bloodyrosemccoy | The Only Question I Ever Thought Was Hard ...

World Peace Day/Winter Solstice
Winter Begins (Northern Hemisphere)
Summer Begins (Southern Hemisphere)
Abilities Day
Capricorn Begins
National Haiku Poetry Day
Yule (Wiccan)

Over the last four months, I’ve been pondering what makes a geek a geek. I’ve pondered this before, but there were some interesting circumstances that brought it to the foreground recently:

-The moment I stepped off the plane on my way to Africa, I had a bit of an epiphany. I realized that I was in for a shocking cultural experience with people wildly different from myself.

This was in JFK Airport. I had just met the other students going on the trip.

It seems that geeks do not really go to Africa, because none of them was. I had some conscientious world-savers, but no one who understood my geekness. It was surprisingly hard.

-Last night, Mom told me she’s always amazed that I like Star Trek and stuff like that. “It seems so out-of-character,” she said. “You’re so … no-nonsense, and here you like all this stuff.”

-Today,

kittikattie linked to an older article that has the dumbest explanation of nerdiness ever.*

And after talking with some nerdy friends through the years and considering what makes me interested in what I’m interested in, I’ve come up with a certain explanation of much of geek/nerd behavior. Since you’re all geeks and nerds, I’m sure you’ll have something to add to the analysis, but from my brother (a Mines geek, no less!) and my friends and myself, this is what I have:

Nerds and geeks come across as hyper-intellectual (sometimes we’re even actually intelligent!), with emphasis on those traditionally left-brained modes of thought that find pleasure in things that fit together cohesively, that have some sense in code.

Geeks/nerds have an obsession with reality and logic. This seems to contradict the fascination we have with sci-fi and fantasy, but I think there’s a reason for that, too. I hate a lot of historical fiction (not all, but a lot) and contemporary fiction because it’s supposed to be set in our world—sometimes you even get famous characters in history. This drives me crazy, because there is no way a novel about, say, Ann Boleyn will be accurate. No matter how well you researched, you have no room to make things up, because this really happened, and it didn’t happen like you’re claiming. It is LIES.

Fantasy and sci-fi have no pretensions of accuracy.** What they do have is logic that works within the given environment—most complaints about fandoms have to do with the writers failing to respect their canon's logical parameters, contradicting the internal story. My favorite example is Superman: we’re willing to accept that he can fly and win fights with trains, because in this world it’s clearly established that there are some people who can do things like that. But try to tell us that Lois Lane hasn’t worked out that he looks a whole lot like her pal Clark Kent, and that’s just crazy talk, because we’ve also established that all the not-heroes in this world are like our own, and therefore we’d expect them to be as smart. Or, if you say that Lieutenant Commander Data—who we’ll accept is a conscious robot—can’t use contractions, then for god’s sake don’t let him say “I’m fine” in the episode where you pointed that out.

We geeks and nerds like to be creative using logical parameters, which is why we work so hard at details in worldbuilding, or are fluent in Javascript as well as Klingon. We like information and complexity and seeing what we can do with it—give me a language structure, and I’ll start playing with other possible structures. Tell me about biology, and I’ll take the constraints and play with ’em. So you say our planet has a 23° tilt? What if that were different? What would the world be like within other possible tilts? What if? What if? What if? That’s also why we like fanfiction. What if you took this character and did this? Let’s see what happens!

And we do have our own standards of coolness—just not the kind that makes us give up the fanny pack that's got all our fun shit in it. But since it’s a different sense of cool than most people have, things that would be uncool to others aren’t uncool to us. By all means, make a model of the Millenium Falcon! Just don’t build an inaccurate model.

So if you identify as a nerd, then you will say it, because nerds are people who like information, and so we do well in school and then play with the info in our spare time. We’re creative, but we like to do it logically, and not the Vulcans’ emotionless logic—for us, logic is full of possibilities, nuances, and emotion. We actually do think math is fun, because of itself and because look where it gets you.

Who wouldn’t want that?

*I still enjoy Weird Al’s White & Nerdy, but I never would have thought of it as a racial phenomenon before that. I always thought he was trying to make it fit the original song, and that white nerds tend to be pasty because we spend all day downstairs playing videogames or writing shit like this in our blogs instead of going outside.

**Or few. The reason I will take Star Trek apart is that it tries to pretend it’s possible in our universe, and then it makes these dumbass claims that aren’t possible at all. On the other hand, Doctor Who or Star Wars don’t even try to be possible, and so I’m much more willing to accept the crazy shit they come up with. (I think that was one of the failures of the prequels: when George Lucas tried to retcon some scientific plausibility into it. Thank you, we didn’t need that.) Joel Hodgson told us not to worry about how he eats and breathes, in his world it won’t matter, so we don’t worry.