Networking and the introvert

Twitter and other forms of social networking have introduced to me to all these hyper-ambitious young people. And by young people I mean twenty-somethings. Turning thirty last summer made me take stock of many things, including my somewhat inconsistent approach to my professional life. When I was twenty-eight I just felt like there was so much time and I would be more accomplished when I was thirty. Really, it was only a matter of time until people took notice of my genius. But two years is nothing, and now I am finally pulling my shit together. Twitter has helped. I mean I had heard of these ambitious, networking sorts but I’d never been able to access so many and their thoughts on this level. Reading articles about this stuff is different than being taken through their daily routines via their tweets. These are real people. Weird. I guess in my head they had some sort of super-human status. Sure, they write and link to fabulous articles but they also eat lunch and sometimes they get lost on their way to aforementioned lunch. I wasn’t even aware I was slighting myself by basically thinking “Well, they wrote an article so they must be some sort of super genius.” So armed with the advice of my new followers/followees I have entered the world of networking and these are my adventures therein.

Tuesday night was a self-proclaimed geek dinner for people involved in the web. I had a pretty good idea what I was getting into. And it wasn’t bad, it’s just that I was just soooooo very unknowledgeable on the topics of conversation. This was partially due to being new to the group and the rest was due to my inability to hold forth on subjects such as comic books…and movies based on comic books, and math-y programming languages. I listened politely and tried to follow the flow of convo - the nice young gentlemen next to me defined a couple terms here and there. A friend of mine, and true comic book devotee, attended. She sat on one end of the table and gave me pitying looks every once and a while. I did however get some advice to work on “making things pretty” a la xhtml & css rather than mess about with php or ruby (programming languages) at this point. Sound advice though I wasn’t quite sure if “making things pretty” wasn’t a bit condescending. Hard to tell though when I don’t know these people or their senses of humor. I’m going to assume that advice was given in good spirit. I did exchange cards with the programmer seated to the left of the nice young gentleman/translator. We have exchanged a couple e-mails on the possibility of working in tandem on projects where I take care of the design elements and he does the programming. That’s a fabulous outcome of my first tentative steps into real networking. I think I could learn a lot from these people and potentially make friends. I would attend again but I will try to drag another right-brained designer-sort with me and/or sit next to my friend so she can hold my hand.

Saturday night was a benefit/cocktail party. I attended with my friend and her boyfriend. He thought he might know some peeps to introduce us too. One of the people he meant to introduce us to was home with a sick kid. I’m cool with exchanging business cards. Germs? Not so much. So that was just fine. Perhaps we will meet him another time. Other than that he didn’t really know anyone, except for my former coworker who now does design for him. I also saw a couple more coworkers and a lady newscaster. I didn't meet anyone new though. Ah, the joys of not-networking. So we just made do with our vodka cocktails that were included in the price of admission, which was fine by me! I think my companions felt kind of bad but I had a good time regardless. I reconfirmed that I can, in fact, walk in heels and clean up pretty well. There were some sexy heels at the party, a pair of them on my own friend. There were a couple young ladies that didn’t seem able to walk in them though…or maybe that was the  result of too many cocktails? I think all sexiness is out the window if you can only lurch in your shoes...unless you're trying to attract a zombie. Though a zombie's thoughts are probably more focused on dining on brains. Speaking of dining, there was quite a spread of hors d’oeuvres that were hard to identify under the red color of the heat lamps. I picked up something I thought was a dessert that ended up looking more like shredded meat on top of  bread once it reached my plate. It was hard to tell since we didn’t make it to the snack table until after the lights had been lowered. I tried something on a spoon, luckily only tasting the garnishing veggies before realizing they were hiding some sort of meat. Thankfully there was hummus and an olive tapenade with pita breads. I made my friend try the olive tapenade first since I was feeling a bit unsure after nearly taking a bite of mystery meat. Yep, it was olives…and she was not pleased with the flavor. What a good friend, right?! Both the hummus and tapenade featured cloves of garlic so it’s just as well I didn’t network since I wouldn’t want to be remembered as the graphic designer with garlic breath. However if you are looking for a designer with garlic breath, do get in touch.