Tales from the dating front I: Geek love

First things first: it wasn't a date. And there was no love, per se.
Plenty of geeks, though.

At the suggestion of a friend who was concerned by the amount of quality time I've been logging with the cats, I checked out meetup.com, the nation's premier defensively non-dating site for singles. Who aren't looking but can't help seeing, y'know? Oh, what? Like there's something wrong with that?

After a couple weeks of intermittently intending to attend the meetup writer's group (but what if they're all really bad? Worse, what if they're all really good?), I opted for easing in with the less stressful meetup Scrabble group. I had no trouble finding the players in the restaurant -- less by their Scrabble boards shall ye know them than by their Coke-bottle glasses and thinning hair. Heh. I say that with love, by the way. These are my people.

And they were good! I'll spare you the gripping blow-by-blow, but I was pushed to achieve a 400-point (plus) score -- and victory -- on my first game. The second, which was about as dramatic as Scrabble gets, and which had the whole gang clustered 'round, saw my opponent drop a seven-letter word in the final moves, coming from behind to achieve an apparently unassailable lead with no time left for recovery...until I came back with a "z" on a double-letter score as part of a triple-word score, giving me 66 points with four letters, and a narrow win.
(That word, incidentally, was "zits." We have met the Geek Posse, and they are us.)

As for the social dynamics...

My first opponent, the group's organizer, was friendly. Very friendly. And while he initially seemed put off, or at least nonplussed, by the gray hair, he also seemed quite taken with my figure (guys, why do you think we can't tell? We can always tell), and I had the distinct impression that at some point -- right around when I trounced him by 100 points, I think -- he decided the hair didn't really matter all that much. This impression was bolstered by the fact that there was an email from him waiting for me when I got home, suggesting a non-club game. Maybe on the weekend. This weekend, even. Over a picnic lunch, perhaps?

Hey, I was flattered, and not displeased. Dipping a toe back in the dating waters after five years is a fairly terrifying proposition. And while I didn't know much about this guy, his being a member of a respectable profession involving books and his offering to share his fries, I took to both be positive indicators.

So I did a basic-level google search.

Some time last year -- and I remember this pretty well -- the city's alternative newsweekly did an article on street harassment. Regular readers may be aware that this is a subject about which I have an opinion or two. The reporting was fairly lame, but I distinctly remember the letters the piece provoked -- and, in particular, one howlingly clueless one in which the author protested that, yes, he made uninvited remarks to, and about, random women on the street, because how else was he supposed to meet anyone in this town? I remembered it because it undermined (sort of, not really) my assertion that all harassment was punitive/bullying; that no man was moron enough to truly think his aggressive and crude violation of some poor woman's right to go about her business undisturbed might actually result in his getting a date. I stand corrected. I still think harassment is overwhelmingly an act of power/hostility. But, apparently, some men really are that dumb.

Anyway, the fact that I actually remembered the letter was irrelevant; I was, of course, instantly reminded of it when google obligingly fetched it, attached to my suitor's name (same unusual last name, same out-of-the-way suburb. Very low probability of misattribution).

N₁E₁X₈T₁.