experiment time

Posted by beth on February 22, 2008

Every day, I go through the same thing. I get on here, and I think, Now I know there was something I was going to blog about. What the heck was it? So I come here, and I type about how I don’t remember what I was going to say. And then magically, it comes to me.

Like now! Usually, at this point, I delete all the free-writing that got me here, but today, I’m going to allow you to see my whole creative process.

Ok, so I was at the ‘bou the other day for far longer than I needed to be, and I was online, chatting with Whitney. We were talking about this guy that we know, and Whitney mentioned that she thought he would fit in well in the time period of Jane Austen. I can’t remember exactly what she said after that, and I can’t go back and look it up because she keeps all her chats “off the record,” so gmail doesn’t have it saved for me. This, in my opinion, is a tragic flaw of gmail. Just because Whitney doesn’t want to remember a chat, that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to remember the chat. I thought it was a lovely chat. Perhaps she disagreed.

Anyhoe, her reasoning behind placing this guy in the late 1700′s was expressed oh-so-eloquently in Miss Austen’s very style of writing, and it had something to do with him securing a wife if he had a large enough fortune. But that is beside the point.

When she said this to me, I laughed – a lot - attracting the attention of the rather cute gentleman seated to my left. He commented that what I’d just read must have been funny. I knew it would be awkward for me to confirm the humor without then explaining it, but I knew that it would also be strange to this stranger for me to divulge the fact that my friend had just suggested that a guy we know would fit in better in days of yore. I’d rather be strange than awkward, though, so I told him what was said.

He was thrown, for sure (I wonder what he was expecting anyway), but this exchange led to a pleasant few minutes of conversation with said cutie. When I told Whitney about it, she asked if I smiled a lot and flirted with him (She used more interesting wording to ask this question, but again, it was “off the record,” so now I don’t know what the wording was exactly.). I said that I tried to, but that I’m not good at flirting with strangers. I’m only good at flirting with guys I know, which I do probably too much. I say “too much” because I do it with both guys I am interested in and guys in whom I have no interest whatsoever, which may make it difficult for them to tell if I’m interested or not because I do it with everybody. But I digress.

So Whitney and I decided it might be fun to do a blog series on “Flirting With Strangers.” We’ll go out in public somewhere, take turns flirting with strangers (or maybe I’m the only one doing it?), give each other pointers and then try again. Then, we will give you, the public, the skinny on what went down. What do you think? Sound interesting? Stay tuned.