By Friday night, I reasoned that maybe Grant was nervous about us; maybe he didn’t know what the next move should be. Sometimes men really wanted a woman to make the first move, to give them the sign that you were into them and wanted to wave them in.

Boldly, I sent Grant an e-mail late Friday to see if he wanted to go hiking over the weekend. I phrased the invite casually: “Hey . . . I’m going to Griffith Park hiking and if you want to get some fresh air, maybe we could meet up.” That was casual, no pressure. Now all I could do was wait.

I waited around all morning Saturday. I heard nothing. As part of my effort to get in touch with my inner Weight Watcher, I decided to hit a Pilates class to kill time until the hike, part of my new A.D. (After Dave) self-improvement regimen. Later that afternoon, I found myself pacing back and forth in my living room willing my phone to ring. I wondered if maybe an accident on Mulholland Drive might have knocked the phone system down and he’d been trying to call and couldn’t get through. I checked my cell for the hundredth time to see if anyone had called and it hadn’t registered. No luck.

To try and kill some more time, I got on the Internet and began Googling Grant again with some of the info he had mentioned. I read some of the articles he’d written at Harvard for the Lampoon and also found some writing he’d done for The Onion; I laughed in all the right places. Then I started assessing the e-mail I’d sent him. Should I have not been so eager? Should I have waited? Was the e-mail too bland and not funny? Was it e-nilla? I logged on to AOL to see if he’d sent me anything. Grant was a comedy writer; he probably had tons of funny lines at the ready that he could dash off to someone . . . a little sunshine and a smile in their e-mail box.

I’d gotten nothing from him. I did a quick buddy search and saw he wasn’t online. I was getting ready to log off when suddenly I was gripped by an impulse I couldn’t ignore.

I went ahead and logged off but remained on the sign-in screen. I typed in his e-mail: [email protected]. He’d told me Speed Racer was a secondhand Halloween costume his parents had made him wear every year.

I stared at the password slot. Carefully I entered p-a-s-s-w-o-r-d. I promptly received an “invalid password” response. Next I tried s-e-c-r-e-t for the password. Again, I was dumped back to the main sign-in page.