He wasn’t there. Lipstick and hair (and heels) a little wasted. Not entirely. And I wasn’t as deeply disappointed as the last time this happened. But really, women should have some sort of bell that lets us know when not to prepare with a little extra magic and spark. It’s a bargain in a way, and when it’s not kept I frown.

But so it goes.

I’m glad, yet, to have a pretty dress and heels and a warm summer evening in which to wear them.

Lordy day. What’s a girl gotta do to get a little attention? What a waste of eyeliner.

Granted, I can, and did, do my shower, hair, and make-up in 15 minutes flat – but when a girl puts in that extra effort, even if it only takes 15 minutes, she wants the guy to at least show up. Not to mention the lack of extra excitement the whole night through. Le sigh.

It has often occurred to me that the best thing about being in a relationship would be, not the excitement, or the romance, or even the friendship, but rather the companionship. Which is a word very similar to friendship but not quite – because even friendship is something that, most of the time, must be fought for. Companionship implies something different – a journeying together, an ease of relationship and lack of expectation/demand that communicates itself, often, through silence. A trust that doesn’t rely on words.

I’ve also been thinking that the problem with being single for a very long time is that sometimes you build up such a strong sense of yourself and your life that it leaves no room for someone else. Yet a significant other isn’t an addition to a life, not once you get beyond casual dating at any rate – it’s a change, and the deeper in you get the wider that change to your life should be.

Sometime this weekend I want to go to Borders to pick up the newest Aqualung album, as well as the newest Lucy Schwartz album.

I miss Allison, and Sam.

I’ve been feeling sad lately. I miss X so desperately, and Y is so troublesome these days. I have, to all intents and purposes, lost two of my closest friends.

And I’m sad because I miss ICA people. I miss that community, that environment, the warm loving joy, the inside jokes, the small ways in which you get cared for as a a part of that group. But I think mostly I’m sad because I feel like I’ve lost the people – no one has reached out since I left, no one has made the effort to love, they’re all just – gone. Absent and missing, lost in the borders of their lives and worlds. Most of them I don’t regret – my time for knowing them and vice versa is gone – but the loss of a few, and their refusal to reach out to keep me, still burns. I’m getting used to it, however – tonight at the thanksgiving dinner was one of the best, most relaxed times I”ve had around them.

In other (brighter?) news, I have a Crush. His name is RHB – red-headed boy. I first noticed red-headed boy in one of my classes first (or second? don’t remember) year, where he thoroughly intimidated me with his intellectual comments in class, his knowledge of abstruse literary terms which I had a bare grasp of, and his general air of Knowledge about all that could be Worth Knowing.Be that as it may, my intimidation masked, or perhaps was simply another name for, an incipient attraction underneath at all. However, after that class was over I promptly forgot about him.

Come third year, and lo and behold RHB turns up in one of my classes(those red heads. they never go away). To be honest, I didn’t pay him much attention the first half of class or so – I knew other people in the class, and he never sat in my section, and after that first flash of recognition, I thought, I’ll never be able to talk to him anyway. However, after a few weeks, it dawned on me that it didn’t have to be that way, and made a resolve: I would talk to red-headed boy before the quarter was over. Two days ago, I walk into class, and there he is, sitting in my section, and no one around. And it occurred to me, with a flash of amusement, that this was my chance. I sat down next to him, and after screwing up my courage for five minutes or so, opened up the conversation quite simply by pointing out that we’d had a class previously. Whereat we went on to have a perfectly normal and ordinary conversation about classes and professors and TAs. And so there you have it. I’ll probably talk to him again before the quarter is over – I may ask him to study with me even though I have have a study partner in E, and in fact B suggested that he and I and B study together also(but it can never hurt to have too many flings study partners, can it? For the record,  both B’s have girlfriends – I’m really not that obsessed:) I was neither disappointed nor excited about my conversation with RHB – he was, in fact, much less overtly intelligent than I remembered, and seemed in fact much more like an ordinary, intelligent person than I remembered him being. Which led me to great amusement at myself, but at least it goes to show that I must have gained in self-confidence between then and now if he no longer intimidates me.But this crush has always been much more about me than about RHB anyway – I like the idea of him far better than I like him, I like the spark of amusement and excitement that it adds to my life and the endless opportunities it provides to laugh at myself. Hmm hmm. Good stuff:)

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