Cyrano de BOTgerac

© 2024 by the author using the pen name UpperNorthLeft.

All sexual activity is between adults 18 years of age or older.

* * *

Chapter 1 -- June

Take me now, lord. End this week of misery and let me find peace.

I wasn't actually suicidal -- I was just in the last session of the last day of a week-long medical informatics conference. Five days of talk after mind-numbing talk had diminished my will to live. As the moderator introduced the final speaker, I could feel the Dementors swirling around the ceiling, gathering to suck away my remaining life force.

I briefly glanced up at the podium from my iPad, and the Dementors vanished abruptly. A lovely blond woman bent to adjust the microphone, and then stood up straight for a moment. She gazed around the room at the audience with a smile that seemed to say, 'We're going to have some fun now!'

"Good afternoon. I'm Roxanne Robinson, from Boston. I realize that I am the only thing standing between you and your escape from Chicago. Thanks for sticking around to the end of this session. I'll do my best to make it worth your while."

She launched into a fascinating 15 minute précis of her AI research. Her project was well-conceived, innovative and fairly congruent with my own research interests. She was eloquent and funny. Her insights were penetrating. I was simultaneously dazzled and intimidated by her sheer intelligence.

She had also solved some of the problems that bedeviled my own research, so I desperately wanted to ask her a few questions. However, my mouth went dry at the thought of actually speaking with her. My innate shyness around women coupled with her physical beauty made my stomach clench.

However, by the time she finished her talk, I had written down several questions to ask her. She stepped off the stage, and walked over to her seat and started gathering up her things. I took several deep breaths as I walked over, screwing up my courage to speak to her. Just as I was about to open my mouth, some asshole cut in front of me and said, "Hey, nice presentation. Let's grab a drink and talk about your research."

She shook her head. "Sorry, but I'm heading for the airport. I have an Uber waiting outside." She clipped her computer bag to her suitcase and then rolled it down the aisle to the exit.

The asshole and I followed her out with our eyes. He said, "Wow, nice ass! Wouldn't mind tapping that." He smirked, and then walked away. I ground my teeth, and mentally kicked myself for not speaking to her sooner.

Just as I was leaving, I noticed an iPad lying on the table where she had been sitting. Oh, crap! She must have left this behind! I grabbed it and hurried out the door. I didn't see her in the hallway, so I headed for the nearest street exit. Just as I stepped out the door, I saw her in the back seat of a car pulling away.

Grrr... I just missed her! I tucked her iPad into my shoulder bag, and grabbed a ride back to my hotel. After checking out, I hopped a cab to O'Hare. As the traffic oozed its way out of town, I spent my time googling 'Roxanne Robinson'. There were quite a few of them. Adding 'Boston' and 'Harvard' and 'informatics' to the search parameters left me with a single result. The faculty directory listed an email address. Aha!

I took a selfie of me with her iPad and added it to a short email.

Hi, I'm Chris Newton, informatics @ Univ Washington. Did u leave ur iPad @ conference today? I have it. U still at O'Hare?

I sent that and my contact info just as my cab pulled into Terminal 3 Departures. After going through TSA, I stopped at Tortas Frontera at Concourse K to grab a bite before my flight. As I munched away, my phone buzzed. A text from Roxanne!

> Yes! That's mine. Tnx for letting me know. I just took off for Boston.

I quickly typed back:

> Boarding my flight in 20 min. Happy to Fedex it to u from Seattle.

After she sent me her work address, I texted:

> Enjoyed ur talk. OK to ask a few questions?

> K

> Which transformer library did u use with ur PyTorch code?

I boarded my flight to Seattle, and we continued texting between our planes as we flew home. It was the most fun I had had all year. It was also one of the longest conversations I had ever had with any woman that wasn't my mom.

