Dear Linc,

I’ve spent my Saturday morning reading poetry. It’s an interesting way to spend the morning, for me, because I don’t read poetry in the morning, or ever at all. I have lived my entire life with an allergy toward poetry. In my mind, even the most consequential classics have always seemed more like “Roses are red, violets are blue…” I’ve never claimed to have a sharp mind.

More routinely, I like to write my never-to-be-sents in the morning. Over time, it has become my way to start the day. I didn’t wake up one morning and think to myself, Today is the first day I will begin my morning routine of drinking coffee. Just like I didn’t think to myself, And now I will begin writing unsent letters to my imaginary boyfriend. These things just happen, and the hope is that one day, you find yourself at an advanced age leaning back and forth in a rocking chair, chuckling at the memory of it all.

It has been an interesting few days. My job has steadily begun to produce interesting contacts. I did not get this job in the hopes of networking, but it’s a nice side effect. And anyway, I don’t know for what it is that I’m networking. I already have a job. The next thing I really want is a husband, but that has to materialize some other way. They say that Cupid strikes only when you’re not looking. The trouble is that I was born with the worst kind of evolution: although our ancestors had heightened senses to pick up when big animals wanted to eat them, my heightened senses only hunts for something useless like love.

I met some guy. I was at Tu Lan, a classic and legendary San Francisco hole in the wall for which I never stop having the pleasure of bragging, Yeah, my friend owns that place. This is despite the fact that in our daily lives, I never think of him as the owner of a successful restaurant. I just think of him as, I dunno, my buddy who always has an extra bag of ground coffee lying around. In the 12 years we’ve been friends, he’s always helped me save money on coffee.

I wonder if the guy I met looked me up on Facebook. I know that is a stupid thing to think about. But I clicked on the public preview of my Facebook profile anyway, just to try and imagine what his first impression of me might be. I realized that I have no idea how to predict his impression, just like how I can write as many never-to-be-sents as I would ever want to write and still never know a thing about you. Still, I was critical of myself: maybe I should change my profile picture. Will he think I’m weird because my cover photo is sheet music? Would he know it’s a Glenn Miller song?

July 20 was not a good day for a lot of people. Just because I don’t write about stuff that happens in the world anymore, doesn’t mean that I am unaware.

But in my corner of the world, I can just sum things up with the Facebook status message that I posted that day:

Comic book run at the library; running an event by a talented author who had amazing and entertaining memories of the golden age of Hollywood; high-fiving with some audience members about the Giants roughing up the Phillies; and then coming home to watch “Duck Soup” AND “Clerks.” Thank you, July 20, 2012.

I should have known that that one lady in the audience — she was reading the news to me from her smart phone; she told me about the grand slam, and reminded me that you started — was a Giants fan. But this didn’t occur to me even though the blouse she wore was orange. I seem to miss a lot of things.

Joe