I was too intent on arguing the merits of going more low level and using an SSL tunnel rather than playing with SSH sessions to notice that all the girls had left.
In the back room of a bar filled with over a hundred linux geeks, five girls had congregated in the corner. They left with their boyfriends, still discussing "living with geeks" on the way out. When I asked them what they liked about linux I drew blank looks, but pretty smiles.
Suddenly, surrounded by Xavier and Olivier fencing me in on the bench and Guy In Black Shirt and Guy in OpenBSD shirt along with GianCarlo and droolBoy across from me, I would have been intimidated, had we been in the quebecois bar.
Instead we argued the merits of learning assembly language and hexadecimal even when programming high-level applications.
THey stopped calling me geekette, and began calling me geek when I corrected El Presidente.
They laughed at my t-shirt, having read the logo, rather than simply stare at my breasts.
They paused momentarily over a "la politique �a rapetissi la bitte" joke, and the collective intake of breath was the same as when I'd first walked in.
Then El Presidente said "did she really say that? She did, didn't she? Cool."
And we moved on.
We talked of my serial port problem, of bandwidth issues in Europe, of the FSF and GNU efforts and rollerblading.
Looks like I'm going to have to go on Tuesday.
Getting ready to leave, GianCarlo who'd heard all my metro stories offered to walk me to my line. So did everyone else.
We were a veritable gang of hunchbacks heading down the interminable downalators at Le Halles, but they didn't pull any macho bits when I suggested they just get on their own lines home, and let me walk the last kilometer to the 4.
I should have listened to "Gianny", who's not trying to pick me up after all, when he invited me to a geekbeerfest months ago.
I have this devastating urge to dig up all my old BSD t-shirts because suddenly I have a place to wear them.
I thought about it briefly before the metro overwhelmed my senses.
A pint and a half isn't enough to have me walking funny, but it's too much for the Stanislas Lem book.
I had the presence of mind not to make contact with the all-too-familiar "will you be my girlfriend" drunk, but my eyes caught on the orange-faced woman with the painfully swollen ankles, whose feet were so ruined that the toes were unrecognizable, and somehow I admired her dedication to fashionable sandals, despite the fact that two toes hung entirely off the side of them.
It was almost as monstrous as the blank-eyed girl whose arm was possessively grasped by a grotesque man, her skinny legs crooked against each other to hold her up everytime he screamed and jerked her around.
My own beer breath in my nostrils, my hands to my face, I could smell everytime the unwashed gentlemen leaned in to sniff my perfume, and I let out my breath in gasps at each stop as the crush of bodies pushed them away.
Getting to my door I keyed my code in wrong three times, my head scattered in a thousand universes.
Running up the stairs, I drowned myself again in the heady pleasure of brilliant conversations, hoping, as I am now...
That sleep will come more swiftly tonight.
Demain, I am not going out, I am collecting every ounce of comprehension that I have on this problem, and sending it to the hapless victim who offered to help me on it, and then I am sending my nearly polished CV around the world.
Then, I am picking up a Callahan's book, carting it to the bath with me, forgetting egoes and frightened reactionary people and where I'm going to be in three months, and teaching myself how to glory in the nature of kindness again.
With so many beautiful hearts in my life, I have no right to forget.
Tomorrow night, will be dedicated to remembering. Tea and bubbles and french poetry and Science Fiction ideals.
Madame Butterfly crying her heartbreaking lament, and you, all of you, ghosts against blue tiles.