I should probably expand on that last statement a bit. I wasn't always an introverted geek. My boy/girl interactions were developing nicely until around age 12. My family was living in South America, where my dad was working for the U.S. government. After 8 years there, he had earned enough money to buy some ranch land in the Texas Hill Country. For my parents, moving back to Texas was heaven on earth. For me, not so much. Moving from a city of a million at 8600 feet up in the Andes to a town of barely two thousand was quite a jolt. Moving from a private school filled with the kids of diplomats and expats to a tiny school filled with the kids of ranchers was massive culture shock. I grew up playing soccer in South America, and had absolutely no American football skills. In rural West Texas, I was that particular type of weirdo who not only didn't play football but who was also in the high school band.

Maybe my life would have been easier if puberty had not picked that moment to hit me like a cluster bomb. Navigating the subsequent hurricane of hormones made for a bumpy flight through my teen years. It turns out that other teenagers can smell fear, and they had big fun teasing me. My growth spurt didn't kick in until my senior year, so I was easy fodder for some of the football players, who thought it was hilarious to shove me into my own locker. The teenage girls were just as bad. Their favorite pastime was for one of them to sneak up on me and start kissing me, while the other girls laughed at my discomfort. The few dates I did have in high school and college were not great confidence builders. Medical school and residency training were mostly monastic experiences for me.

So, for me, holding a two hour conversation of any kind with a woman was an extraordinary event. The fact that she was also intelligent and attractive was beyond belief. I couldn't have pulled this off in person. Texting was just within my comfort level, especially since we stuck to technical geek speak. It also helped that our research interests were so congruent. We were both passionately interested in the uneasy intersection between AI and clinical medicine. As long as we stuck to medical applications of Python and PyTorch, I was fine.

* * *

Chapter 2 -- July

After a week in the June heat of Chicago, it was good to return to the cool mists of Seattle. The next day, I swaddled Roxanne's iPad in bubblewrap, and dropped it off at the nearest Fedex office. A few days later, I got a cheery text from her.

> My baby just arrived! :) U R awesome!!

> U R welcome!

> Coming to AIMS. Dinner is on me!

> Deal!

This exchange made me simultaneously delighted and depressed. The Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Society was meeting in Seattle in September. I would have been wiling to donate a major organ to spend time with Roxanne. Fortunately, that wasn't going to be necessary.

What depressed me was that my paper had been accepted for one of the AIMS scientific sessions. I hated public speaking. Jerry Seinfeld once said, "Peoples' number 1 fear is public speaking. Number 2 is death. That means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than doing the eulogy." Testify, brother, testify.

I really wasn't looking forward to the thought of failing miserably in front of Roxanne. To make things worse, she had totally nailed her presentation in Chicago. By comparison with her, I was going to suck beyond all recognition. And after sucking, I would have to sit through a dinner with her, trying desperately to make conversation and not sound like an utter moron. Oh boy.

* * *

Seattle has the reputation of being overcast and rainy all the time. This rep is usually well-earned during our otherwise mild winters. However, the summers are GLORIOUS. The sun doesn't set til after 9 pm, and the temperature rarely gets above 80 degrees F. A local joke is that Seattle is so wealthy that it can afford to air condition the whole outdoors. This makes it very pleasant to exercise outdoors during the summer. Most summer days after work, I would go running the 3.6 mile course around Green Lake.

Exercise has always helped me deal with anxiety. With my upcoming AIMS talk hanging over my head, I headed for Green Lake. A good, hard run helps to drown out any chaotic thoughts bubbling through my brain. Having a few extra endorphins on board doesn't hurt either. I left my house and headed a few blocks south to Green Lake Park. A few laps around the lake seemed like just the thing to me.

I was just finishing my first lap around the north end of the lake when I heard music playing. As I drew near the wading pool, I saw a group of fiddlers and other instruments sitting in the shade. Someone on a portable PA system was asking for one more dancer for a contradance. As I drew closer, a young woman ran up to me and asked, "Will you please dance with me?"

"Um, no thanks."

"Oh, please! We just need one more person. Please don't make me sit this one out."

"Uhh... uhh... I don't know how to dance!"

"No problem, if you can walk, you can do this kind of dancing. I'll help you."

When you are tongue-tied around women, you think that your main problem is asking them to do something with you. It had not occurred to me that it also made it hard to turn them down when they wanted something from you. She ignored my stammering, and pulled me into a long line of dancers.

