Oopsie!

A left me a message wishing me a happy new year. Isn’t it strange how some people can completely take your life over for so long and then they move away and you hardly even think about them.

I do think about him, of course. It would be impossible not to given the kind of history that we share and the fact that he was there for me in whatever capacity at a time when I needed someone to be there for me and I didn’t even know it before he showed up. Plus, we still have so much and so many people in common that it would be strange indeed if I didn’t hear from time to time about him. Who knows, maybe he even comes to this page to see what I’m up to.

I don’t know how I feel about that – people whom I know and love coming here and reading things, intimate things that I have jotted down. How strange that I feel perfectly all right sharing my thoughts with a hundred or so strangers online but I feel shy when I think about such-and-such person reading what I have written. I suppose this is normal in some way – why would you want any one person to know all about you? No reason at all.

Yesterday I met a couple of those strangers and it was odd to say the least. Last few times I have met chowkies, they’ve been people whom I’ve known for a while, both on and off chowk albeit online and it felt like meeting up with old friends when we met up. There’s something to be said for making friends online – with nothing to distract you, you tend to rely more on who they are as people than what they are in person. But this time I was meeting people with whom I’ve hardly talked before and that too at a very superficial level… and not at all, in two instances.

And at the last minute Sam gave us the Scout, which is slang for saying she didn’t show up. She had her reasons and they were excellent ones and I was the one who told her I was all right meeting with these folks pretty much on my own but I have to say I wasn’t quite so sure when I walked in the door and saw three men sitting at a table and realized I didn’t know a single one of them and I had just committed myself to spending at least the next half hour [if it proved unbearable and I wanted to make my excuses and skedaddle, the polite thing would be to stick around for at least a half hour] with them.

But they all proved to be really nice people and I think I was probably the unbearable one, especially given the faux pas I made at the end of the evening when I leaned in to the nicest guy in the bunch and, in the hopes of being well mannered, asked, “What would you like me to call you? Would you like me to call you uncle?”

I immediately knew I shouldn’t have said that! It was different from the last time I’d asked that question because at that time I’d met that person’s wife and she said she’d like me to call her auntie and so the question had a lot more natural flow. This time, I immediately felt like an idiot. What was I thinking?! Yaaarrrgghhh!!!

Later on I realized, from some things he’d let slip during dinner that he was the same age as my cousins and really all of them were in the same category [senior citizens, hehehe ] but by then I was home and nearly dying of embarrassment. I think it was because he reminded me of another, dearly beloved chowkie whom I’d met for the first time a couple of weeks ago and in the dim lighting of the restaurant I was kind of projecting a whole bunch of stuff. I feel like such a moron… you have no idea.

So just in case this chowkie’s in the habit of reading ilogs, I’d like to say I’m sorry if I was rude. It was the road to hell, sweetheart, paved with good intentions. Sigh.