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It's interesting, really, the things that catch your attention. What makes one person stick out of a crowd for you, while the rest remain anonymous passersby? Folks in Really Realy World tend to do their sorting based on visual cues, at least at first, but when you largely live in the world of the digital, it ends up coming down to perceived personality. Communicating one's true self through print is tricky business, and few people do it well, I've found. Don't get me wrong, I've formed many a long and lasting friendship via IM and email, but that was usually become of some outside force exerting an influence. Frequent visitors to my blog, coworkers on the site, fellow trivia game players, these people I got to know over time, as I mentally added the sum total of their comments and formed an idea as to the personalities at work.

I bring this up to contrast the near-instant impact Taurus had on me. Language is a drug for me, the most delicious of opiates and aphrodesiacs all in one. Simply using it well isn't enough to trip my trigger, though; I know more than one writer whose work is so perfect that it practically makes me weep, but that doesn't make me want to hop in bed with them. As has already been mentioned, I'd met Taurus in person for a bit, and while he created a good impression, it wasn't an OMG impression. No, that came a bit later. I had to ask him something work-related, and he was, shall we say, somewhat slow to respond to emails, so I bugged him via IM. Hey, don't put your screen name in your signature if you don't want it used, you know? (The allegory of that is don't put it in your blog profile, either, unless you want various icky people asking you to do various icky things to them. Ew.) He was pretty hands off, arm's length, totally appropriate, given the business relationship, but he was still alarminly funny. It's definitely an eyebrow raiser when you exchange all of about three sentences with a person and yet you find yourself mentally going over the conversation hours later. During every exchange that occurred after that, I found myself wishing he wouldn't blow me off, but he always did, le sigh. Until the one day he didn't.

So it was pretty clear why I was so into him, but I couldn't quite suss it in the other direction, so I reread the log of our conversation. And again. And one more time. And I didn't see it at all. I wasn't particularly witty, or charming, or funny, all I really did was ask him questions about his background and such. I mean, really, you find out someone used to do the various things that Taurus used to do, that's interesting as hell...how do you NOT ask questions about that?

I am, of course, a complete myopic idiot.

One of the things that constantly reminds me of how alone I am is that my friends--again, people who claim to care about me--regularly fail to ask me questions beyond "how are you today?" I'm not sure why people don't ask more...I don't think that it's an overwhelming amount of self-centeredness that prevents them from doing it, at least not as a rule. Maybe it just comes down to a simple lack of interest; not in me, per se, but in the world at large. I want to learn just about everything I possibly can, simply because I find value in knowing things. If something interests me, I want to know about it. Duh. Perhaps others just aren't that interesting in increasing their knowlege base unless they can see the immediate benefit to their lives. *shrug* Their loss, man.