July 27, 2001
Schmooze-King
My friend Kat, whom I haven’t heard from in a rather long time (she’s in the Navy now), long ago gave me the title of Schmooze-King on her web page. I’m not entirely jazzed about the sobriquet - mostly due to the implications of schmooze - but the explanation Kat gives doesn’t have those negative connotations:
Jim is a schmooze-king, one of those people who has the awesome ability to be outgoing, meet all kinds of impressive people, and remember their names.
Now that I think about it, she’s kinda right. I realize that, without necessarily trying to, I’ve acquired a far-flung web of acquaintances and friends - mostly by having the good fortune to both be in the right place at the right time and to have met people (and, oddly enough, places) that have that schmooze-king ability in orders of magnitude greater than my own. Twid, TonyD, Toast, and Liralen (to a lesser extent). RPGBBS, alt.callahans, alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo, SouCon, GenCon, Aether. These people and places have been, in addition to all other things, doors into wider worlds of people, places, and things that I likely wouldn’t have found otherwise. Now, they overlap - and I’ve long lost track of who it was who introduced me to certain people, since there are so many possible approaches.
So, yeah, I guess I do know all kinds of impressive people - which is kinda neat. Makes you feel odd when you hear someone else idolizing a guy you were making fun of and drinking beer with the other night. On the other hand, it means I have to kinda watch myself so as not to sound like a name-dropping jerk when I mention meeting up for beers with so-and-so, or playing paintball with those guys, or exchanging email with whatsisname.
Then again, it’s nice to have ammo to outgun other name-dropping jerks. Heh.
Posted by jim at July 27, 2001 09:45 AM