We met via Yelp’s Talk section from a post I made in Columbus Ohio asking, “what fun things are there to do in Columbus on a Monday night?” Our email thread went back and forth all weekend. We met at my hotel at 6PM sharp in downtown Columbus as planned. Neither of us flaked and we both displayed the same relief that it had worked out.
I didn’t know exactly what this was going to be. My naivety has waned in the past 15 months as a single man. I used to display the same confidence, happiness and friendliness to everyone not realizing that, toward a woman, it can be considered flirting. Lately, I have learned to know better. I’ve learned that when two single people have dinner and talk about ex-lovers that it’s not just small talk. The person I’ve always been, Adam the naïve and Adam the “let’s be best friends” is always hopeful that it’s just dinner.
As a post-grad Harvard med student told me in a bar one night, “you’re a nester. You nest and that’s only appealing to 30 year olds.”
I haven’t changed my “nesting” tendencies. I’ve only done absolutely everything to not get involved with anyone which has worked out pretty well. I think this preface catches everyone up.
She was kind, a drifter like me. We used drifter in conversation as if it was a good thing. Our ability to drop everything and start new is only matched by our lack of wealth and absence of long-term hobbies & goals. We migrate, shift, grow, learn and evolve rapidly. Some call it a trait of “millennials” but I like to consider it a movement in still life where only the rules of nature apply and we’re along for the ride.
We walked down the North district of Columbus where some of the finer bars and restaurants of the city were and it was 2 miles away from Ohio State where every restaurant has a beer pong table tucked somewhere in the back. She and I had Mexican food and talked about our adventures, Ohio and the fact that she is surrounded by hundreds of miles of corn fields but is allergic to corn. This made me laugh.
There was a moment after my first beer and after enjoying a delicious soft taco with too much sour cream that we shared that moment. I don’t make assumptions as to what people are thinking when they give me that look but my thought was, “oh shit.” That was not what I signed up for. Luckily, it was a false alarm. I continued to be myself and she did as well but it wasn’t until we said goodbye with a simple hug that the breathe of air I was holding in my lungs from fear that this was more than dinner finally escaped from my lungs. I had to have been holding that breathe in for 3 hours straight but I was nervous about what might happen which is normal for me.
She was beautiful and very intelligent and a social media Jane of all trades and her goal was to live in 10 countries before she was 30. My goal, a less ambitious one of living in 10 cities in The US before I’m 30 felt a bit childish. She only had 3 years left on her goal. After the 3rd martini, I did share that I kind of wished I lived in Columbus so we could see each other again. She smiled without realizing it and didn’t say anything. That made me chuckle.
These fragments of an experience are far more powerful than telling a full story. I’m partly doing this on purpose but, at a few hundred words in, I actually have failed to talk about what I had planned on when powering on the laptop on this cross country flight from DC to Las Vegas.
I’ll end the very long preface with a note that I’m doing this more lately. I’ve been spending more time with both men and women for one or maybe two days with no goal, objective or networking opportunity. It’s just a moment in time where two people come together to share themselves with each other. I find it exciting. For some reason, I have a hard time finding someone my own age or younger. Most of these moments are shared with people 28-45 years old. Occasionally, as you may have read in my story about Alice, I’m lucky enough to share wine with a retiree and am always amazed at what I learn in these encounters.
V taught me something last night. It was so profound that I had to look away from her at the dinner table, apologize for my silence and take a solid 10 seconds away to process it. I apologized again for grabbing my phone to take a note. She grabbed hers in the silence to check in on Yelp to the restaurant.
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“I’ll get home; I’ll meet my friends at my favorite bar. We’ll get some lighter heads for our heavy hearts. And we’ll share a drink. Yeah we’ll share our fears and they’ll know how I love them.” – Coner Oberst
We were talking about blogging & twitter and social media and discussing sharing. After 10 minutes of chatter on the subject with our respective backgrounds she said, “You won’t find me on Twitter or Facebook. I only use Yelp and it’s really just a way to be artistic and have fun.”
When talking about her travels through Spain and upcoming adventures in Thailand and Australia and stopping in to visit a friend in London, I wrapped up our brief chat about ex-lovers with, “when will you write your story?”
She paused and said, “I’ll write it when it’s done…which will probably never happen so maybe my story won’t be written. I’m okay with that.”
That statement shared with a guy like me who not only shares every moment of his life but geotags it with location, documents the date & time and incorporates tweets, blogs and photos with location check-ins to make a biography that I think will be a great read for my kids or something I can read when I’m old and gray.
Needless to say, it stopped me dead in my tracks. My mind started spinning and after writing this down, I said, “There are largely two kinds of people in the world. There are people who share carelessly. The cult of personality spawns celebrity egotism and spawns more sharing to the point where you’re living your life just to share it (something I blogged about recently) where nothing is worth doing unless it’s something that the “follower” will mark it as a favorite once you tweet it.
The other kind of person is the follower. They may selectively share mundane aspects of their life but not to a degree that someone like Nick Starr or I would. Even those of you that deny it can’t deny that it makes you feel good when someone comments, replies or re-posts something that you’ve shared. Twitter’s co-founders have said many times that a majority of Twitter users don’t tweet. They follow those that they’re interested in and don’t say a word. I have over 3,700 followers but only 200 reply to me once a month. I saw the influx of replies when I announced the departure from San Francisco for New Hampshire from people that never chatted with me before. They were there all along.. Last night, a photo from a high school friend was shared on Facebook of her husband and new son together and they looked so happy. I commented briefly, “happy family. You all look so happy.” She messaged me saying, “I read your blog posts. I just don’t comment.” Last month, a colleague at my job was approached by a kid at a tech party asking if Adam was there. They said I was not and he said something along the lines of, “Adam is so awesome. I love following him.” This is a kid I’ve never heard from before but he’s 14 and reading every tweet and blog post.
These are the two types of people that I see most often in the world. Alphas who dominate and over share until they become their own worst enemy and eventually fall off the deep end which is something I’ve almost done a couple of times. I think the EncyclopediaDramatica entry on “AdamsBlock” had a description of me and it contained the tidbit, “is showing an over inflated sense of self-importance”. Yes, I was becoming what I’ve always feared. Then, the other type who religiously follows but rarely interacts. This is true in life among humans, in nature among other animals and goes far beyond social media.
This is why V’s quote made me pause. I know this is certainly one way to go about it but I never actually heard it spoken aloud. When I dug a little deeper, she said that it was better to stand behind someone and be in the shadows pushing them into fame and stardom or talking to a friend for hours to console that friend after a loss of a job or family member than publicly boast online how awesome life was. On the other end, she’d rather take time to live her own life and make every day the best she can without wasting time following, reading and becoming involved with the stories of others.
Of course, being in social media (for now, at least) she backtracked a bit to say that there’s nothing wrong with either side of the spectrum but her story is more fun if she’s living it and not capturing it.
When I probed by asking, “do you think your story isn’t important enough to share?” She said that it wasn’t an issue of self-confidence. It’s just the simple fact that writing this all down would be a waste and sitting at home following a Twitter stream would mean that she couldn’t take trips across the world and be adventurous and……meet people like me.
That was the moment where I held back from giving this stranger a hug and said. You’re right. When we parted ways, she asked that I not use her name in the post. “It’s more important to affect people while living your own life day to day than to write it down day to day.”
Wow.