I declined the job offer in beautiful, scenic Minneapolis. The cost of getting out of ye olde lease here in Virginny is far too prohibitive to go moving off right now.

Maybe in a few months? Perhaps a year? Maybe never.

Depends. I don't know.

All I know is that, in the end, the allure of moving to the hometown of Semisonic and The Replacements was less than the cost of carrying two households, one in Minnesota and one here in DC.

Maybe if Prince made a new album, that might have thrown the bell curve to the Twin Cities.

Thanks to everybody who expressed concern/gratitude/best wishes/joy that I was getting the hell up outta here...even if it didn't come to fruitition.

Kinda glad in a way. Not sure if I could go to the Mall Of America everytime somebody came to visit. It's a big mall, but, at the end of the day, just a friggin' mall.

A strange thing...I've been organizing my socks. I had no idea how many pairs of socks I had. At last count, nearly 200 pair. I went a few years where I'd rather buy new socks rather than matching the pile of individuals in my big blue tub o' socks. Not saying I'm smart, just lazy.

My tub o' socks has been around for four years.

I've ended up with about 50 or so "unmatchables." Solitary socks without a mate. Who knows where their mates ended up. Some of these socks are years old; others were bought scant weeks ago. I'm sure a few of these never made it out from Edgewater, a few are somewhere in Baltimore, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of these missing socks could be found back in Iowa.

Interesting that I know some of these socks have been missing their partners for years, yet I still carry them around. Scared that somewhere in Heaven, my grandma would be yelling at me for throwing away a perfectly good sock? She'd probably tell me that lots of poor kids would love to have those socks. Or, am I too lazy to pick them out from the pile and throw them away?

Or, just unwilling to let go?

As I'm coming into the Wedding Season, with four weddings in six weekends, I've been thinking about the whole mating dance, and my goodness, socks are the perfect metaphor. Some socks go around for years with their mate right by their side, others with their mate just feet away.

A few socks will never see their match again.

But matching up socks seems right. Something I should have done a while ago.

And, one of these weddings wouldn't have happened had I not set the couple up on a date. My nickname may be Claven, but I'm definitely Cupid.

Yeah, I can see the obvious symbolism of socks and my own life. I'm not blind, and, frankly, I'd have to be Ray Charles to not see the parallels. These socks are the perfect example of my own failures and strengths of my personality. I'm stubborn, sentimental, disorganized, amazingly able to recall minute details of random, innocent encounters, and just plain old lazy.

And Lord knows I've felt like an unmatched sock lately, too. Between dating, career, debts, memories and sorting out various friends...I've got a hell of a lot of socks.

Time to sort out some socks.