If the guests want to wrest the check away from the host, because the host is also the guest of honor, then the guest who volunteers has to cover the whole thing. A guest can't volunteer -all- of the guests to pay for the host/honoree.

First group impressions can mask a lot of individual variations in the members.

Almost no one can take on an entire future in one step, much less while reeling emotionally.

Being negative is easy. There will always be a downside to everything good, a hurdle to everything desirable, a con to every pro. The real courage is in finding the good in what you have, the opportunities in every hurdle, the pros in every con.

Awkwardness is when there's a risk of a perception gap between what you mean and what you appear to mean.

If the guests want to wrest the check away from the host, because the host is also the guest of honor, then the guest who volunteers has to cover the whole thing. A guest can't volunteer -all- of the guests to pay for the host/honoree.

I think we'd all hate to be the one who gets declared undateable by one's entire grad-school population based on a couple of told and retold stories.