I've never written a daylog before, so forgive me in advance if this is either not the appropriate space for the following thoughts or if they are too lengthy.

It's been almost exactly two years since my break-up with my first girlfriend. It ended in about the same way it began, 6 months earlier. Very, very strangely. Two and a half years ago, I was at a very odd point in my life, confused and depressed. Being an army brat (or in this case, Coast Guard), I had moved to a different part of the country every 2 or 3 years, and so I never really made friends, and had never really been managed to talk to girls. However, I had met someone at my high school (which I despised, the school that is) that I liked, but I wasn't really sure how to approach her.

After giving the matter considerable time to sort itself out inside of me, it failed to do so, and so I turned to angst. I am not, for the record, an outgoing person. I am the person in the dark corner who everyone ignores, and who you'd swear doesn't even have a tongue, because you've never heard him talk. So, with considerable hamfisting, I finally managed to tell her, over AIM, that "I loved her." This was probably the worst possible thing I could have done. I didn't have the slightest fucking clue what love was. Up until that point, she had been reasonably good friends, and by that, I mean that she talked to me from time to time. She never said two words when one would do, after that incident.

This caused a lot of depression on my part, and my thoughts strayed to suicide. I had no idea what to do, and my parents, completely oblivious to it all, were no help. So at the winter play for my school, where I was the lighting technician, I was sitting backstage one day, wishing that someone would talk to me, but too bitter and afraid to talk to anyone on my own. A girl who I didn't really know, didn't want to know, came over and talked to me for a little bit. Jessica. This began a strange relationship that her parents refused to admit existed (because they were fascist overlords of her life and hated me) and that my parents didn't know was happening.

Over the course of the next 6 months, we had one of the strangest relationships ever, and I can say this with confidence, despite never having had a relationship before or after that. We never went on a date alone, as her mother followed us everywhere. About the only place we ever had alone was the school library, because the librarian was out on maternity leave. During that time, our relationship quickly lost any semblance of being anything other than "friends with benefits" only without the "friends" part. We were people who knew each other who, for an hour or so a day, would hide out in one of the upper rooms of the library and make out. We barely knew each other, each of us hated what the other liked.

So, it wasn't much of a suprise that 6 months after it began, she informed me that she had been "cheating" on me. I didn't give a flying fuck, as she was leaving for college, and I was entering my senior year of high school and learning more about computers than I had ever known existed.

Flash forward to the present. I still haven't had a girlfriend since then, and have only had one female friend, who lives a thousand miles away and I know mostly online. Two weeks ago, I started work at the OSC (a Coast Guard computer center) as a college intern. I love my job, I spend all day long playing with expensive computers as a system administrator and network security administrator. So, as part of the SA portion of my job, when a new intern needed a computer, I went to deliver it. This is where I met Melanie, a girl who shattered every view that I ever had held about girls.

She is smart, more so than anyone I've ever met. While I was setting up her computer, putting it on the network, configuring it for her use, we talked. For once in my life, I was not nervous when talking to a girl, I did not stutter, I did not make an ass of myself and then become bitter and leave. Without realizing it, I started talking about computers, only to learn that she was a Compsci major, loved computers, had overclocked her computers at home, and so much more. My jaw must have dropped at that point.

Over the following two weeks, we've become friends, spending hours upon hours a day talking to each other, both over IM and in person, and I've attempted to flirt with her (with the guidance of the aforementioned female friend), and she's caught on and (given the fact that she isn't running away from me) accepted it.

However, now I am once again reduced to angst. I like this girl, a lot. I know far too little to say love, nor would I if I did. The problem is that I have reverted to being afraid. In my first relationship, there was no gradual dating process or anything like that. One day, out of the blue, it happened. Now that I'm attempting to woo her, I no longer know what to do. I don't want to be seen as obsessing over her (something that my best friend and college roommate jokes with me considerably about), but I want to convey to her the fact that I would like to date her, and that my interest in her is far more than just her looks, but her mind as well.

Apologies for the above ranting, but I needed a place to write this out, and perhaps gain feedback.