Saturday morning ramble

What a pain, what a panic it was, the first time my laptop broke many years ago. I couldn't do anything: check e-mail, check the weather, pay bills. This time, it was anticlimactic (in a good way, I guess); there's not much you can't do on a tablet. Blogging, of course, is a pain--at least linking is. I can ramble all I want and it's only slightly more annoying to do so from an iPad keypad. But do you know what's awesome about the iPad keypad? The global keyboard. I used four different languages (alphabets, I should say) on it over the last week. But I digress. I'll need my laptop back (a new screen is in the mail; it's just a matter of my installing it without breaking anything else) before I make end-of-year donations, much less before I do my taxes. And I'd like to be able to access my music and my pictures and other files. But in terms of internet connectivity, I'm set.

Once the laptop is up and running, I'll compile and share most of the links I've tweeted (or retweeted). There was one especially thought-provoking one. Strike that; given that I've tweeted about factory farming and human rights issues, it would be flippant to describe a blog post on The Frisky about dating as especially thought provoking. But it's the one that's gotten me thinking differently (look, you guys know I think about food policy and human rights; there's not much at this point that makes me think differently about either).

Could I backtrack for a minute with another random thought, or series of thoughts? It is, after all, a ramble. Anyway, I was at an event this week--actually, I was at three, and each was excellent, productive, and fruitful in terms of connections that will help me get the job done. I'm actually a terrible networker; my introversion exerts a restrictive force, tries to hold me back. But I've learned that I have to get out there and introduce myself to people. I'm still not comfortable doing as much at social events, or even at work-related events for social reasons. But we will get to that.

At the event yesterday, or after it, I introduced myself to the moderator, who has written a lot about what I'm working on. In handing her my card, my handbag turned upside down, and everything fell out of it. She was super nice, helped me clean it up and such. But I realized, as we were gathering my stuff, that I had inadvertently exposed information about myself that I wouldn't think to announce to a business contact. There was a (field-related) business-card holder that has sparked conversation or at least connection for the second time in a month (the first was when I handed someone a card at an alum event). But--and none of this stuff is private, but it's just interesting--that all if the sudden, this woman could tell that I sent holiday cards (I had the ones that needed international stamps in my handbag); read books in print (oh the retronym! Who would have thought that one day we'd need to specify that a book was in paper form?); and carried an epipen. None of this matters, none of this is unique; I just find it interesting that in a world of Facebook, which I'm not in, there's information about us out there, and then there are the things we carry, which broadcast information about is whether we want them to our not.

***

That event was the second of the week where I danced a very bizarre dance (not quite avoidance, but no willingness to approach) with the dude I went batshit on a year ago. I revisited that episode over the summer in a post on not calling dudes because if they gave a shit they would call you, and you only want to be around dudes who give a shit. That post is the single-most read post on this blog, and it attracts traffic from all over the world. Women just about everywhere--and a lot of them--are wondering about calling (or not calling) dudes. 

I will spare you the details regarding this dude in particular; the point here is that, having run into him, I had reason to think about what I so liked about him that is missing in all the other guys I dated (and all the guys who asked me out) over the last year or so. And even though there was a lot (sense of humor, intellectual pursuits), if I had to boil it down to one single thing that so attracted me to this guy, it would be how genuinely, incredibly nice and polite he is. That sense of humor and formidable brainpower would be flicked off as a source of attraction if he weren't just so nice. Hence the article I mentioned earlier--on the distinction between self-proclaimed "nice guys" and guys who are nice. It really resonates. The "nice guys" trade in favors, so they're just paying it forward; they're finding things to do "for you" to establish some kind of emotional debt. Women are right to be wary of those guys. But with guys who are nice, it's the opposite: we love nice, when it's genuine. Really.