Web Development & Girls (oh my)

This past weekend a very strange thing happened to me. Well, not that strange, but unprecedented. On Friday, I went to a party - the usual kind with beer, women, and improperly portioned mixed drinks. There was even a little beer pong involved. I made the rounds, and chatted with the girls one by one as I always do. Topics of conversation varied from "where are you from" to "apartment location" and "have you seen the ____ on youtube." The last girl I talked to was the one I was most intimidated to chat with. She was not only tall and pretty, but slightly distant from the happenings of the party, which made her even harder to talk to. It wasn't her fault - the other girls were all longtime friends who were recently reunited, and she wasn't quite in at the same level.

I bounced off chairs and post, and ended up talking to her about the same BS as all the other girls. Topic of conversation changed to careers, where I get the shaft because mine brings many connotations and stereotypes to the surface immediately. Being a web developer does have a cool sound to it and I like the connotation that I am intelligent and creative (though some are unaware of the creative aspect), but I usually get tagged as a geek/nerd/social awkward almost instantaneously after I drop my career on the girl. Moments before they could have been utterly interested if I had said I was in finance, a lawyer, or some other supposedly glamorous position. This is all strange in a culture where every girl has AIM, email, MySpace and lives off of Google, but I think those who create for the Internet are still the last hold outs for the nerdy categorization. I responded to her question with a somewhat hushed web developer, but unlike usually, I received a smile and a widening of her eyes. "That's so cool," she said. She went on to tell me about how she was taking an HTML and reading a book on websites for fun, because she was actually interested in it. She has some kind of minor HTML hard-coded shopping site. The next twenty minutes was an intriguing conversation that got me riled up. Twice I had to catch my excitement and slow my words down and remember not to scare her with technical jargon or preachy enthusiasm. After that we all went out to a bar, and she and I did not converse again.

In my mind, which I assumed was totally inaccurate, we had hit it off about the Internet. Of course I was scared that the alcohol had made a the whole thing seem mutual even though it was probably a one sided conversation with me talking and her listening. Abstractly, talking about dynamic web sites, programming, and web startup ideas is terrible "game" and something I only reserve for girlfriends who make their commitment to me and then have to suffer through my ramblings. The next day, to my disbelief, I heard through a friend of a friend that she was all excited about our geek talk. Amazing. Though it won't go anywhere, because I am indisposed, the whole thing has changed my ideas about what to look for in a girl. Maybe there are beautiful girls out there who enjoy everything I do, including the "geeky" things. Only time will tell.