Les Affaires de Coeur: December 2007 Archives

And suddenly there is clarity, and a measure of peace. I realize what the blonde's email meant, and it's not bad at all - just a sort of message in a bottle to say, "I do like you, but I don't feel like I have the time and energy to get involved with you. But I wish you well." Not a bad thing.

And I emailed the date from last week, and almost immediately got a response that was - well, clear. He wasn't interested, despite having invited me to come sleep with him. The not-interested part doesn't bug me. The fact that he would have slept with me anyway pisses me off. Boys are stupid. Okay, some boys are stupid.

I am glad to be able to cross him off my list, though. And boy am I glad I said no.

And now, well, new year's eve awaits.

It's one of my favorite times of year, fraught though it often is with high expectations unfulfilled. I don't think this year will disappoint, however. We have a good plan. We have the right sort of champagne. We have fun things to do later. And I may fly some paper airplanes with my plans for the year off a bridge into one of the rivers.

I like my dress. I like my friends. I am generally happy with myself. Alles gutes, nicht wahr?

Happy 2008, my darlings.

PS. Two of my bloglines subscribers have mentioned that they're not getting updates about new Girlwich posts. I assume something funky happened when we had to rebuild the site - resubscribing may take care of it. (I hope!)

There are many things I do not know. Enough that, according to Socrates, I'd be considered pretty wise. Lately, the list has a lot to do with why humans, particularly those of the boyish persuasion, behave the way they do. I don't think these are among the sorts of things to which Socrates' rule applies, however. At least, I don't feel particularly wise for not understanding them.

One day passes after I write the above, and now this.

An email from the blonde. A casual, friendly email. I'd say I am stumped, but the truth is, right before I opened up that email account, I said to myself, oh I'll just check; maybe there'll be an email from the blonde.

Clearly my psychic powers are still operating on all eight.

What to do, what to do. Annabelle said to wait a day. Boywich said Annabelle is right, and offered to try and translate the boy-speak. (Really. Isn't he funny? Though he was drunk and didn't do too well with the latter half of our conversation.)

I wrote a quick draft of a response and let it sit. I was cordial and noncommittal, because that was how I was feeling. (And surprised.)

But I didn't feel like playing all these strategy games, because, well, that's not who I am. Even when I maybe should be. So I sent it. A few hours after I'd written it, but that was primarily a Boywich delay (we talked for 3 hours), who, still retaining his own psychic prowess, has also begun IMing me the moment I started writing about him.

Anyway, the list of things I don't understand about boys is getting to resemble Santa's list at this point, what with the aforementioned development, and the fact that the fellow I had that (I thought) really good date with last week hasn't called me since.

Possible explanations: a) he didn't think the date was so great; b) he just wanted to sleep with me, and the fact that I declined to come up to his apt. meant he was writing me off; c) he has somehow missed the memo that if you don't call, girls get the idea that you aren't interested.

On the other side of the coin, here are things I do understand:

1. Exactly what Shirley Horn is talking about when she discusses the peculiar beauty of the post-gig jam session.
2. Most of what astrophysicists are talking about.
3. The wisdom of the very old and the very young.
4. Why horses and dogs love to run really fast.
5. Much of what matters and what doesn't.

I do not, on the other hand, understand why the caged bird sings. If I were the caged bird, I would put my energy toward smashing those bars.

PS. Those are Annabelle's Mittens up there. The highly observant (anal) among you will notice that one is longer than the other. That is not because I miscounted the rows, but rather because I had enough yarn left to make them a little longer and had only reknit one of them when I decided to take the photo.
PSdeux. These pics are pocketcam (not bad for a pipsqueak, right?) because my one true love (Nikon) was out of battery when I turned it on. Yeah, I agree. It sounds dirty. Don't worry; he's all recharged and raring to go again.

I think my theme for the new year will be Good Things Come to Those Who Believe They Deserve Them. To wit: I had what can only be described as a great date last night. I didn't have any big expectations for it. It was with a guy I'd met on the Interwebs. I'd talked to him briefly on the phone and ascertained that he was talkative, so I felt relatively certain it wouldn't be a lapsing-into-awkward-silences kind of scenario, but that was really all I knew.

He'd asked me to dinner, which is unusual for a first date, but also rather nice. We met at midnight, which is highly unusual for a dinner date, but suited both of us down to the ground (he keeps my hours, and then some, if you can believe it).

And then I got lucky. (Get your minds out of the gutter, girls; I don't mean that kind of getting lucky, though that might have been on offer had I been so inclined.) What I mean is, he was cuter in person than in pics, he had a nicer voice in person, he was much more interesting than I'd expected, and a bit geeky (which I like), and on the whole, the thing just went.

You know what I mean. A date can either require effort to keep it running, or it can locomote under its own power. This seemed to be one of the latter. On the way home I found myself giggling slightly under my breath in the cab, because I was tickled by it. (Also tickled to be coming home at 5 in the morning; that's fun in and of itself.)

