Callidus

Last time, I told you I’d elaborate on my summer travel plans. What I didn’t tell you was why.

thrall and I have been friends for years now. If I remember correctly, she emailed me, at the suggestion of Tabico, sometime in 2005 to promote her just-opened blog and we’ve been crafting epic email chains ever since. Although we hadn’t spoken in a little while, earlier this year we re-connected and started talking summer movies, writing, Joseph Gorden Levitt (and whether he’d end up wearing a Batsuit), and plenty more; we really do have a lot in common.

One of the things that we have in common is a bit of secret-identity-sydrome. Prompted by one of her blog posts on the subject years ago, we’ve discussed how we both, at times, feel a certain enticing thrill from flirting with revealing our real identities. Its an idea that is just the right amount of scary to be exciting, but also scary enough that we’d never do it.

Back then, we both pointed each other to websites we were involved with in vanilla life. It was a way of playing on that edge of actually outing ourselves, but with someone we trusted. If either of us had really dug deep, we probably could have discovered who the other person was. I can’t speak for thrall, but I didn’t mine very far. I was content to know a little bit about her outside of the EMC community without feeling like I needed to know more.

In her case, I pointed her to a website run by a handful of people, including myself. She basically would have had a one-in-five chance of guessing who I am or she could’ve read-up on each person involved in that site and perhaps connected some dots with things she knew about me from our emails.

Interestingly enough, there’s a person in the EMC community, that’s commented on my blog a few times over the years, that I know from the comments section on this same vanilla website. As far as I know, this person has no idea that they know both sides of me. But, its a neat little hundred-to-one coincidence that does nothing to diffuse the secret-identity-syndrome that thrall and I share.

Now, I don’t know if thrall ever deduced who I am or not but at this point it doesn’t really matter seeing as how she and I are going to be meeting in-person in a little over a week.

We’ve had a rough idea that we lived relatively close to one another for a while. I never knew exactly where in the south she lived, but just based on things that she’d mentioned in her blog, I had come to suspect that she wasn’t too far away. As a matter of fact, I had an interesting encounter on vacation last year where I bumped into a woman that I thought might have been thrall..but that story will have to wait for another time. 😉

During our epic email conversation this summer, she broached the subject by stating that she would feel comfortable meeting me in real-life and extending an invitation if I were ever in her neck of the woods. This would probably be a better story if I told you it was a difficult decision that involved lots of soul-searching and drama, but the truth is I thought it sounded like terrific fun from the start. Which I suppose speaks to the fact that I also felt 100% comfortable meeting her.

I’ve always said that the thing about the EMC community that I like most is the people. I’m sure there are some assholes around, there always are, but I’ve had exceedingly good luck to become friends with some truly wonderful people like FreezeFrame, Tera S, Alina, Tabico, and thrall.

I’m excited at the prospect of finally meeting one of those friends in-person and continuing our conversation in the really, real world.

Besides, as evidenced by my woeful update schedule, we all know how much I hate typing 🙂

thrall is going to be writing up her own post on our forthcoming visit, so be sure to check out her blog for that. I also imagine we’ll both have posts written in the aftermath talking about how it all went and how we are so not what the other one was expecting, etc. If anyone has any questions they’d like me to pose to the saucy scribe, let me know and I’ll add it to the list of conversation topics I’ve started keeping (I don’t want to forget to mention anything).

As a matter of fact, the only thing I’m worried about, going into this, is that there won’t be enough hours in the day to contain all our banter; we’re both quite the chat-boxes.