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The world is packed with nerds and obsessives. Recently, at the tram museum here in Baltimore (I was only there because my daughter was attending a birthday party), I found myself going up and down some tracks, in a tram which was packed with screaming five year olds on a sugar high, as well as a fifty year old man, wearing a bobble hat with a camera slung over his shoulder. While beaming at me in a slightly sinister fashion, the man leaned over and informed me that he loved to come here on a regular basis to ride this perfectly restored nineteen fifties tram. After a brief cross-questioning of which trams I had experience of, the self-confessed train fanatic told me he was deeply jealous that I had rode on a Viennese tram, in his opinion one of the most beautiful trams in existence (or so he had heard). He also told me of a recent holiday he'd made to London where he'd taken 2,000 photos of the Underground network. I said, "You mean you actually took photos inside the tunnels?"

"Oh yeah, it was amazing," he replied, opening his back pack and pulling out a photo album. "It was an absolutely brilliant holiday. I've got some of the photos here, if you'd like to see them." Mercifully, at this point, the tram ride ended and I was spared from having to look at the tunnel photos, although now I wish I had, just to see whether they were simply pitch black. But my point is this. Yesterday, before I went to my first Baltimore Bloggers Happy Hour, I was afraid, very afraid, that it would be wall to wall nerds clutching photo albums full of train tunnels. Because that - perhaps unjustly - is the common stereotype of the blogger.

Mercifully, the people at this blogging thing were all pretty normal and fun. Beyond that, I cannot tell you what exactly went down. All I can say is that I learnt some things that in any other circumstances I would blog about. But only a masochist would blog about bloggers. It is ironic, that you cannot blog about fellow bloggers or you might find yourself blogged about, quite possibly in a negative context.

Ah, feel my pain. Here I am, my memory throbbing with anecdotes, but my hands are tied. The syndrome I am currently feeling can probably best be compared to the blue balls syndrome in the male (for those of you not familiar with this term, it refers to the testicular aching that occurs when the blood filling the vessels in a male's genital area during sexual arousal is not dissipated by orgasm).

Pity me, dear friends, sitting here with my blue balls, my fingers frozen over the keyboard.



Don't hate me because I'm beautiful!