It was all very civilized, and I said at one point to a friend the next day, "I don't know what I've done to deserve such bounty, but I'll take it." But then I realized exactly what I'd done - I believe that I deserve the bounty. I have managed to actually take that idea in, and sit on it like an egg till it matured, and now it inhabits my body, so that when I go out into the world, I am more likely to draw good things to me, all magnetlike. At least, that's my theory, and I'm stickin' to it.

In any case, I had a swell Friday night, thank you very much, and in celebration of all things good, here is a picture of the pink sheepskin booties Miz Fury gave me for Xmas. Aren't they too too groovy? Kitten thinks so, too.

PS. The fabulous and talented Boywich (my tech support department) has fixed the comments so that you don't have to register to get your 2 cents in.

Oof, and now I am overwhelmed again by the strangeness of setting up dates with people I have never met. And by work (I have to finish two projects in three days, and I have more than enough shopping errands to fill those days). And all I really want to do is my Xmas knitting, but that keeps taking a backseat to more pressing items.

Do you ever get a longing for a time you've never experienced? I am having that - a yearning for some apocryphal era when social life was simple, boys were plentiful and comfortable to be around (ha! I can't even write that without seeing how far off it is from the truth), and I had nothing much to occupy my time, plus plenty of money. Oh wait, that is heaven. I forgot.

Meanwhile, back on earth...A little judicious tinkering and I have magically (and somewhat mysteriously) managed to get a photo to appear on the site. It is a nice subject, too. Malabrigo (top) in Verde Esperanza and Colinette Cadenza in Mardi Gras (bottom). The former is for me; I'd bought some Malabrigo a couple of weeks ago thinking I'd knit the blonde a hat, but apparently the Sweater Rule has a Hat Corollary. So, when Miz Fury and I ducked into Downtown Yarns this week to pick out some yarn for her fingerless mitts, I decided to exchange the boy yarn for the glorious Verde that I'd lusted after on my previous trip.

I think if I am not completely sick of knitting mittens by that point (I have two other pairs in the queue), I will use it to make myself a pair.

Let's see, what other ephemera can I throw at the wall here? I have two soups on my agenda, and I am just trying to decide which one to make first: A) beet, carrot, ginger, squash, and red lentil, or B) potato, leek, celeriac, turnip, parsnip, collard green, and white bean. Don't they both sound good? Wish I had two big pots; I'd do them double-fisted and alternate eating them.

Egad what a trivial post. Apparently I am too tired to be coming up with grand epiphanies. Go read Juno if you need something deeper, eh? (Yeah, it sounds dirty, but I don't think she'll mind. She's cool like that.)

Well that was fun - not. It seems that for some reason best known to Movable Type, as of Friday I was no longer deemed worthy to log into and post upon my own blog. And after much futzing and investigating, my friendly neighborhood geek guru (Boywich, who is the actual author of the post below this one, in case that isn't immediately apparent from his little self-promo) discerned that the only way to fix it was to upgrade the whole damn shebang to a new version of Movable Type. (Yes, he is always that funny. No, you may not have his phone number. All boys are belong to me.)

But wait, there's more - and it's even fussier and less entertaining. Because we couldn't log into the old version at all, we weren't able to port my existing posts into the new version, and for some reason - again best known to the nanobots or whatever strange contraptions make the blogware go - the new version gets posted at a different address. Ack. Yeah, I've had a migraine all day today, and that's before I even got all the details nailed down.

However, the good news is that once we finish hand-importing all those trillions of wordy, pic-heavy posts to the new site (and eventually figure out how to make it appear at the proper URL), the thing will operate a lot better thanks to its upgrade. For instance, there will now be proper archives and stuff, so you can easily see just how fracking wordy I really am.

Okay, enough technobabble. If anyone is still reading and/or awake, I am now going to move onto more entertaining things. I was going to put up a pic of some very pretty yarn I bought, but since the new and theoretically improved MT isn't letting me do that yet (apparently I have not beaten it sufficiently senseless to have earned its respect), I shall instead have to offer you a boy update. After trying and failing to create a Top 10 List of Reasons to Ditch the Blonde (I got to 7 and then got waylaid by dreamy memories), and then getting a very helpful boy's eye viewpoint from Boywich (who pretty much rocked the house this weekend, what with the blog-fixing and the empathizing, and assorted laughter-inducing conversations), I woke up this morning with a) a migraine, and b) a clear vision of what I want to do.

I won't go into details, because I am not (at the moment, anyway) feeling like laying my whole life out there on the table for y'all to peck at, but suffice it to say, I have at least one date this week, none of the participants in which will be yellow-haired, and I think the whole situation is going to work out just fine. And I am quite a bit more content than I was a few days ago. Not entirely, but well on the way.

PS. One more bit of techno-talk. The rather bland site design you see here is only a temporary placeholder. I'll be poking around in my html (sounds lewd, don't it?) and messing with it, and prettifying, but it may take a while, work and life and potential dates being what they are. So, you know, hang in there and just imagine that that skyline is real or something. Thanks.

PS2. Late-breaking addition: Gregory Peck! Oh, how glorious.