Dam.

Okay, so I didn't want to get in trouble for having a swear word in my title--that's the only reason I spelled it without the 'n'. So don't even think about correcting my spelling, because I am in no mood for it.

But honestly--ever have one of those moments where the fates conspire against even the slightest chance you have at a love--or lust--life by means of piddly coincidences that then become insurmountable obstacles, if only because you wrap them in more layers of anguish than that kid from A Christmas Story? Yeah, we're talking some serious overdramatizing, but I can't help myself.

I'm at the Bookstore Cafe, not thinking about Big Block of Cheese Day or anything to do with Aaron Sorkin. No, I am prepping a set of submissions for the Amy Lowell Travelling Poet Prize, due in Boston by Saturday. Yesh: thank God for express mail. Anyway, the prize itself is $47,900, with which the poet must spend 12 consecutive months outside North America or the possessions of any of its countries. I know I could have said a year, but that has different meanings to those within and without the academic system. I discovered this prize last night, while I should have been reading Hegel and Kristeva on the purpose of poetry...and before I spent four delightful, wicked and totally unproductive hours with Greg Ramsower and Jake Teitgen in the Keough dining room. Though I did learn that a house of brands is where the parent company, like Johnson & Johnson, spreads like a roof over the bricks of its brands, while brands of house appear to be like--correct me if I'm wrong--Apple, where you have the iPod and the iBook and iTunes, but all are pasted with the Apple logo.

Back to the point: upon discovering this prize, I immediately started--no, not revising poems for submission--looking for long term cottage rentals in Australia, Ireland, Scotland and Spain. Yup. Smart. But now, as the deadline looks closer, I am in the Bookstore Cafe, selecting and revising, when who should appear but someone we shall call AH. He's looking very cute and Londonesque as always, very nice black wool peacoat, hair curling just past the unpopped collar, and accompanied by a companion of the young-male-teen persuasion. The situation reeks of Big Brother-ness, which only makes him more appealing.

He comes over and says hi, asks what I'm doing, etc. Charming, between bouts of advising his protege. We close the conversation with him saying he'd like to read some of my work, and that he'd like me to read some of his. I stumble over an idiot's version of "I'd be delighted to" and then he leans over to pat my shoulder at exactly the same moment that I shift in my seat. I do this so I can face him, as opposed to talking sideways, but I'm fairly certain it comes across as "the last thing I want you to do is touch me." When really I'd like it to be both first and last and everything in between.

Honestly, I like him, I think he's incredibly smart and funny and quite attractive, but I'm not stalkerish crazy about him. From all my sources I know that he's fairly well attached to someone else, and I have no jealous-rage issues about that, which tells me that my attraction is pretty superficial. But I really want him to think I'm as cool a friend-type person as I think he is, and subsequently I will spend the next hour and a half obsessing over the chance that now he thinks I have a) a personal disdain for him or b) a general phobia about being touched, neither of which is even remotely true except maybe the last one and only by strangers.

Great. And now the cafe has been invaded by middle school creatures who don't know enough to turn off their iPods if they're going to let the earbuds dangle. Just great. At least one of them has the decency to have brought a well-loved copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. It's not quite enough to redeem the whole gaggle, but it's close.

Song of the moment: "David Duchovney"~Bree Sharp