I knew this was going to happen

I knew this would eventually happen. And it did.

I was walking through this fine city and stumbled across a street fair, a common summer occurrence in Madison. A man with a packet of information approached me, looking as if he wanted me to sign a petition or become a member of something.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m…” and gave me his name, in a manner which did not clarify for me whether he was gathering signatures or just garden variety crazy.

“Hi…(his name here),” I said, facing at an angle away from him so that I could keep walking if the crazy came out.

“We’ve never met but we…had an exchange over the internet,” he said.

Oh! Online dating connection. No petition, no crazy. Wait…scratch that last part. Probably crazy. But while I was attempting to determine this, I was proving myself to be an asshole. I racked my brain trying to remember who he was. I don't interact with that many people, so why couldn't I remember him? He remembered me by sight we he's only seen pictures! Crap! Who is he? Was he the guy who sent me a picture of himself that reveled that he was still living with his parents? Was he the guy who told me way too quickly about his medical conditions? Or worse still, was he so boring that I don’t even remember our conversation?

Sensing that I couldn’t place him, he listed a few things we talked about. Unfortunately they were the topics that I speak to almost everybody about.

“Why don’t you tell me something about you,” I said, trying to sound upbeat and non-assholeish, and he told me what his career is. DING! Success! Proper brain synapses now firing! Only at this point did I warmly shake his hand, my eagerness mainly stemming from my own relief in remembering him, saving me from seeming like a total douchebag.

My now-aligned brain synapses informed me that this is the guy who is in the same field as I am, which presented me with the Paradox of the Peer: Do I meet someone that I already know I have much in common with, or do I avoid the risk of souring a relationship with someone that I will likely work with at some point? Or is it just a bad idea altogether because if we did meet we would just talk businesses? Because that’s pretty much what happened.

So, standing in the hot sun, at a block party, on a Saturday, I found myself talking about work. Or, more accurately, listening about work while I attempted to interject. He obviously wanted to continue on the topic that made me remember him, and equally as obvious was his desire to impress me. This had the unfortunate side effect of having him create a complicated argument to support his point that he not only lost me in, but lost himself in. Mid-sentence, the rate of his speech slowing proportionately to the realization that he was now just rambling, he dropped the subject and apologized, explaining that his friends often ask that he speak in sentences, not paragraphs.

The thought of his friends requesting that he speak like a normal person made me laugh, which he readily joined me in, saying, “I’m glad you find that funny instead of potentially annoying.”

The fact that these two are not mutually exclusive I kept to myself.

We then had a short conversation about my shirt, how he just bought a house, and how we have a mutual friend before he had to run.

And there it was. I knew that it was only a matter of time before I ran into someone I had met online, and it happened with minimal awkwardness and douchebaggery. Win!