She was right. It was a really simple dance, with a pattern that repeated every 30 seconds or so. Half of the dance consisted of her pulling me in close and swinging me around and around. The remainder involved me swinging some other woman, and then being sent on to a new couple. After about 8 minutes the music stopped. She gave me a big hug and thanked me for the dance.

Wow! In the past 8 minutes, I had had more nice-looking women closely pressed up against me than in all of my previous life. Also, I really didn't have to say much to them. When I calculated the ratio of women in my arms to words spoken, it was about 50 to 1! By that metric, it sure beat anything else I'd ever tried before. As I stood there agog, pondering this, another woman asked me to dance. This time I just nodded, and we were off to the races again for another 8 minutes. I ended up dancing for the rest of the hour.

There was no need for me to say anything to a woman other than telling her my name, or briefly thanking her for the dance. As the musicians packed up their instruments, one of the women I'd danced with came up to me and handed me a flyer. "We'll have another outdoor dance here next month. But if you want to dance sooner than that, just look on the web for local contradances."

I thanked her, and jogged back to my house. I put the flyer on my fridge, had supper, and went to bed.

* * *

By now Roxanne and I were texting each other once or twice a week -- mostly on geeky AI topics. I enjoyed the back and forth, and found it productive. I told her about a dead end on one of my projects and her suggestion led to a fix. Likewise, I sent her a few lines of Python that solved a problem that was driving her mad. We then spent several weeks in an asynchronous brainstorming session on medical applications of AI. This resulted in material that we later used to write several AI papers together.

* * *

After my runs, I would usually amble past the shops and cafes along the northeast corner of the lake. I would grab something tasty for dinner and mosey back to my place. One evening, I meandered past a large window filled with swirling black and white shapes. The sign on the window said 'Sakura Aikido'. I peered inside, and saw women and men in white canvas gis going through a series of warmup exercises. As I watched, one of the women stopped and waved at me. I was surprised to recognize Sally Ueshiba, one of the radiographers from work. She came to the door and said, "Hi Chris! Want to watch our practice?" I had nothing better to do that evening, so I nodded and sat down on a bench inside.

After the warmups, Sally and another one of the black belts led the students through a series of techniques. The students worked in pairs, and took turns throwing each other onto the mat. The throws were cool, but I was more impressed by the grace with which the student being thrown interfaced with the mat. Where I would have gone 'splat' or 'crunch', their downward trajectory would smoothly morph into a forward or backward roll and they would immediately bounce back up on their feet. It was mesmerizing to watch. At the end of an hour, Sally clapped her hands, and everyone dropped to their knees on the mat and sat back on their heels facing a shrine at the head of the dojo. Everyone bowed to the shrine. Then she turned to the class and bowed to them. They bowed back. She clapped her hands again, and class was dismissed.

She said goodnight to her students, and then came over to me. "Nice to see you again! Let me change out of my gi, and we'll grab some coffee on the corner."

I nodded and sat back down on the bench. I had first met Sally about five years before when I was a radiology resident at UW. I had to do an emergency joint aspiration one night on call and Sally was the radiographer on call. The patient had advanced arthritis, making it hard to see where I was going, even with X-ray guidance. I apparently impressed Sally by successfully tapping that challenging joint on the first needle pass. She impressed me by her almost telepathic ability to hand me exactly the right syringe or the right needle at the right time without any verbal cues from me.

That initial respect grew as we worked together for the next few years. She was one of a handful of women at work with whom I had anything more than a superficial conversation. We'd been casual friends since then, but nothing romantic. Besides, if I ever did hit on Sally, her girlfriend would kick my ass, assuming that Sally had not already taken care of that.

"OK, I'm ready." I followed her out the door and down to a nearby indy coffee shop.

We sat down with our drinks and she said, "Congratulations on graduating from residency. What are you doing now?"

"I did a research fellowship in U. C. San Francisco last year. I just started a one-year informatics research fellowship here at UW. No clinical work and no call. I mostly write computer code for AI research and keep bankers' hours."

She smiled. "Sweet. You always were a geek."

