clicking and sparking are just special effects (part one)

Tomorrow night the Austin Bloggers group is meeting at Opal Divine’s. My boyfriend and I are probably going.
Tomorrow will mark 13 months, to the day, since we first met. At Opal Divine’s.
It isn’t a very romantic story. It does not involve any sparking, clicking, or magical music playing in the background. It is remarkable only because it is so unremarkable.

The Austin journallers were having their March happy hour at Opal Divine’s. I hadn’t been going to them because I hate driving downtown during rush hour on a Friday. I had gone to the February happy hour only because I was downtown anyway running an emergency errand for my friend Connor, and I figured I might as well stop by Guero’s and see who was there. Turned out to be a fabulous happy hour with a huge table packed with people, including someone from the Austin Blogger crowd (hi David) who wanted to see what this online journaller thing was all about. We were worried we’d frightened him, but it was all right. (He wrote a really funny blog entry about it, but his site is currently down so I can’t link.)
I got to Opal Divine’s early and if you have ever been to Opal Divine’s, it is a huge converted house with all these hidden little rooms, so it can take a good 10 minutes to find the people you know who might be there. I think it took me a good 20 minutes to realize that no one else was there yet, to call Tim and see if he was going, to debate just plain going home, and to generally get grouchy about everything. Okay, grouchier. Shut up.
So finally Tim showed up and we stood by the front entrance debating whether we should get a big table, and outside or in, or what, and this guy walks up to us. Older guy. Looks like a big old computer geek. I mean, you look at this guy and you know he’s going to be such a know-it-all about all kinds of annoyingly obscure stuff, and he’s got no social skills, so he’s going to interject his massive trivial knowledge into conversations at the wrong moment. Like Cliff Claven, if you ever watched Cheers, although that’s not what he looked like. Oh hell, I thought, a newcomer.
The guy introduced himself and it turned out he was another one of the blogger crowd, a friend of David who had read David’s entry about Guero’s and thought he’d come mingle with the journallers. I practically founded the Austin journaller get-togethers so I have a proprietary hostess feeling about them, which means that I was very polite and friendly and told the guy how happy we were that he had joined us, and tried to make him feel at home, although in the back of my head I was sure we were going to be stuck with some gratingly dull loser.
We managed to snag a huge picnic-style table outdoors, and we were really lucky because a big crowd turned out. Greg showed up shortly thereafter, and Kramer, and Abbycat and Feith, and more people kept appearing.
Now if you know Kramer, you know that the first thing he likes to ask people he meets is when their birthday is, because then he feels he can get a good idea of their personality based on their astrological sign. So he met the blogger guy, and asked him when his birthday was, and when the guy told him, he proceeded to issue some generalizations about the guy. He knew the guy must be that sign because of blah blah blah.
And then the guy told him that he’d given him the wrong date of his birthday.
Somehow this struck me as funnier than it probably was, because I had never seen anyone do that to Kramer. People generally tell him their birthday and then they nod and smile and respond well to his comments about their astrological type.
I looked up at the guy and grinned at him. Okay, maybe he wasn’t a total techie bore.
Shortly thereafter, I switched seats to talk to Greg and split some cheese fries with him, and the table was so swarmed with people behind me and around me that I couldn’t change seats if I wanted. The new guy seemed to be having a good time sitting by Rachel and Feith and whoever else was over there at the end of the table. I stopped worrying about being a good hostess to new people and chitchatted with the people I did know and generally had a good time.
If someone, maybe Kramer, had prophecised that a year later, I would be living with the blogger guy, I would have laughed and told Kramer he needed to get his charts adjusted. I had no interest in some old-school gray-haired bearded guy, thank you very much.
A few weeks later, Tim convinced me to go to an Austin Bloggers meetup because it would be a good way to interest the bloggers in JournalCon. The meetup was at Mozart’s—again, outdoors. The weather was lovely. I went by myself and I was aware as I parked the car that this wouldn’t be like the Austin journaller gatherings, because I might not know anyone at this meeting except for Tim and maybe David. Also, I kept hearing that hardly any women ever showed up at the blogger meetings and the conversations were pretty tech-centric. Bloggers actually talked about blogging tools and stuff, whereas journallers tend to talk about food, gossip, sex, margaritas, gossip, sex, weird piercings, and sex. I felt slightly intimidated.
Fortunately, I ended up sitting at a section of the table that did not spend too much time talking about trackbacks and pings and whatever the blogging issue of the day was at that time. I sat by Rachel and Tim and the blogging guy we’d met at Opal Divine’s sat by us and was not boring at all. In fact, I remember thinking how nice it was to sit and talk to someone at one of these gatherings who actually seemed to be listening. A bunch of us went to Hula Hut afterwards and had a nice time, but if you’d told me I might end up being attracted to one of the guys there that night, I would not have guessed correctly which guy it was. No spark. No gleam. No clue.
It wasn’t until the next Austin journallers happy hour at 1920s Club (just about one year ago now) that I had any personal thoughts about this guy whatsoever. He was part of a group of us gathered around a small table—Adina, Invincible Girl, and I forget who else. I had been talking to Adina about JournalCon and I remembered admiring his t-shirt, which was from Wil Wheaton’s site and had a fake name tag on the front reading “Hello, my name is William F***ing Shatner.” When we started talking about sheets with high thread counts, he became restless and finally gave a cursory goodbye and left.
Well, you can’t blame him. But he had that whole antisocial/grumpy vibe going the whole time we were there. You could tell he really wanted to be somewhere else, preferably somewhere quieter, less smoky, and with better lighting.
And I think that did it. It’s a terrible thing to admit, but somehow I always end up interested in the guy who gets fed up in a big noisy crowd and fidgets and wants to leave early. If you’ve known me for awhile you know exactly what I mean. Suddenly he wasn’t just a guy who’d walked out of a gathering I felt like I was pseudo-hosting, which would have made me feel a bit guilty and sorry for him, but he also reminded me of other guys I’d dated, so perhaps the possibility of him as a potential date was planted there.
The evening ended with four or five women including myself piled up on a sofa talking about all marrying each other, so you can see it did not have a huge giant lasting effect or anything. I wouldn’t say there was a spark or a click. Maybe a blink.
(more to follow soon)