From today's "Doonesbury" "Say What?" feature.

"I screwed up."
-- Barack Obama, February 3, 2009

"I wish you'd have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it... I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with answer, but it hadn't yet... You know I... I hope I... I don't want to sound like I have made no mistakes. I'm confident I have. I just haven't... You just put me under the spot here, and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one."
-- George W. Bush, August 13, 2004, when asked if he'd made any mistakes since September 11, 2001

Waiting.

I feel, now that it's all over, that I should say something about what happened with C in the end. He'd been terribly ill, which is why I didn't hear from him. He gets a pass. Very much so. But we finally spoke-- at length-- and he was very honest with me. He just doesn't have the bandwidth, as he expressively put it, for any sort of relationship right now. And when I pressed him, as I really felt I had to, he admitted he just didn't feel it. He was very honourable about it, and we're still on good terms. believe-- I hope-- we're still going to be friends.

I don't blame him, I'm not mad at him, I'm not hurling darts at his photo. I'm not entirely sure what I wanted out of all of this, but I think what made me so sad was simply the loss of potential. We were not "boyfriend/girlfriend." We were not in love. But I had hopes that perhaps we might mutually discover something, build something. Try something.

This isn't the sort of thing one person can pull alone. No relationship of any kind is, of course, but in this hazy, tentative, preliminary stage, if both parties aren't interested in seeing how deep the rabbit hole goes, then said burrow goes nowhere. There's no point in digging alone.

I'm far more sanguine about this now than I was last week, when I could feel an undercurrent of frustration and anger under my surface all week. I knew then, as I do now, that there'd been no kind of promise or expectation stated. But I'd felt like perhaps, at last, after so long, I was finally getting somewhere. And then I got shunted back to square one. It's not a pleasant feeling. Not at all.

In the store today there was a customer: a very handsome man looking for earrings for his daughter, and perhaps some fossils for his sons. We started talking: about his kids, about his son's acting job, about my night with Hamlet, about Shakespeare in America, about all sorts of things. He wore no ring, and mentioned no girlfriend, and part of me wanted to find a pretext to give him my card, but I didn't. I simply enjoyed the process of very slightly flirting-- though I'm not sure he was flirting back, and I'm fine with that. I just enjoyed talking to him-- Jeff, his name was-- until it was time for his flight.

To Chicago.

Has anyone heard from Surlywench?

If I can't find her soon, I have four or five corsets to make very quickly for some really annoyed customers.

So yeah. If anyone's seen or heard from Heather, can you tell her to contact me immediately?