Prying open the floodgates: Another Milestone

I must say....for a while after I started this blog, I was really determined to do what I planned out here, but I really couldn't see how I was going to break ground to start. Well, now not only have I broken ground, but I'm prying open the floodgates to a social life. Not all that close to getting them open yet, but I did reach another milestone today:

The first in-person meeting. I met up at Starbucks with one of my friends from the craig's list "strictly platonic" w4m section. Pretty interesting, I had never met anyone from the Internet before. I arrived a few moments after her, and simply said "hey :)" and got something similar in return - no handshake or hug. We had exchanged about 50 e-mails before meeting.

So she ordered a coffee, and I ordered a blueberry frappuccino, or something like that. We sat down at a table, and we talked. And talked. And......talked. This talking went on for a whopping 2 hours and 50 minutes.

My anxiety level ranged from little to none. Meeting up with someone from the Internet was surprisingly non-awkward: we immediately got into normal conversation. I should say though that after talking to this particular girl via e-mail for a while (never talked on the phone, by the way) I felt quite comfortable meeting her, because at some point she realized that I was "shy" and said that she didn't mind shy people and was going to get me out of my shell, stuff like that. All of that had put me at ease.

Overall the conversation was good, I presume, because
1) it lasted almost 3 uninterrupted hours
2) she kept talking for a while even after saying she needed to head out
3) at some point, she invited me to a party at her friend's house next week

There were a few times where I was just smiling a lot and listening to her, and she asked me what I was thinking and I didn't really have an answer. That sounds weird, but in actuality it was just kinda funny, and wasn't really all that indicative of the problems I'm working on with this blog. In general though I noticed (as always, so far) that I am good at asking a lot of questions (somehow without it seeming like an interview), but have relatively little to say about myself. The first part of that is great, but it would be a big help to have more to say, or to have it come more freely to my mind. I did feel a bit inhibited, but for a first meeting and at this early stage of my quest, that wasn't too bad.

In almost 3 hours, we hit some interesting topics. I wish I could remember them all, but I will add them to the old Conversation Topics blog entry as I do.

The biggest help so far has been that the girls I've talked to, like most females, talk A LOT! I'm at a point where I feel very confident about 1-on-1 conversations with talkative people, provided I have a decent list of reserve topics in mind.

I wish I could somehow see statistics on how much I say compared to the other person in the conversation...and on how much I say about myself, as opposed to asking questions. The numbers would be astounding, but like I said, I'm going to work on being able to handle both sides a bit better.

Finally, a side note about the "strictly platonic" nature of this meeting. This was my whole-hearted intention, but, with this craig's list section, I get the feeling a lot of the people who post there actually have more in mind. She was telling me about another guy she'd met who'd also responded to her post. She didn't like him at all, and said that she thought about saying they could "just be friends" but didn't even like him that much. Uh...wouldn't that imply that she had some intentions that were certainly NOT strictly platonic? I wonder if she had that in mind with me as well. That would be a complication because I hope she will become (just) my second actual offline friend....but I guess we will see.