The Geek, an Introduction

I feel like I should take a moment to apologize for the lack of posting that's been going on here, but the majority of the bloggers here have been extremely busy with pre-spring break schoolwork and spontaneous parties and raves that we've decided are more fun than posting here every day. I can't promise we're all going to start posting again since I have no idea what the others' schedules are, but I'm going to attempt to keep up.

On to the background of the point of this post: recently I have been getting a lot of gifts (various holidays going by and such, not to mention delayed birthday parties since my family is too big to celebrate every single on individually). The best part of this is not necessarily the awesomeness of the gifts, but the realization that I have finally trained my family to understand geek gift giving. I now have two shirts with chem jokes, several music ones and a few general geek shirts that I find hilarious. I also have the first two seasons of The Big Bang Theory and two entire 2 x 1-foot boxes filled with books. The one I need to talk about today is the half-joking half-serious gift that I got yesterday: A Girl's Guide to Dating a Geek.

I must say that the general idea behind this book (as given by the title) is a great one. Geeky people have their own social laws to live by as opposed to the average "normal" person and it's good to be aware of them. If you're new to the geek community, it's probably smart to study up on it a bit unless you feel like learning it as you go along (which is not that painful really, but to each their own). If you're already a geek, either you know it or you can, in true geek fashion, study it before even bothering to attempt it. I'm sure there are plenty of geeks who have yet to have extensive contact with the outside world (or never will, but that's another story).

All in all, it's a sound topic to write a book about. However, the author did not do a good job at all, I'm sad to say. There are several assumptions they made in regards to the audience of their book and those who it is supposedly describing. First, they assume that the girl reading this is not a geek, has no intention of becoming one, thinks geeks are all socially unacceptable and still inexplicably aims to date one. Hopefully, you can find the flaws in this perspective without me having to point them out. Second, they assume that all geeks are or are seen as largely socially inept, unhygienic, inseparable from their computers (or at least from talking about computer-related things), addicted to caffeine, anti-religious, super-intelligent, have no fashion sense and have the ability to bore anyone within fifty paces in 5 seconds flat and not notice it. While some of this may be true in part, it certainly doesn't show the geek in a good light (which I think is extremely offensive and, overall, dumb since geeks will end up ruling the world one day anyway). Third, the difference they noted between geeks and nerds is that nerds lack the knowledge that geeks have and yet are still purely cerebral beings. Personally, I think of nerds as those who are almost exclusively intellectual IRL while geeks spend so much time on the computer that they make the use of the acronym "IRL" necessary to distinguish the fleeting interruptions by real life into the their usual virtual lifestyle. Fourth, they have a few systems in this book for "training" the geek to not be as geeky, to also do non-geek activities or (they put much emphasis on this) bathe. Now, I don't know of any geeks in my realm of experience who don't bathe and, in the event that they don't and I haven't noticed which is unlikely, I'd rather not know. As to the "training," why on earth do you want to date a geek if you're just going to re-train them to be "normal?" Why not just get a "normal" boyfriend/girlfriend and save yourself the effort?

I could go on forever complaining about the portrayal of geeks in this book, but I'm pretty sure that my fellow geeks who are reading this have a good idea of how annoying that is. The part I'm most amazed at is that the author seems to have decided that geek women (or at least geek women who want to date geek men) don't exist and that all typical women have no clue about anything that falls under the topic of geek knowledge - and apparently this includes higher-level word usage (according to the author, the word "plethora" is only used and understood by the most advanced level of geeks...I guess that makes me one of them). I would like to inform the world that we do exist and we are not nearly as repulsive as the regular world seems to insist we are (that goes for all geeks, not just the women).

I must also address that the depiction of conventions, parties and games that geeks frequently gravitate to is rather negative. No detail was added to the descriptions of the types of conventions at all and there was a long section for each type detailing how to entertain oneself at one of these conventions etc. without participating or, Heaven forbid, seeming interested in anything going on. I never knew that the only uses for a girl at a LAN party were related to the transportation of people, junk food and various forms of caffeine to and from the party or the individuals there. Silly me, I expected that I would participate if I attended. I probably shouldn't tell anyone that I was actually looking forward to being a Weeping Angel for our Dr. Who-themed group for Dragon Con later this year either *gasp* the universe may implode.

There is one good point to this book: the pie table. It is not a table made of pie nor did I incorrectly type "pie chart" - it is a table about different types and amounts of pie. To be precise, it is a table that shows, given certain undesirable but sometimes necessary actions that need to be taken by a geek, what type and how much pie should be awarded to them for performing said actions. Apparently, the author has discovered the nearly-universal geek weakness to pie (which I must say is a relief to me because otherwise this book would have been a complete waste of research time - they did say that they did some "research" whether they did or not). Though this means that, if this table is put in a non-geek's hands, that person may have some limited control over a geek, it also means that the geek community is about to get a ton more pie for doing things that we probably would have to do at some point anyway. I don't see any major drawbacks to this.

As much as I have left to say, I imagine I should stop. I could go on for a thousand pages on this (or any) topic, but I know there would be few left reading it by the end. This text simplified: geeks are awesome, they need not be re-trained to be "normal," they do come in both male and female, and they can always be rewarded with pie.

~The Minister of Silly Posts