On a couple’s wedding reception website is a link to a post I recently wrote about touristy things to do in Seattle. This is an amusing surprise—on the same page as the wedding announcement and suggested hotel accommodations is a a reference to intueri.

To be fair, this event isn’t totally random—I met the couple this past winter during their holiday in Seattle. The rendezvous occurred as a result of an offhand comment I left on his weblog and, a few weeks later, I met the author, the well-mannered Brock, and his charming wife, on the other side of Lake Washington.

I feel both anxious and excited before meeting bloggers/readers—I’m never sure what to expect. As we read what the author writes, our imaginations create physical appearances, speech characteristics, and mannerisms to accompany the text. In my experience, these are usually wholly inaccurate. I also wonder what we will talk about—I worry that the conversation will dwindle into monosyllabic utterances:

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“How are you?”

“Fine. You?”

“Same.”

“Great.”

—though this has never happened—on the contrary, conversation flows smoothly, I enjoy the time we spend together, and I appreciate and value the new social connection. (However, an extroverted introvert is still an introvert!)

The tastefully-dressed Brock and his intelligent wife had mentioned that they shielded my identity from their families and joked that they felt excitement about our meeting because “it’s kinda like meeting a celebrity”. I laughed out of self-consciousness: Celebrities don’t sit alone in front of their computers at night and type out stories—though I’ll accept the compliment. Perhaps intueri shall soon appear on computer monitors in movies, across billboards, and on the covers of magazines. Maybe a singer will find a clever rhyme for “intueri” (which, incidentally, was never meant to be said) and mobs of teenagers will redesign their MySpace page to emulate this site. I suppose that also means that, in an effort to assert and maintain my celebrity, I would require a MySpace page, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a Flickr account, and whatever Web 2.0 application du jour.

Ahem.

In addition to Brock and his wife, I’ve met

• Terry (long, long time reader, but not a blogger)
• Yasmine (at Sweep the Sunshine)
• Justin (at Insolvent Republic of Blogistan)
• Nick (at Blogborygmi)
• Jesse (at Random Stuff)
• Hypokitten (at Mediblogopathy)
• Bardiac (at Bardiac)

(Hello, everyone!)

In addition to partaking in their good company and thoughtful and interesting discussion, I joined each of them to (in shuffled order):

• eat breakfast at a restaurant overlooking Elliott Bay
• share multiple pots of tea, including one that tasted like chicken soup
• chat in an empty hospital hallway
• go to the top of the Empire State Building
• eat Thai food in a house tucked away in the woods
• have drinks at a “baroque bar”
• drink overly caffeinated beverages
• nibble on Eastern European pastries

They were all gracious people. They were the kinds of interactions that bolster your faith in your fellow man—people are neat. They have meaningful things to say and they view the world in unique and wonderful ways.

I never intended intueri to become a social networking tool (hence the result that I have only met seven people “in person” despite maintaining the blog for nearly seven years), though this is certainly one possible application. With the recent brouhaha over physician bloggers, anonymity, malpractice, etc. etc. etc., meeting readers seems like another option to promote transparency and accountability—sometimes it is difficult to remember that the words on the screen are coming from a genuine human being. When one writes primarily for oneself (whatever that actually means), though, how much transparency and accountability is necessary?

That being said, I have little idea who actually reads intueri. Which is why it is disconcerting when I meet readers who make remarks about something I wrote that I don’t even remember writing.

(Part of the ongoing Relationship Series.)