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 entrée 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.