The results are in, and I quote: Unfortunately, you did not have any matches this time at speeddating. Hopefully you will be interested in attending future events. Your Original Asheville Speeddating Team
Damn. And I could have been SO much meaner yesterday! I was nice! I erred on the side of being relatively pleasant and look where it gets me - not a single date from . . um. . okay, a group of guys I was not interested in dating either. Still. It feels like rejection anyway and I momentarily got all verklampt and depressed. Momentarily would be the key word here, though, because at home, as you see, I have the lovely results of my brief foray into the ten cent sale at the library. Warning: Danger, not-WillRobinson, Danger. I am about to get totally nerdy here. And I do mean nerdy.
In this wonderful pile of mostly crummy escapist fiction from the seventies and eighties (man, I do love used books. I love the randomness factor and I love searching the shelves and I love the way the books change over the years so that while 10 years ago you would find, like, 20 copies of Dove, nowadays you often find stuff like Bonfire of the Vanities or the latest Sidney Sheldon magnum opus.) So, what did I find in the treasure heap of mostly 80s paperbacks that was the library book sale? Thieves World! Yes, Thieves World! Book 7, to be specific.
Back in the early 80s, while outwardly I was a freaky teenager with long hair, a dangerously devil may care attitude and too many evil friends, inwardly I was a complete and total nerd. (This is where my old friends chime in to tell me that I was an outer nerd too. Okay, they have a point. Leave me my delusions, alright?) Not only was I a Star Trek watching, Dungeons and Dragons playing, SCA meeting attending (only once, I swear. Once.) nerd, I was a fantasy & SF reading nerd. Anything I could find (some things have just not changed) and somewhere in those years, I discovered Thieves World, a place where I was happy. Thieves World is a noir, dystopic medievalish city that essentially makes no sense, populated with mostly stock characters who still made the occasional leap into good or at least interesting writing, combined with outrageous plots that kept me at the edge of my seat. I ate them like candy. I had pretty much forgotten all about it over the last, uh, 20 odd years until I saw that battered cover with an embarrassingly sinewy thewed whatever with a sword on it and my heart leaped. I read it yesterday and it was AWESOME - full of names I knew oh so well but that I would never have known that I knew. (Got that?) Also, the stories were pretty damn good, although, okay, it gets a bit complicated what with gods fucking mortals and undead fighting each other and some characters who are dead and some who aren't and wait, where's the cute thief I was in love with at age 18? Now I have to find and rediscover all the other books and I foresee some happy hunting in my future. It's good to have a quest, particularly for books, because books at least are possible, whereas love is apparently not. The hell with you, speed dating.
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