Impact and Impressions (Expected and Otherwise)

Last night was a Saturday night and I decided to go out solo. Drink some drinks, people-watch some people, and dance some dance. I am definitely better at the first two, but if I do the first one well enough the third one can fall into place well enough.

In many ways, Seattle is a small city. If you stay in the same neighborhood and go out to its places, you're going to bump into the same people pretty regularly... but while it's a big city, if you rarely stray from your 'hood, it's possible to go months or even years without seeing people that you met. I tend to frequent the Lower Queen Anne area of Seattle, with an occasional journey to Belltown and an even more rare excursion elsewhere. This means that I rarely have an opportunity to see people who, say, go to Capitol Hill or Pioneer Square on a regular basis.

So shelve that information for now. We'll come back to it in a bit. I wanna get a bit abstract on you here for a moment. Let's talk about impact and impressions that we have and make on people that we meet. I've made some graphs to hopefully articulate my thinking.

We all start with a blank slate:

We have an opportunity to make our mark, and after some time passes, we do so:

Of course, there aren't just binary states... you don't either know someone or not. People have impressions of you, and I think we all strive for this:

We want people to like us.

Actually... do we? I do. I would MUCH prefer people like me than not, even to the point of altering my behavior to please others. I know that sometimes people say they have to "keep it real"... and I'm not suggesting we all give away all of our identities to please others, but we DO dress a certain way, use soap, drive on the correct side of the street, etc., and not just because we have to. I believe that the monkey in us all wants a bunch of green hexagons.

But, the reality is... that's not the reality. (That sentence is incredible, I know.) Some people will like us, some won't give a damn, and some will actually dislike us:

The reason for their feelings isn't very important to this discussion... they might not like us because of our vocabulary, or because we're an asshole to them because we don't like them, or because we prefer Superman to Batman.

While I cannot hope for a realistic level of precision in these graphs, we can get a little closer than the one, above. For every person that we meet and impact, there is a ripple out. Each person that they know gets an impression of us that is generally good, neutral, or bad. These impressions can be based on their observations, your Facebook page, or what they heard about how you chew your food.

With the impact ripples, we get something that looks like this:

I left space between most of the ripples because the impact points we established earlier are often isolated, but in a small enough environment--say, a neighborhood in Seattle--there can be some overlap.

You can see that even people who really like me will have people around them that do not particularly care for me, even if there's a general trend towards green.

Let's apply this to last night, shall we? Or, rather, let's edge towards that application. First a bit more background/context.

About a year and a half ago, in the midst of my funemployment, I made an appointment to meet with a placement agency. I went into their office to meet with someone who works with employers to place people like me so I can apply my skills.

I walked into the office and the administrative person (we'll call her Secretary, although I realize that is a dramatic understatement of her role) was, to be blunt, pretty stunning. She was was wearing a very nice, professional skirt and top (or was it a dress? I remember her correcting me after, but cannot recall at the moment) that highlighted some of her, uh, skills.

She had me fill out some paperwork and I ambled into the office to meet with the guy. I was reasonably effective in the conversation, but a large percentage  of my brainwaves were spent thinking about Secretary and what--if anything--I was going to say to her on my way out. I knew I had her name and her email address, so I could do a bit of Facebook research when I got home, etc., etc. Yes, weird. But I'm a dude. I like skilled women.

After the meeting was over, she was not around, so I let myself out. Found her on Facebook later that day, but didn't send her any messages or anything... I am reasonably well skilled at hiding my oddness when I should.

Fast forward a month or two. I am still out of work and I get invited by Secretary's company to have a networking/mixer event at their office. I really don't like mixing or networking in a semi-jobby job capacity, but I knew it was a good idea to go. So I did.

She and I talked a few times. I made her smile, I thought, above and beyond her role of playing hostess/having to smile at everyone. At the end of the evening I told her we should be Facebook friends, she said she wasn't Facebook friends with people that she worked with, and I pointed out that she hadn't got me a job yet, so we were good. She laughed and said I could add her.

So I did. When she accepted me, I noticed she was "In a Relationship". OK. Sure. Fine. I sent her a message and let it go.

A couple of weeks later, we chatted a bit. She was on the outs with her bf. I said we should hang out some time, and she agreed. Nothing set in stone, but promising, right?

