It's been a while since someone has spent two hours telling me why I'm great.
I'm remembering why I enjoy the interview process so much.
My interviewer was a charming, enthusiastic, and very intelligent fellow who's looking to turn me into what might be a valuable business contact for him.
They're a tiny company, they don't have room for a security division, but they have so many questions and it turns out that I have just the right words to answer them with.
It's lovely when your interviewer is trying to explain something and you stop him carefully to point out that it sounds a lot more coherent and professional if you put it this way.
It's lovely when you recognize precisely where he is going halfway through his sentence, watch him recognize your knowing nod, and then watch him take notes on the way you phrased what he is trying to say.
Funnily enough, I owe ScrewUps and the FUD lessons I learned there for a few of those moments, but they felt good, and I now have a connection in this city that might take me a little beyond being a deskjob employee for a bank.
We'll see, we both walked into the meeting knowing that there would be no hiring contract on the table.
The nice thing is, that we both walked out pleasantly surprised at the compatibility of our interests, and the peculiar complement that my odd assortment of experience plays to their odd business goals.
Whenever he mentioned this or that product, I'd mutter "hey aren't those the guys that..."
and he'd say "exactly. Hey wait, you know more about why we want these guys than me."
And I came home through surprisingly little traffic, wired and thrilled, to the most beautiful smile of the universe, which reminded me of a wonderful thing that I learned this week.
You see, I have loved so very many people, and I have fucked so very many people, and so very rarely have the 'twain met.
Simply because I have had this immense difficulty with taking love and turning it into "in love", because of my one impossible demand.
It's not how you look, how funny you are, how many people you can enthrall with your charm.
All that makes you fuckable.
Intelligence and kindness make you a good friend.
Putting the two together, somehow, falls just short of starry-eyes, although it has earned me quite the repertoire of excellent fuck-friends, short stints, learning experiences.
A lot of it is due to where I spent so many years, and a lot of it is that I spend so much damned time in my own head that I have these strange definitions of what constitutes uberhuman, my priorities are wired according to a slightly alien diagram.
The most significant of which is the willingness to learn, which everyone has, and then the ability to grit your teeth, and decide that "I'm going to learn this and improve on it NOW because it is important to life."
There's willingness to learn, recognizing the importance of learning, which is necessary just for me to consider you human.
For me to drop every hermit, scared-animal instinct and turn to you and tell you "I think I am falling in love with you"
takes just that one step more. You have to be more than human.
I don't have the right words for it in me right now, but it takes an understanding of the self, of people, of life, of priorities, it takes an understanding of the concept of learning beyond adding items to your skillset.
It takes the ability to grow.
Mr. Pyke has blown me away on several occasions with this. When he came to Paris last year he had so many sentences with such a familiar taste to them - I remembered feeling them emerge from my own mouth with the same stresses and syllables.
Six months later he did the impossible and ironed out his syllables, in a way that too few people ever manage too, especially...
...especially people who've been hurt so badly that healing has been turned into a dirty opressive joke rather than a rational necessity.
And he keeps doing it. He keeps doing what too few humans are able to do. He keeps surprising me, despite how heavily I already believe in him, he surpasses my expectations, turns gracefully on his toes and learns an entire new language, a new skill, he waves his hands and does the impossible.
He makes magic, and today I saw in his face the colour of that magic when I tried to tell him precisely this.
I love you Mr. Pyke. Truly, thou'rt a fairytale hero.
Someone whose very existence I've always been afraid to believe in, and am suddenly so thrilled to be proven wrong.