Happy Bookmark: February 16, 2006

I’m coining a new term: “Happy Bookmark.” I’m going to use it for really good real-life events that happen to me that I want to blog and remember. The act of blogging good things will henceforth be known as “Happy Bookmarking”. You heard it here first!

So Feb. 16 gets a big “happy bookmark”. Wow, the day has been awesome.

Okay, so first of all, S was here for like 10 days and left this morning (just pretend it’s still the 16th because I haven’t gone to bed yet.) He’s now in San Diego until Sunday, which is a relief. S, hon, I know you are reading this and I totally love ya in that best-friend kinda way, but you are also a stress ball. And I’m a stress ball. Put two stress balls together and force them to share a house and a car for 10 days and you get… IMPLOSION. Which is kinda what happened on the 13th. I just broke down and started crying at one point. On the 14th I didn’t get out of bed until sometime in the afternoon, when Andrew asked me out to what became lunch even though it was like 4PM. (Thank you, thank you, thank you.) I got to rant about everything that had happened in the last two weeks with Andrew and that improved my mood considerably.

Things have gotten better since, and today’s the best day I’ve had in a while. Today definitely deserves a happy bookmark. I had 3 major events happen, but I’m too tired right now to type it all out, so I’ll just mention the last one. I headed up to SF to check out Geek Entertainment TV Turns 1000. It turned out to be a really fun party. I was expecting to know more people there, but I only knew like 4 people, so at one point early on I went downstairs to the bar, and while waiting for a Sprite from the bartender (I haven’t had alcohol in several months and plan to continue that), I set a goal that I’ve never set before. I decided that, since I was feeling confident, I would go up to every single cute guy in attendance and introduce myself.

Now you gotta know something about me before you read any further. The fact is that I’m a complete wallflower at most parties. Or, as Andrew described it the other day, “When you talk about Simpli, you’re all “blah blah blah!” [and happy gestures], but when someone asks you about your personal life, you clam up.” Which is entirely 100% accurate. I’ve had a lot of shitty things happen in my personal life, so I tend to just not talk about it. This makes it difficult for me to break the ice at parties (that and a complete lack of knowing how to ask questions to get other people to open up.)

So now you have the premise. I’m an introvert. I generally consider it “good” if I meet 2 or 3 new people at a party. But here was my crazy self, presenting me with a challenge that on any other (normal) day, I would have just rolled my eyes and shrugged off. But today I was feeling confident, so I thought “What the hell.”

And I DID. I went up to every cute guy (and, okay, some of the normal-looking guys there too, and even a girl or two!) and introduced myself, asked what they did, etc. And then I started asking questions based on what they said. It didn’t hurt that this was a techie party and so I knew what they meant if they said “I work with Ruby and AJAX.” The odds were in my favor that I’d “click” with these guys. And boy, did I! Wow. It was totally great. Okay, so I didn’t get any dates out of it (yet…tee hee), but I did boost my self-confidence by about a mile. Hey, I can go up to random people at a party, introduce myself, and carry on AN ACTUAL CONVERSATION for a while! I know this may not seem like a lot to those of you (*cough*N*cough*) to whom this is second nature, but for me, this is a huge step. It felt really good to be able to break myself out of my shell. And hey, I did this. Not anyone else. ME!

Happy bookmark; February 16, 2006: The first day I was comfortable at a party.