And before that...

You know, it does not take much to make me completely lose confidence in my ability to do my work at work. Today my team had a meeting for the first time in like a month, and it just seemed like everything agenda point that came up somehow ended with me in the hot seat. And it's so fucking intimidating sitting there talking to all of these ultracomputery men that no doubt look at me and my little pigtails and think all sorts of horrible things about the reason i might have been hired. I'm not sayin, i'm just sayin. There's this one in particular, i rarely deal with him but when i do, i always feel so horrifically stupid and inadequate, but the fucked up thing is i think he's rad. I look up to him even though he's so short with me cause I want to know everything he knows. Today i made him laugh hard in the meeting (with me not at me) and i swear to god it was this sweet internal victory, i was practically shaking. And the thing is, in general, i'm pretty self-satisfied with the fact that I have like no official computer education, that i didn't even get online until 1995 and used only macs until late in 1996, and here I am with the word "engineer" in my title and my fancy SGI. Like, 90% of the time i walk around patting myself on the back for having picked everything up on my own and worked my way into this tech world and these tech positions with my stupid writing degree... and then someone like this guy walks into a room and 1) never says anything that's not totally relevant, correct, and lots of times something that no one had thought of 2) makes huge contributions to areas he's not even supposed to know anything about 3) KNOWS EVERYTHING. you know, granted, he's probably 40 something, probably worked at AOL since the mid-80s, and is probably just neurologically gifted in a way I can't really ever achieve, but god. It's enough to make a girl pout. Fucker. And yet, hero. Oy.