Optimally not optional

My St Patrick's Day gift was yet another lesson in proper priority-setting.

Friday night was a birthday party for someone I only kind of know but has always seemed pretty stand-up. It was also themed: Come as your high school self. I dug out some old khakis with pleats and a rugby shirt that had apparently never been worn and discovered I was at least half a decade older than anyone else present. (It's a dead giveaway when you can't discern who's in their "throwback clothes" and who isn't.)

Maybe half the people there were from the regular Rogers Park bear crowd and half were new faces that I enjoyed chatting up. One of these new faces was attacked to the kind of portly furball body which makes me weak at the knees. He was completely clueless that I was flirting with him until a pal pointed out, "I think he's hitting on you" (to which I responded, "For about a half hour now") and that was enough to seal the deal. We eventually made out a bit, but he had to get up early for work so we exchanged numbers and agreed to get together the next day after his shift ended.

Long story short, that never happened, and it didn't happen in a particularly cruddy way: He woke me with a text that gave me hope (and spurred me to clean and tidy), then he strung me along for hours in the afternoon before cancelling at the last possible moment because his never-before-mentioned "roommate" wanted to see a movie. This came literally right after I'd begun cooking food for the two of us since he said he didn't have the money to go out to eat.

I was pissed at him and annoyed with myself (on top of being already out-of-sorts at two missed rendezvous around lunchtime)--too annoyed to follow my own advice, which is not to be hard on yourself. Call Me By Your Name was an unexceptional film in most respects, but that speech about going "bankrupt at the age of thirty" from destroying your own tender emotions resonated with me. I tried to remind myself that, regardless whether the tryst ever took place, the enjoyment I felt anticipating it was real, but I wasn't ready to hear that that day.

I wasn't ready to hear it the next morning either, but there was a German-speaking bears meetup scheduled for the afternoon so I didn't lay about brooding. I'd chosen the venue and it was unexpectedly closed. (Here my roving eye came in handy: I spotted a cute bear hustling across the street and, after keeping him in my sights for a bit, realised, "I know him!" and hurried over to make the interception.) The two of us (his husband was hungover and Nuphy didn't want to venture across the North Side even the day after St Pat's) went to Thai Pastry instead and shared a snack while we geschwätzt haben before he needed to slink back home and study for his exam the next day.

It was unseasonably mild, so I headed to the beach, stopping first at the spot of Monshu's lakeside memorial on the first anniversary of it. While walking, I ruminated on the fact that here someone I knew only casually had kept an appointment with me despite the fact that (a) he'd had a late night of drinking; (b) his husband had bagged; and (c) he had studying to do. Any one of those would have been an acceptable reason (according to degraded state of contemporary social conventions) to beg off of taking a crosstown bus just to chat in German with me, but no, he had a commitment and he kept it.

So as much fun as it is to feel up a furball now and again, I need to concentrate less on chasing tail and more on cultivating the kind of acquaintances who brave the Sunday schedule on the CTA with a St Paddy's Day hangover for you. I know full well the wisdom of this; now I just need to get my feels to listen.