Vagary

1. †a. A wandering or devious journey or tour; a roaming about or abroad; an excursion, ramble, stroll. Obs.
Freq. in the 17th c., chiefly in verbal phrases as to fetch, make, or take a vagary.

†b. to play his vagary, of a horse, to leave or refuse to follow the proper or desired course. Obs.—1

c. An irregular course or distribution.

†2. A wandering in speech or writing; a rambling from the subject under consideration; a digression or divagation. Obs. (passing into sense 5).

3. a. A departure or straying from the ordered, regular, or usual course of conduct, decorum, or propriety; a frolic or prank, esp. one of a freakish nature. Now rare or Obs. (passing into sense 4).

†b. Without article: Frolic, gambolling. Obs.

4. a. A capricious, fantastic, or eccentric action or piece of conduct.

I'm pretty sure I left Coda a voicemail the day before his birthday or the day after, but he never called me back. Not that it bothers me when Coda doesn't call me back. We've had some lively email exchanges but our phone conversations have generally been one-off affairs, not really part of an ongoing dialogue or anything. Not that I have a leg to stand on the returning of phone calls tip; I'm at +5 for outgoing calls made vs. return calls made (meaning there's three people I'm supposed to call and eight people who are supposed to call me, applying somewhat subjective and arbitrary rules of etiquette) but if you consider email correspondence roughly equivalent to returning a phone call, which I do, then I'm at -8, unless you count friendster testimonials, which I don't, in which case I'd be at -13 for the year.

Coda did call me back, though, even if it took him a couple months. I'd run into him on IM and demanded to know where the hell he'd been. "Falling in love," he said somewhat cryptically, as if that means anything at all to me.