Free fries

The weather the past week has been pretty fantastic, so I spent a lot of this past Saturday outside. In the evening I went to the Mariners-Yankees game (Yanks spanked the home team 7-2 in a fairly uninteresting game), but I spent most of the day on a hike of Mount Si. Or, at least while we were driving there I thought we were going to do Mount Si, which had me a little nervous. My friends Chris and Sarah do pretty much every extreme sport known to man and they rate Mount Si as "fairly strenuous", and while I'm getting in better shape, I'm not sure I'm up for fairly strenuous yet.

Luckily, neither were my hiking companions, who directed us to Little Si, which is a much easier hike and was quite pleasant given the weather. Here are some pictures from the top of Little Si:


The handsome devil with the sunglasses is, of course, me. You'll note that I'm pretty much completely draped in technical wear, but I still found reason to hit REI on Sunday. I mean, it was their anniversary sale. You'll also note that I'm looking a bit shaggy, but I managed to get a haircut after the hike.

Anyways, the title of this post is "Free Fries". Mount Si is in North Bend, which is notable for having something to do with Twin Peaks. (It's also not very far from Roslyn, WA, which is the fabled Cicely, Alaska from Northern Exposure [which, oddly, is on one of the HD channels out here]). North Bend has a restaurant that offers unlimited french fries if you eat their Mount Si Burger. Now you might expect this to be a difficult task, but it's simply two 1/3 pound patties with cheese. I was nearly convinced into eating it and thus earning the table unlimited fries. I figure there are better competitive eating deals than that, so in the end, there were no free fries.

Man dates

By the end of the week I will have been on two man-dates. Thanks to Bobby and Rita for introducing me to people. Please feel free to make jokes.

But, I do not have a cat.

[PS: Get better Franko.]

Match Point

It's no secret that I'm struggling to meet folks out here. This seems to be a theme for many people who are new to Seattle, but I don't think I met a lot of people back East either. My specific dilemma is this: I can be solitary for 48-72 hours before going crazy, I only know four people in Seattle, and I'm absolutely terrified of the process of meeting new people. To be sure, I'm drawing a fine line here: I enjoy being introduced to people, which is how I met all the wonderful people I count amongst my friends. But I would rather play with vipers than introduce myself to a total stranger.

This is a pretty bad phobia to have when you're in my situation. The most obvious solution to this is the Interweb. Whether it's meetup or match or myspace, there are a multitude of options to screen and "meet" people electronically. I'm not necessarily looking for something romantic, I just want to find some people. On some level, the impersonality of the web is perfect for me, and frankly, I'm an epically good emailer, while my conversational skills are kind of hit-or-miss. Everyone I've talked to about going this route has wholeheartedly recommended it. I'm an constantly regaled with the stories of how so-and-so met such-and-such online and got to learn about their city and now they're engaged or now they know lots of new people. It all sounds great. Except for one thing.

All of the stories are second hand.

So am I just blessed with friends who are all perfectly happy with their social situations? Are my friends not comfortable online? Is DC just the kind of town where social networking kind of breaks for adults (since everyone is scared about their boss finding out they might have a social life)? I have no idea. But this worries me.

Three other things worry me:

1. My first encounter with match.com was in 2002. A guy I worked with at the time moved to Boise and put up a profile to try and meet girls im Boise. We found the profile in Richmond and spent an hour at work grouped in someone's cube looking at it and making fun of it. That has always stuck in my head.
2. Screen Names. Most people I know (except for my dad, strangely) use something very closely related to their name when picking screen names or email addresses. They don't use "qtpie103" or "ski_luvr" or crap like that. I've moved away from my first AOL name (karttyler) to rtcurtis and tyler.curtis because I want people to know who they are communicating with; I like the genuineness. So when I see the "qtpie103"s of the world, I become very skeptical of what their deal is. I don't know why it bothers me so much, but it really, really does. It's why I hate the idea of "blogger communities" where people refer to each other by screen names rather than real names. You know when it was cool to do that? When you played Dungeons and Dragons in 5th grade. And you know what? It wasn't cool then, either.
3. This.
   

[This is where I'll readily admit that I'm definitely going to do match or meetup or something at some point... kind of like buying a Blackberry. I know I'm going to do it, but I feel the need to fight it and point out all the reasons why I shouldn't do it before caving and (hopefully) being really happy that I caved.]

So that's what I'm battling with right now. Huan mentioned something about an East Coast ex-pat group one of his friends is putting together. And I'm starting to meet some b-school friends of Tyler H's (MBA is to Seattle as JD is to DC), so maybe one of those will turn into something.