magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

A bunch of RISD kids that I know had work in a group show opening at a gallery on the Lower East Side tonight, so I ventured out this evening to see some art, support some friends, and of course drink some free booze. 'I should do this drinking after not eating anything all day thing more often.' I was speaking to Chris, who also showed up at the show with Dave and Christian.

'I just had a slice.' Surprising. 'You haven't eaten anything?'

'No, nothing.' Which wasn't actually true I realised later, I had finished off about a third of a tub of hummus with some corn chips around lunchtime.

'What's wrong? Is something wrong?'

'Actually. I slept until 12:30. I think I might be sort of depressed. Not in the sad sense, just in the feeling nothing sense.' Although, with the exception of the sleeping way too much over the last few weeks and with the not really eating all that many meals, I haven't really been letting it get to me. A little bit of aimlessly pacing around my apartment, maybe. But I don't think I'm actually depressed. Or at least I've learnt to deal with it better.

'What are you guys up to after this?' Dave asked.

'I could use some food,' I said. 'Tiny's is just around the corner.'

'I'm not really hungry, but I wouldn't mind going somewhere where you could get food and I could get a drink,' Chris chimed in.

That took Tiny's out of the running, so we walked up to Kate's. Vegan nachos. Portobello and spinach salad. Another beer.

'So that Lighthouse comic,' I brought up when Dave was in the bathroom.

'She called you?'

'No. But I'm pretty sure she read it. I passed the link along through the friend of hers who sent me her original note. Very junior high school. That was last Wednesday or Thursday. And then I didn't think that he had gotten the message because it wasn't in my MySpace outbox, but when I got home from that show in Williamsburg on Saturday I looked at my log files, and while I was on the subway she had spent about an hour reading my site.'

Dave was sitting back down at the table, caught the end of what I was saying, and I could tell was drawing an incorrect conclusion. So I went back to the beginning, and told the whole story. 'And I can't always tell who's reading my site, but certain people leave certain patterns in the logs.' Sometimes I feel a little weird knowing how is reading, but they are reading about me, after all. 'And so she spent an hour on my site, but hasn't gotten in touch.'

'Because she thinks you're a freak.'

'Well. Yeah. Probably. I'd like to think that she's drawing a response piece. But no, she's probably just sort of weirded out by the whole thing. And the fact that it looks like I'm just getting in touch now because things didn't work out with this other girl. And to be fair, there's probably some truth in that, and that is kind of lame. But the real motivation was from seeing The Science of Sleep.'

'I know you,' Chris said, 'so I don't think anything you've said is that weird. I don't even think the comic is that weird. But I can imagine if someone that I kind of knew but hadn't talked to in a long time, or someone that I might have once been kind of into, but wasn't necessarily anymore, wrote something that seemed sort of obsessive about me online, I'd be kind of freaked out, but I'd be too fascinated to look away. I'd definitely keep reading. But I might not get in touch.'

'Yeah. You're sort of putting the weight on her to make a big deal out of it,' Dave said. 'If she were to contact you, it's probably saying more than she really wants to say.'

'You should just call her,' Chris offered. 'You still have her phone number, right?'

'In my old phone.'

'Well, you've done a lot more than plug in an old phone in the past. I think you should call her. Nothing worse can happen. I'll expect you to have called her by the next time that I'm sitting across from you.'

Chris took off for home on his bike. Dave and I walked crosstown to the A, talking some more, and then headed off in our opposite directions.