As it happens, I am a little off today, maybe not wondering specifically about true love, but off-kilter, for sure. This unpleasantness started yesterday, when I was invited to dinner with someone I will refrain from naming to a place of her choosing, whose enjoyment of her rack of lamb entr�e was punctuated with repeated claims of poverty, and who then, after three whiskeys and an ornamental frozen dessert, stuck me with the $113 check when she claimed to have forgotten her wallet. I am laboring under the assumption that her embarrassment over her forgetting precluded her from thanking me, but at the same time, I can hear a little tiny voice whispering, �Sucker�.!� (For those of you who may be my old boyfriend Donny, I am not hearing an actual voice in my head�this is the figurative sense of voice-hearing, as employed in the Eagles� mega-hit, �Peaceful Easy Feeling.�)

So, am I a sucker? Maybe, maybe not. Probably not, but the experience was not one I enjoyed. I�m annoyed with myself for the level of buoyancy I attempted, so that my dining companion wouldn�t feel that anything was amiss. I might have been appeased by a simple �thanks,� or �Next time, it�s on me,� but that was not forthcoming. As I said, �sucker�� I would love to think that my cheerful disposition last night came from my innate grace, but really, it was just the same old passive aggression and repression you�ve all come to know and love.

Another experience I had which challenged my sense of self-worth came this morning, when a coworker approached me to say that she�d seen some of my artwork over the weekend. I smiled, and waited for her to continue. That left a big pause in the conversation, which I filled with self-loathing. Eventually, she said, �It was� cute!� in a labored and wholly unconvincing way. Then, she walked away, leaving me to wonder why she had brought it up at all.

And later, a friend wrote to tell me she�d seen some of my artwork, a certain element of which, she noted, was �hokey.� Somehow still able to reach the keyboard from the puddle of self-hating slime I had become, I drafted a response asking why she felt it necessary to write me specifically to state that something that concerned her in no way, and which I had created, was �hokey.� Sadly, I lacked the strength necessary to press the �send� button, and so was unable to complete my task.

So, not exactly a day of tragedy, but these little interactions are wearing. Perhaps tomorrow the planets, in their infinite twist around the sun, will squeeze out a drop of sweeter juice. I can only hope so.