A few weeks ago I was bored at work and cruising around Friendster. I bookmarked someone, and a couple days later she wrote me. We kept up the banter for a few days, and agreed to an unusual sort of first encounter: a pre-hurricane game of drunken scrabble Friday night.

The night before I was a little keyed up, what with my very first date-type thing in a very long time and my birthday and the hurricane. I started reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas- which I think is as good as, and far less soulless than, most of its reviewers suggest- until I couldn't keep my eyes open, around two.

At four in the morning I woke up with a squeamish intuition that someone was in my room with me. I never have intuitions like that, and when I do I ignore them, so I laid in bed, waiting for the atmosphere in my room to settle. Just as I was about to fall back asleep at 4:30 am, I felt something on my femur, a gentle, sudden pressure and a little persistent weight. Throwing my covers off, I turned on the light. There was a large tree frog sitting in my dirty clothes hamper where I'd flung it. My heart was pounding. Willy (my band's trumpet player) had given me a fedora with a pastel band, very Miami Beach, which I managed to fling right on top of the frog. I took it out of the house and did not get back to sleep.

After a day at work, my stomach started to roil. I grabbed some Immodium and Tums. I was tired as hell- we'd been making arrangements for Frances all day- so I grabbed a cup of coffee at McDonald's. I also picked up on my way down to Tampa:

-Doritos, working the trashy-but-somehow-appealing angle and

-A bottle of Chopin vodka. Expensive enough to redeem the trashy.

-Limes ("to ward off scurvy," I planned to say) and

-Tonic ("to prevent malaria.")

It took me two hours of wrong turns to make it down to this person's apartment, and when I got there she was sitting on her balcony, apparently waiting. I'd told her I was an awful driver and would get lost; I was 15 minutes late, as I'd predicted.

Since I hadn't eaten since noon I got too drunk on her own vodka; I beat her at Scrabble and telling bad jokes at a bar we'd stopped into for a few minutes and ended up insisting she keep the vodka we hadn't touched and letting myself out, leaving her to close her own door shouting, confusedly, "See you later" down the stairs, and I'd seemed unfriendly, taciturn, and (worst, because least often true) unable to hold my liquor.

I could claim that we just didn't get along, as I have to the family members who knew I had a date. The truth is I was just awful at it, incapable of doing the delicate little dances and did not pretend to be neurotically protective of women in general as seemed to be her desire and utterly failed to pick up on her minor flirtations (i.e., remarks made upon my playing VULVA on a triple-word score. Don't ever think Scrabble is a bloodless game.) and I could not bring myself to be curious about this person, especially after the jokes that began with "I'm not racist but" and the fastidiousness of her apartment and finally, for crying out loud, she'd read every book by Graham Greene but didn't like Brighton Rock. I was too tired and too little looking forward to the hour drive home my crankiness guaranteed.

I don't know whether to write this person and apologize, or cheerfully suggest we get together sometime, or not do anything at all. Will probably decide on the latter. The ettiquette surrounding drunken scrabble games is not really clear to me.

I turned 25 at 9 this morning.