I laughed. "Guilty. How about you? New side gig teaching aikido?"

"Yep, two nights a week. I passed my second degree black belt exam a few months ago, and Sensei asked me to take on more of the teaching. I'm still at UW, but only work day shifts now."

"Yeah, I don't miss night shifts."

"No shit. Especially since I was assaulted there last year."

"What!!?"

"Yeah, I guess you didn't hear about that while you were down at UCSF."

"No, I didn't. My god! Are you OK?"

"It was stressful at the time, but I'm OK now. I was on the late shift and business was slow that night. I was dozing in a chair in the break room when this asshole came up behind me and grabbed me by the neck."

"Oh shit!"

"Well, that's what he said about 10 seconds later. I pivoted and threw him over my hip onto the floor. Then, I grabbed the bokken that I was using to practice sword suburi on slow nights. I proceeded to beat the living crap out of him, and he ran out the door. Campus security and I chased him out of the hospital and halfway across the UW campus before he finally got away from us."

I tried hard to look concerned, but burst out laughing. She laughed too.

"Wow, I wish I could have seen that!" I paused. "But how did he get into your break room?"

She sighed. "It had never occurred to The Powers That Be that our staff needed a secure break room after hours. After that incident, you need a key card to get into our break room now. Progress."

"You amaze me -- I have never had that kind of courage. I've never been assaulted like you, but I did get stuffed in a few trashcans in high school. Hell, you could probably stuff me in a trashcan."

"Yeah, I could, and I'm only 5'2". You're about 7 or 8 inches taller than me, but that just means you have farther to fall. Your arms are longer than mine, but just gives me longer levers to use to throw you around."

"I could have really used some aikido skills back in high school."

"Might still come in handy on the mean streets of the UW Med Center."

I snorted at that.

She said, "We have an 8 week introductory course starting next Tuesday evening. Show up at 6 and we'll get you fitted out in a gi in time for the 7 pm class."

Why the hell not. "OK, I'll be there."

* * *

Chapter 3 -- August

Roxanne and I were now texting each other several times per week. As long as I stuck to AI stuff and Python code, I had no problems thinking of things to say. However, she was now starting to throw in more personal comments on things that were outside my comfort level. She sent me a few selfies of herself at the Boston Public Garden, and texted.

> Ur turn. Pls send pix of u.

Oh geez. I didn't have any pictures of me that weren't terminally lame.

> Will do next week.

> K. Looking forward to AIMS in Seattle.

> Me too.

> Never been to SEA. Show me the sights?

> Sure. What do u like?

> Local art museums? Otherwise, surprise me.

Crap. I know nothing about art. Let's see what she likes...

> Fave art museum @ BOS?

> Love the MFA -- especially musical instrument collection.

> You play?

> Flute and piano. You?

> Piano and trumpet as kid. Not lately.

OK, art museums and music. But what would she find surprising? I was out of my depth. About all I ever did is run Green Lake or take aikido classes. I needed a mentor, but couldn't think of anyone. Then it occurred to me that one of the online AI chatbots might have some ideas. I picked BabbleBOT, and asked it for 'activities to impress a girl'. It had a few suggestions:

1. Cook for her -- Nope, my cooking didn't even impress me.

2. Write her a letter or a poem -- That's a hard no. I was struggling to even write short texts to her. No no no.

3. Do a DIY craft project together -- Eek!

Since I was intimidated by the idea of talking to her in the first place, activities that required a lot of talking seemed counterproductive. I therefore decided to reframe the question as: 'activities to do on a date that don't require conversation'. BabbleBOT had a few more ideas. The couples massage sounded awesome, but seemed a bit presumptuous since we still hadn't even met in person. The next suggestion was a nature walk, which was actually an excellent idea. A sufficiently grueling hike would certainly preclude having to talk to her, but it would also probably preclude her ever seeing me again. Maybe if I dialed it down a bit so that we both had to save our breath for hiking -- maybe that would work.

* * *

As I left for aikido practice, the dance flyer on my fridge reminded me of the upcoming outdoor dance at Green Lake this Wednesday. Maybe Sally would like to try contradancing.