meeting and greeting

I went into the city yesterday to do some shopping and go to the Sepia Mutiny meetup. I was a little worried about the whole real-life-colliding-with-anonymous-bloglife thing, but it seemed to work out ok. I haven't exactly written anything on this blog that I need to hide, apart from a bunch of bad jokes and occassional references to recreational drug use, but I think that there's a different mindset behind writing that's done anonymously and writing that's done with a public name and face on it. (At least, this is the belief that I developed after reading the diary of a woman that I sublet an apartment from one summer in college. Damn, that was a fascinating diary. I would tell you about it, but I have this vague paranoia that one day she'll find out that I read her diary and will feel utterly violated. Oddly, I don't feel any guilt about reading her diary, just fear that she will find out about it. I'm not sure what this says about me as a person.) This blog doesn't exactly take advantage of anonymity to delve into any real kind of self-exposure or dark-night-of-the-soul kind of stuff, but I guess I kind of liked the idea that if I for some reason felt like talking about some private aspect of my personal or family life, I could do that here. But ultimately a blog is always going to be a public vehicle written with an audience in mind, so even if I chose to keep a blog that was entirely anonymous, I'm not sure that I would ever really get down to writing something jam-packed with Shocking Revelations! Sordid Romances! and Other Things Ending in Exclamation Points! Not that those sorts of things happen in my life anyway.
What was I talking about again? Oh yeah, so mostly I was just nervous that people would match me to my blog and think "Um, ew?" Of course, most people have lives and don't spend their time thinking about random people's blogs, so this fear was probably unwarraranted. Or they were all thinking "Um, ew?" but were just too polite to say anything.
Anna and brimful have both posted with their usual grace and aplomb on the meetup, so I guess I'll just stick with the non-sensical self-absorbed rant for now. Everyone was friendly and welcoming and non-scary. In any fairly big group, people seem to fall along a spectrum of those who tend to keep the conversation rolling and those who mostly tend to sit back and take everything in, every once in a while chiming in with a comment. Me and the guy next to me, Vinod, both seemed to fall into the latter camp; I'm not sure that I said a single word to him the entire time, which I sort of felt bad about, but I figured that since he seemed to be a listener-type like me, maybe he was glad that I wasn't trying to engage him in awkward conversation. (If you're reading this Vinod: I wasn't trying to dis you! And yes, I know that you're probably not reading this. But then again, if you're reading this, then there's a hundred percent chance you're reading this! My head hurts.) Anna (and also the famous Om Malik!) were both full of funny stories and asides. If it had been me hosting something like this, I would have been devising conversational gambits like, "So, uh, do you, like, like any, um... stuff?" At the same time, I was struck by the fact that even the people who were the most full of anecdotes and conversation were also geniunely interested in hearing what the quieter people like me had to say. It wasn't at all like one of those annoying discussion sections you have in college where there's one or two blowhards who deliver monologues from on high while everyone else just wishes they would shut the fuck up.
What the hell is the point of this post? I have no idea. I think I'm turning into the section blowhard who needs to shut the fuck up. Anyway, since I'm the sort of person who doesn't really start to feel comfortable around people until I've spent a lot of time with them, mostly I just felt like I met a lot of cool people that I would ideally like to meet again, and hopefully they don't all think that I'm a complete dolt and would like to meet again at some point, too.