The fulcrum of this geek teeter-totter was his weekly
outing with the folk-dance troupe, his one social
outlet that guaranteed at least a modicum of
interaction with the opposite sex. Near the end of that
first year at MIT, however, disaster struck. A knee
injury forced Stallman to drop out of the troupe. At
first, Stallman viewed the injury as a temporary
problem, devoting the spare time he would have spent
dancing to working at the AI Lab even more. By the end
of the summer, when the knee still ached and classes
reconvened, Stallman began to worry. "My knee wasn't
getting any better," Stallman recalls, "which meant I
had to stop dancing completely. I was heartbroken."
With no dorm and no dancing, Stallman's social universe
imploded. Like an astronaut experiencing the
aftereffects of zero-gravity, Stallman found that his
ability to interact with nonhackers, especially female
nonhackers, had atrophied significantly. After 16 weeks
in the AI Lab, the self confidence he'd been quietly
accumulating during his 4 years at Harvard was
virtually gone.
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