Had a party at our house for Giles. Oh, I love him. Oh I love him. As he was leaving, I [perhaps a little drunkenly, but nonetheless, charmingly] said 'Oh, Giles, I have to hug you,' and he said 'Well, I won't say no.' Oh, I love him so much. But now he has gone back to England. And so the crush is ended.

Went hiking up at Crabtree Falls, which was really cool. A group of us are going to do a regular once-a-week hiking thing, and that's going to be wonderful. That's the kind of training I need to make myself into a real hiker. And I want to be a real hiker.

Had the first tarot reading anybody's ever done for me ever. He only had a 'love' deck, so it was about my romantic life. And though Jesse kindly interpreted it as 'your love is a mystery,' I know what it really meant, which is nothing I didn't already know, but nonetheless a little disheartening: this is a time for decisions and change within myself, but simply not a time for romance. Weirdly, though, I am not particularly worried about this at the moment. I guess I just have too many other things I'm worrying about, and somehow it just doesn't matter that much.

Actually, I also learned something about myself this weekend: I learned that sometime, over the past six or so years, I have have become a flirt. I don't know how this happened, especially as I used to be so shy I couldn't even approach store clerks to buy something, but happen it has. I'm a universal flirt, though -- since it has more to do with a desperate need for a approval and esteem than it has to do with sex. I'm really just trying to be desperately charming, in what homeowner housemate describes as "a good, old-fashioned Southern way." Nonetheless, there it is. Astounding though it may seem to me, I am, and have been for several years now, a terrible flirt.

That sound awfully self-agrandizing. I should end with the low self-esteem part of the weekend, which was everything else. I know nobody wants to hear about it, but I'm having a very hard time with having gained ten pounds since I came here. Ugh. But I'm not going to go on about that. Nobody needs to hear it.

Anyway, there's the weekend. I have a feeling this is all pretty incoherent. But so what. At least it's not as bad as the novel I just finished, which was essentially Jane Eyre in Space. I didn't like Jane Eyre on Earth, for goodness sake, let alone In Space.