A game of Star Wars Trivial Pursuit. I am facing three opponents, each of whom know I know the trilogy very well. We’ve alterred the rules slightly:
I must play two pieces, and complete two pies. Upon enterring the center to complete a pie, I must answer all 6 questions on one card correctly. To win, I must complete both pies before anyone else completes one.
I won the game on my first turn.
I did not answer a single question incorrectly
It was like some ancient tribal ritual which must be completed to be recognized a man. From that momen forward, I was truly a geek.
(I seem to recall a rule that if a player does win on the first turn in that fashion, each other player gets the opportunity to match that task. Of course, they may have flubbed a question regarding the bounty hunter that Han ran into on Ord Mantell…)
I refuse to admit that I am a geek. I am not a geek. I read trashy science fiction and fantasy and have an unhealthy knowledge of traditionally geek-centric matters, but I am not a geek.
I say that I am not a geek before I have as yet refused to compile a kernel.
I’ve set that as an arbitrary goal. Though I may rattle off the specs on Chewbacca’s bowcaster, and watch the Simpsons, and have a degree that is completely useless in the modern world but rather useful in Geektopia, and play EverQuest, and even give my computers names, I AM NOT A GEEK.
In ninth grade I became acutely aware that I was the only person reading the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Doctor Who books at lunch. Still, I soldiered on. By tenth grade I got fed up and decided to try to shed my geekiness. I did everything I could think of to not be a geek, at least in public. And then I discovered the awful truth that there’s no one geekier than a geek pretending he’s not one. Lord, it was a painful sight, I imagine.
So I quit trying to fight it. I went ahead and embraced my geekness. I told the world, “I’m here, I’m geek, get over it!”
(Seriously, I do think of it as coming out of my geek closet. I don’t know, I’m not gay, but I imagine the two are at least slightly similar.) And suddenly it’s like it didn’t seem to be a big deal as much. By coming out and embracing it, I sort of transcended it.
So now I sit at work, with my robot toy on my computer, wearing my caffeine molecule t-shirt from ThinkGeek, listening to the Empire Strikes Back soundtrack without a care about who might come in and what they might think about how geeky I am.
I knew I was a geek the moment I met another geek. It was Junior High. All my friends had always been the other social outcasts, with whom I’d had very little in common, other than outcast status. But then I met someone who shared some of the same interests, and, most importantly, a similar perspective. Suddenly I realized I wasn’t a loser, a reject, a retard, a kiss-up, a teacher’s pet, or any of the other labels that had been slapped on me. I was a person who had a different way of looking at the world, and there were other people like me.
I think a better question would be “when did you start revelling in being a geek?” I mean, I’ve always known I was a geek in much the same way I’ve always known I had a wee-wee. However, I didn’t start revelling in geekhood until sometime after I graduated from college (at about the same time that I realized how truly LAME traditionally “cool” activities are).
My epiphany came at, of all places, a DopeFest. It was my first meeting with Geobabe, and she was bemoaning the fact that her life revolved around rocks. Suddenly, she said, “I realize it now…Oh, my God, I’m a geek!”
That set me thinking. I can converse for hours about termite and pest control. I honestly find termites and other social insects fascinating. And I love trying to outsmart mice.
I’ve pretty much known it for a while now. My hubby is one, too.
However, it really whacked us in the face the other night. We were sitting in the living room; me on the couch and hubby in the rocking chair. We each had our laptops up and running on our laps, while watching Star Trek on TV.
Got a job as a computer operator. (Yes, there were computers back in the olden days - we used them to do the dinosaur census.) Learned to program in ALGOL. I was afraid that if they found out how much fun I was having they’d quit paying me. I’m not sure that “geek” was even a word then, but I sure was and still am one.
When, to kill boredom in elementary school, I taught myself to speak backwards and in alphabetical order.
About five years later, I was watching The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and there was a man on the show whose talent was doing exactly that. He actually said, “I hope I’m not the only geek in the world who can do this.”
In eighth grade when I became annoyed my English teacher’s lack of grammar skills. It wasn’t until ninth grade that I started getting really annoyed, and same now here in tenth grade.
I finally realized I am a real geek when I noticed grammar mistakes in our school newspaper and actually tell the teacher in charge about them.
I love my geekiness. I knew I was a geek from the early days, when I was the only one in my class who was reading Freud instead of magazines. I have always been ahead of the others in my age cohort to the extent that I really didn’t have ‘peers’ (people my own age I don’t have to speak slowly to) until I hit high school.
That said, my geekiness hits me in the face every so often. Example: I have quite a few video games, none of them particularly new or advanced. Most of them first-person-shooters or Maxis simulation games (schizophrenic? naah… :D). I was in the electronics section in the local K-Mart, pondering whether to buy a relatively new game, and I couldn’t justify the purchase to myself. I realized I spend more time programming Perl than playing video games. I probably spend more time typing commands into a shell than I do looking at computer-generated graphics.
I was also somewhat disappointed when I realized that an object-oriented conlang would be impossible.
I’m not sure I was bemoaning it, exactly. Ever since I forst took a geology class, way back in community college, I was hooked. I love rocks. Perhaps it was just at that moment that the depth of my geekosity dawned on me, but I’ve never been sorry for it.
I recall when Strainger was in DC last spring, I showed him around the National Museum of Natural History’s geology hall drool and then he wanted to go see the American History Museum…we went there, and as we were coming out, I stopped dead on the front steps of the museum, pointed down and said, “Look, stylolites!”
