Taking The Hint

I've been working in Los Angeles for the past five days. I'm out here for two weeks. During this trip, I was supposed to meet up separately with no fewer than three people, for dinner, drinks or coffee (respectively). Yet once I got here, not one of those three people have responded to my phone messages or e-mails.

And of those three people, two of them were established friendships (or so I had thought), and one was a person whose mutual acquaintance we were looking forward to making (or so I had thought). But all three of them have blown me off.

I know the problem can't be my breath, since none of these people have been around me recently to be olfactorily offended. I doubt it's my personal hygiene, since I do bathe with reasonable frequency. And unless they heard about my highly-contagious tuberculosis (which I've done my best to keep secret), concern for their health around me shouldn't be a factor.

(Okay, I was kidding about the TB. My lungs are actually quite happy to be out of the Houston humidity for a few days. And the smog in SoCal has been extremely light since I've been here, so special thanks go out to the L.A. drivers for keeping their emissions down during my visit.)

But the questions remain in my mind: Is it me? What did I do?

I can certainly understand how real life gets in the way, and how our planned visits might have to be rescheduled for another time. What I can't understand is how people who had been frequent correspondents suddenly just don't think I'm worth a quick return call or e-mail: "Hey. Something has come up. Thanks for thinking of us, and we'll try it again next time." It makes me wonder if those friendships were ever really there in the first place.

My apologies to those of you who have been waiting for a funny missive; this one certainly doesn't qualify as amusing. But I've been very busy since I've been here, and now that I have time to catch up on my thinking, I find that I have to chew on rejection by silence, three times over. And I can't help but wonder what I could have done to rank so low on the priority lists of three people that are so very different, yet all seem to agree on one thing:

"Gary isn't worth my time anymore."