I thought I was going to finish updating all three goal areas before posting this, but I found out that today is Geek Pride Day, and since this post was already in the planning stages, I needed to jump on that bandwagon.
Geek Pride Day is a fairly recent holiday, first being officially celebrated in America in 2008. (Dia del orgullo friki started in Spain two years earlier, and there were Geek Pride celebrations at a bar in Albany, New York some years previously, but I think it’s fair to say it has been building slowly.) The date comes from the May 25th, 1977 original release date of the first Star Wars film, celebrating a time before legacies were tarnished and it was still so cool that you didn’t even notice that Luke was kind of a whiner, but also ties in to Towel Day and Glorious 25 May, thus covering three science fiction fan bases, and those are good places to look for geeks.
At times when I am being weird, I apply labels to myself, and it was in noticing that the labels were situationally different that I started to ponder the different connotations behind the words. Naturally I started with an internet search, and there is plenty of information out there, but I disagree with the conclusions of others, therefore I present my own. I will still link to the Venn diagram, because I love a Venn diagram as much as the next nerd, but I think it’s wrong.
http://www.greatwhitesnark.com/2010/03/25/difference-between-nerd-dork-and-geek-explained-in-a-venn-diagram/
To be fair, I think the reason this gets it wrong is largely the result of trying to make it fit into a Venn diagram, because it does not all necessarily overlap, and I think sticking with the Venn concept but making “nerd” the center is the only real reason for the inclusion of “dweeb”. Does anyone use that?
To my way of thinking, “dork” is simply the issue of social ineptitude. It doesn’t have any relation to obsession, and it often is combined with intelligence, though the combination is not necessary. I say this because when I am thinking of myself as a dork, it is generally related to a social interaction, usually with someone of the opposite sex.
“And he was so nice, even though he was clearly talking to the biggest dork in the world.”
“I am such a dork. I may someday become better off financially or more physically attractive, but I will never be smooth.”
These are real thoughts, inspired by real situations, and the word “dork” was inescapable.
“Nerd” I associate primarily with intelligence, but also with a certain amount of seriousness to it. Nerds may be socially inept, but it may be more that they are not socializing with the less intelligent, so those relationships just aren’t established. I base this more on how the people whom I truly considered to be nerds in junior high kind of hated other people, and somehow that became how I defined it.
Those of us who were classified as nerds because we were brains and hung out with other brains, but did not hate people, I thought perhaps were not actually nerds. This generally just got certain people accusing me of thinking I was better than them, but I think they thought I had delusions about being more popular than I was, and it wasn’t that. I usually just hedged, though, because believe it or not there was a time when I was not accomplished at sorting out and articulating my feelings.
I also know that there were people who were picked on for being nerds that were not smart (this is their appraisal of the situation, not mine), so I realize that for a lot of people “nerd” just means unpopular and vulnerable to abuse. It makes me wonder if the member of our group who did not come to us through the advanced classes ever got picked on for being a nerd, because she wasn’t, but she associated with us of her own free will.
I can only say what it means to me. When I think of myself as a nerd, I think of my academic inclinations. When I am wondering about something, I start wondering if there is a good book on it, and my solution is generally to read and research, and then in the midst of the reading to find even more books to read, so I can really have a full understanding of the subject.
There was an episode of Malcolm in the Middle where Malcolm was dealing with a super genius child (more than Malcolm, anyway), and he asked the kid what his brain was like:
Malcolm: “I mean for me it’s like when I’m thinking really hard my brain starts making connections and those connections make other connections and it feels like a bomb going off. Is your brain like that?”
Barton: “It’s like a beehive and every bee has a brain like yours.”
My brain kind of runs on a circular track, where new information combines with old information until it adds to the big picture. It will keep circling around and around if I don’t actually do something with it, though, which is why I need to write so much. If a question can’t get resolved, it can get pretty bad, and this is where I become a geek.
To be fair, it’s a fine line. Let’s return to the topic of music, where I was thinking about music, and my emotional and physical responses to it. There’s a section in “Bizarre Love Triangle” that actually physically resonates within me, and I was wondering if I was hooked up to brain scanners while listening to it, what it would show, and what my odds were of making that happen. I think that’s pretty nerdy.
“Summertime” was a different matter. I was obsessing over what made it different, and why it sounded so beautiful. I was mentioning it to other people who played guitar, but they were not familiar with that song. I tried sending a message to Ray Toro via Twitter, but Twitter is a very ineffective means of 2-way communication. I looked at an MCR forum that promised to answer questions, but then I realized it meant questions about the site, fortunately I realized it before I submitted my question. And I would still be coming up with new theories, like maybe it was tuned to a higher pitch? Was it actually the keyboard and not the guitar? Was I nuts?
Watching a video of them playing, I have noticed that Ray moves his hand way down the neck, which would change the wavelength and frequency and everything, and maybe the rest is that it is just a good instrument being played well, giving it the additional purity and beauty and that’s what I’m settling on, because I need to move on!
I have said before that I am not a computer geek, because I don’t enjoy untangling the knots that arise when technology is going wrong. I do seem to be a geek for a lot of other things though. So yes, I do agree with the obsessiveness being a geek attribute, but again I am not sure that it needs to be combined with high intelligence, though that probably helps.
So being obsessive isn’t always fun, but at the same time there is this enthusiasm that really does bring some rewards. For example, on Youtube I discovered some videos with Ray Toro and Frank Iero giving guitar lessons on different songs. With my luck, there was not one for “Summertime”, but I listened to the others, and they were talking about a section on “Na Na Na” where it shifts the tone, and it goes a little bit Black Sabbath, and having listened to some Black Sabbath with the other things I was doing, I could totally hear it. Getting that felt amazing!
I should say here that geeks realize that we are different, and we get stoked over things that will seem weird to others, but I’d be lying. Often we only partially realize it, and sometimes even when we know we are geeking out, and being totally weird, we still can’t help it and we need to carry on anyway. Sorry.
I guess the geeks are my favorite, because of the enthusiasm. A nerd can be cold-blooded and blasé about things, but a geek can’t. There are some accompanying highs and lows, but they can be a lot of fun, so Geeks out there, do it loud and do it proud.
While doing the research, I came across many references to poor hygiene, for all of the categories, and I have to say that has not been my experience. I might just know the wrong people. I have known people with poor hygiene, but usually they were very deliberate nonconformists, and so that may have been their way of keeping it real, or perhaps the most striking evidence that they were not really all that self-aware. Personally, I like not stinking.
I do also like self-awareness, though, and this article came to my attention a few days ago, and is probably a good closing note:
http://io9.com/5912201/do-you-suffer-from-answer-syndrome
I think I’m okay here, because I know there are things that I don’t know, and I like listening to other people, but it doesn’t hurt to keep it in mind.
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