Talk Nerdy To Me: It’s Not The Distance, It’s The Time

It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these columns, and it was the end of last year when I actually wrote an entry that wasn’t a segue into my current beauty/fashion column. There’s a reason for that. So, why randomly choose to preempt Beauty and The Geek and write something for this column? There is a reason for that as well.

Actually, there is one reason for both of these things; that reason is Dan — you know, our lead staff writer here at Geek Life.

I’ve known Dan for a little under a year now as he’s been writing for the site since the get-go, or thereabouts. While we’ve had our share of email conversations, they’ve been primarily “business” related, with a few asides here and there. It’s a weird and wonderful experience getting to know a person primarily through their writing rather than mainly through talking to them, which is really what I did. I think the first thing that Dan wrote for the site was a review of the movie “Splice,” which I would have never deemed worthy of watching until reading his review. The rest is, as they say, history.

I think I decided I was interested in Dan in a more-than-friendly manner around January, which is the reason I stopped actively dating. Mind you, despite the fact that I am a person who gets asked out a lot, I’ve never really been good at initiating things with guys. So, of course, my telling him that he should send me his evil mirror-verse twin, that I would like to build a robot of him, or that I would like to clone him so I could have a Dan of my own didn’t quite go as planned (Listen, I told you I was bad at this making the first move thing). Eventually, we did start talking a lot, and we decided to give the whole relationship thing a try.

Three days before he moved to Korea.

So, yeah, 6,000 miles and some change. The distance doesn’t bother me as much as I thought it would. Okay, that’s a lie. It kind of sucks. I would rather be a lot closer to Dan than a lot further, but at least we get to talk every day. That’s kind of the part that sucks the most — no, not getting to talk to Dan every day, but the amount of time that I get to talk to him. There’s a 16 hour difference between where I am and where Dan is (in the future), which means that the window of time in which we are both awake and not working/busy on most weekdays is around, oh, an hour.

Which totally and utterly blows.

How are you supposed to cram a day’s worth of conversation into an hour? I think we’ve managed fairly well thus far, given the circumstances, but it’s still frustrating. In a lot of ways, it makes me realize how much we take technology for granted; it’s something that’s so integrated into our lives that we don’t even think about it — but when it’s unable to help you communicate, it’s something that almost makes you feel lost. I’m always updating Facebook and leaving people comments/having discussions. If I’m bored, I have conversations via Twitter. My best friend messages me every day via Gmail chat to talk about nothing in particular; I talk to my coworkers via IM to make communication easier and more efficient. I make a lot of plans via text message; and I have plenty of email conversations with people. So, when you’re inundated with the buzz of social media white noise, but the only voice you really want to hear is quiet, it’s a silence that’s deafeningly loud. That hour I have with Dan makes the other 15 hours of the day that I’m awake extremely long.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t want to sound ungrateful. Every minute that we have together, as fleeting as they may be, is wonderful. It’s the time that we don’t have that’s rough.

About Tiarra

Tiarra Wantz is a comic book and sci-fi geek girl who enjoys reading, playing video games, creating typography art, and comparing everything to “that one episode of TNG where…” Tiarra lives in Las Vegas with the love of her life, Dan, where they live together with two cuddly kittens named Panda Face and Ser Pounce-a-lot and a precocious pup named Pippin.

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