I am a Geek

Most of you are now saying something along the lines of, “Well…duh…”  I am, if nothing else, proud of my geekery.  I know things like the fact that today is Neil Gaiman’s birthday and screw up on the dates of a good friend’s birthday even though my friend makes me smile more often than not.  I love crime shows, anime, science fiction.  I adore fantasy, Christmas movies, and toys.  I listen to every kind of music except country and yodelling (I really do think they’re somewhat related).  Among my adoration for rock, hip hop, and rap, I even have a peculiar love for spoofs and unique sounds like dubstep violin or Native American flute songs.  Comic books, superheroes, and Sherlock Holmes win my vote for Totally Awesome Things.  Robin Hood, the Doctor, and all things Aurthurian will steal my attention and turn it to fiction and then inward in a way very few things real to life can.  Assassins, Gypsies, and thieves…I love them all.  They make me squee.  There is something in me that is drawn to characters who are out of the ordinary, half one thing and half another, making them never any one thing at all.  It’s why my characters are never one thing.  I am a divided person and always have been.  I am okay with that in a way that non-geeks cannot be.  I don’t want to fit in.  I don’t want to be the same as everyone else.  I’m good being different and having an inner-life that few can understand fully.  I put my thoughts on paper and the thoughts of my characters because that’s what life is for me: a story.
 
I adore stories.  The stories we tell ourselves, the ones written by others, the ones represented on a screen or a stage.  For stories, my geekery knows no bounds.  I have done NaNoWriMo since it began and now I’ve dragged our impressionable youth into my madness.  I started playing games when 8-bit was “so totally rad” and computer games were green and black and ONLY available at my school (because the only way to afford a personal computer was to have it donated to an educational institution).  I grew up in the tech boom economy of Seattle and grew into adolescence with the Grunge scene.  Shakespeare makes me clap and smile (though I really would LOVE to slap Romeo) and being someone else for just a little bit while acting is a lot like writing for me.  I drop into someone else’s mind, figure out what makes them tick and then show it in whichever medium works best.

I excel at picking apart movies, books, problems, and people.  I flip the pieces over in my mind, tinker with them, and figure out how to make them work brilliantly, wonderfully, and sometimes just the same as they had before I took them apart.  I like to puzzle things.  Or rather, I really have no choice.  The world is an endless puzzle.  It’s why puzzles with pieces done on a table start to bore me about 20 minutes in.  It’s a flat puzzle with only one answer.  In life, there are infinite possibilities and answers go flitting about willy nilly and make you dance and jump and cavort to find them, reach them, make them work for you.  In writing, just like in life, the possibilities are endless and the wonder can only be defined within your own mind.

Someone asked me once what it was like to be in my mind.  He thought that I was “crazy smart” and that, apparently, made me scary.  It’s not that I’m crazy smart though.  It’s that I observe anything and everything.  I’m good at retaining odd little details no one else cares about.  I remember that one character lurking in the back corner of the the tavern that no one else reading a book notices and I instantly piece together from his existence that he must be a bit of a shady character and possibly our big bad.  Twenty minutes in, I can tell how a movie is going to end because I know how a writer thinks.  The thing that’s different about me from your average person is that these things bring me joy.  I love watching how they get from Point A to Point Z.  Movies are about the ride, not the ending.  Life is the same way.

I’m also someone who gets as excited as a four-year old about to go to a birthday party where they will get to ride a pony or an elephant or some other really rather nifty animal.  I get excited about stupid things like an Ood dancing or a TARDIS cookie jar.  The fact that Sherlock Holmes’ rapid pace sometimes mean slowing down makes me smile and the fact that I have to explain his thought process to my friends when he says something at high speed and they can’t trace the sentence sometimes makes me blink.  My ADD means that I move quickly from place to place in my head and within a story.  It also means that when I’m focused I can keep up with anything and it’s not a question of losing focus, at that point, it’s not possible.  If one of my interests comes up, my focus is laserlike.  The fact that I can then remember these things shouldn’t be surprising.  The fact that I remember lots of things shouldn’t be surprising.  I am a geek because I love so many different topics to such a degree that I’m a bit of a nut about them.  I can remember your life story, the lyrics of a song, or the sound of a penguin laughing that one time you showed me a video about it.  I, most likely, won’t remember your first and last names unless it’s important for some reason and I may or may not remember what colour tie you are wearing unless I look at it and think, “Wow, that’s a really brilliant tie!”  The things that a normal person relates to, remembers, and can expound upon aren’t my cup of tea typically.  Am I able to talk about them?  Sure.  I can talk about anything.  I’m not anti-social.  It’s not like I don’t know them.  I do.  It’s really more along the lines of they don’t make me so excited I’m practically jumping out of my skin.

The funny thing is, my geekery is well-hidden until you get to know me.  I have my own style and none of it is overtly geeky (well, except for my cute owl earrings perhaps).  I can talk about football, politics, and religion.  If you hit upon the right team, I can even wax poetical about any number of sports.  Sometimes, I even enjoy doing so provided it’s not an argument and it’s really all in good fun or intellectual curiosity.  Most of the time though, if I find a like-minded soul,  the things that light me up and make me want to dance aren’t your everyday topics.  So, yes.  I am a Geek.  And a darn proud one at that.  Welcome to my brain.