A couple of weeks after THAT, she invited me to come out with her friends. I left where I was and met up with them, and at the end of the night we all went back to her place. I think there were two female friends and a male friend. The male friend, in the apartment, pointed out that I had sweaty armpits. I appreciated that. :|

The others went to sleep and she and I crashed on the couch. I went in to kiss her and she turned away. Fine. We sort of cuddled and I went home the next morning (actually, I walked home... it took so freaking long my feet still ache just thinking about it... ugh).

We talked about hanging out again, but it never happened. She moved out of the state, and she invited me to her going away party, but I wasn't able to make it. I actually zapped her as a Facebook friend last week because we never talk and I try to keep my Facebook friends list tidy (that's another blog entry altogether...)

Last night, then. Did I see Secretary? No. Did I see her friends, though? Yes. I'd met some of them and seen others in Facebook pictures. I expected this:

I thought that she probable had a good impression of me, and so most of her friends who knew me would be either green or yellow, too.

I was wrong.

It started off with me seeing the male friend that I'd hung out with that night so long ago. The one that had called me out for excessive sweating. I wanted to tweak him a bit, so I approached him at the bar and we had something like this as an exchange (names changed, natch):

Me: Hey George!
Him: (Does a double take, has a blank look on his face) Uh... hello?
Me: Yeah. How you been? It's been a while...
Him: Do I know you?
Me: Yeah. I met you through Secretary a while back.

At this point, he was confused and off-kilter. Cool. I had planned on shaking his hand and going back to my part of the bar, but what's that they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men?

George was not alone. He was with two other guys and, like, three women. I was reasonably sure I knew one of their names (she was a cute blond I'd seen in pictures on Facebook) and I might have met one of the others that night (I think she encouraged me to get into the cab with them) but I didn't know their names with enough confidence to say hi to them, too.

Plus, I was just trying to rattle George a little for the armpit sweat neg he'd delivered on that night.

The short woman I had no knowledge of was right next to George as the exchange happened, and she joined in the conversation:

Me: Yeah. I met you through Secretary a while back.
Her: I remember you!
Me: Oh, yeah? Cool...
Him: (Looking at her) You do?
Her: Yeah, he's the guy who...

She then turned to him, covered her mouth and LITERALLY whispered to him. Or murmured. Maybe used sotto voce. The point is that I couldn't hear what she said, and I couldn't read her lips... and she had intended that.

George's face went from blank and quizzical to... hard. Not necessarily angry, or hostile, but... hard.

And I knew that I'd made an error. Because it was not this situation:

It was this situation:

Oops.

So I tried to flee the scene, leaving them at the bar after not correcting George when he said it was "nice to meet" me (he had, after all, met me, and it was a failing on his part to not recall said meeting)... and wandered back to the edge of the dance floor to drink, people watch, and consider dancing.

George's group, though, migrated. They didn't migrate next to me on purpose, I don't think, but they DID cause me some discomfort. The short chick who'd brought George up to speed was the biggest irritant... she was staring at me from, like, four feet away, and then when I made eye contact with her, she made an exaggerated, "Why are you looking at me?" face before turning away.

Then, about three minutes later? She had her iPhone up and was taking a pic of me. From three feet away. No joke.

I called her on it and she at first tried to pretend like she was getting video of the dance floor, but then she just flat-out asked if she could take a picture of me. I said "sure", and she did. I knew it was an iPhone when there was no flash.

The room was dark, and when she tried to send the pic to Secretary (which I am 99% sure she did; I looked over her shoulder and have very sharp eyes) it was basically a black box.

So there I was, surrounded by red hexagons, and I wasn't ABOUT to leave the bar on account of their perception of something they think I might have done over a year ago. Eventually, they had enough to drink that they lost interest in me. Or I had enough to drink that I no longer noticed their interest in me. Same difference, right?

I had a couple of other mini-adventures, too, including a brush with the chick that wrote me the pair of notes I referenced in a recent blog post (the first time I'd seen her in about two years) and another late-night trip to Neighbours, but I woke up this morning thinking about

What impression did I make on Secretary? Had I been fooling myself into thinking we actually got along reasonably well and/or did I hallucinate that she invited me to her going-away party? Or were all of those red hexagons misperceiving something?

Hmm...