Wednesday, July 09, 2003
Just as God Made Me
I don’t care to gamble, and I don’t play team sports. I think this may have something to do with my basic risk aversion - I don’t like to be subjected to the vagaries of fate or incompetence. I want to win or lose on my own merits, not those of a teammate or team or random quirk of chance. I don’t like situations that are set up to keep me from helping myself out and achieving my goal. Situational helplessness, I guess you could call it. I hate it. Makes me antsy.
So that’s why I’m settling back today to think of something really easy to write about. No special challenges for me today. I’m taking the road of least resistance and highest probability of success. “Success,” being a word that is contextually shaded - and here, I think it means “a cheap laugh at the expense of someone who can’t fight back.” And since I’m making things so easy on myself, I’ll pick the biggest, fattest, softest and most defenseless target I can think of.
This essay is therefore entitled “Why I’m Such a Geek.” It’s one of a continuing series, but the first here to be so blatant about it. I’ll limit myself to just a few items for this round, as the subject does not admit to being exhaustively analyzed at any one sitting.
* I actually care that the word “geek” means “one who bites the heads off chickens.” (or snakes. Don’t want that whole sub-specialty of geeks gunning for me. Or gumming for me. That sounds even worse, actually.) My Webster’s Ninth Collegiate here says that “geek” is probably from E dialect geek, geck fool, from Low German geck, from Middle Low German. The attribution goes back to 1942. Okay now I am a bit puzzled because no one in ‘42 was doing the low (or even mid-low) german thing. How did we leap from mid-low german “fool” to 1942’s “oral poultry decapitator?” And then of course, the dictionary is from 1985 - there’s no reference to computer geeks or other benign modern variants of geekdom. That’s another fascinating linguistic shift that bears further analysis. Upshot: only geeks care about the etymology of “geek.” Q.E.D.
* I feel sorry for letters I delete on the computer, and try to use them in other words. Like, “okay that E and that N are in the right positions if I take out the letters between them and type in three other letters, and then add an e to the end, so I don’t have to erase everything; that’s right E and N, you get another chance at a rich and fulfilling life as a letter....” I waste more time typing around “saved” letters than I would spend retyping everything from scratch.
* I’m really really psyched about my new purchases: a papershredder and a nitelite. The shredder is going to change my life - believe you me. And the nitelite has a photosensor so it turns off when there’s enough light to see, but now I can find my waterglass on the bathroom sink at night without turning on an overhead light, after which I can’t get back to sleep again, so either I’m thirsty and awake, or light-addled and awake, but it sucks either way, except now it doesn’t because I have a nitelite! Next up: low-light shredding - for the ultimate in intimate security!
* I read notes I find. Shopping carts, bus stops, on the street, left on park benches… I have this burning curiosity about what other people thought important enough to reduce to words. And usually it’s nothing, a boring shopping list or notes about a used car or something like that… but once in a while I find a wonderful note passed back and forth between flirting schoolkids, or bored officemates in a meeting, or family members at a dreadful outing… these are hilarious, or touching, or something - but they’re worth reading. And once I found a few pages of a totally filthy novel wadded up on the sidewalk near an elementary school, roughly torn from the book; the jist of the passage that I found was that someone was getting Vicks Vap-o-Rubbed where you’d never ask mom to put it for you. You gotta keep your eyes open to see stuff like that.
* If I’m hi-lighting a list where items will be checked off one by one, I like to start with one color of highlighter as a “baseline” color and then use another color of highlighter to show changes. So suppose you have a list with things that are “finished” in green, and things that “need work” hilighted in yellow. You finish woring on a “yellow” item and hilight it again in blue. Now it’s green, matching the others that are “done.” This kind of control over the quality of visual radiation makes me feel like some sort of superhuman. For like a third of a second. But that in itself is worth something.
* I have a blog. Oh god how much lower could I sink?
Thank you for joining me in this exercise in humility. Now leave me to my ignominy. That’s alright, I’ll sit in the dark.
