The Calling last night was less fun than usual, for some reason. I might just have been tired (it seems to be my normal state of being, after all), or I might have been in the wrong mood, but it seemed more than usual that most of the people I go there to see were busy talking to their other halves, or to better friends than me, and were difficult to prise away from these people for more than a few minutes at a time. So, more than usual, I felt like a fifth wheel, drifting around the place distracting various people from the people they really wanted to be talking to.

Over the last six months or so I've said to various people that the one thing I missed most from being in a relationship was the unlimited supply of hugs, and therefore that as long as I have a few huggy friends being single is perfectly bearable. Normally this seems to work fairly well for me, but it's at times like this that I feel slightly as if something else is missing, which is that it would occasionally be nice to be special to someone. Instead of having lots of friends who are pleased to see me when I go over and say hello to them, it would be nice if there were at least one or two people who would spontaneously come over and say hello to me once in a while, because that way I wouldn't feel as if I was doing all the work.

Of course this is not entirely justified; there are a few people who do that, notably the Gallery people. Perhaps they just had less energy than usual last night, or something. Ah well.

As an afterthought to that lot ... It's not really applicable in this case, but I feel like sharing some words of great wisdom which were sent to me the last time I posted that sort of whinge in this diary. (For those reading on Livejournal: this was some years ago while this diary was only available on Monochrome.)

I'd spent a frustrating afternoon trying to find some company, but everyone I tried to visit or telephone was already occupied with something else. Eventually I'd managed to phone one friend, but after a quarter of an hour she was phoned on another line by someone more important and had to put the phone down on me. So I wrote a morose diary entry about all this, in which I complained that it would be nice to have just one person to whom I was occasionally more important than something else.

Clare sent me a response in which she pointed out that if I myself didn't qualify as such a person, I was doing something very wrong. Of course it didn't really cheer me up at the time, but in retrospect I decided it was a piece of True Wisdom and should be remembered in case it came in useful in the future.