someone like you

I spent Saturday at the Red Pencil in the Woods Conference nerding out with a a bunch of people who wanted to talk about the future of e-books as I much I do. I was there with Lam, one of my fabulous new colleagues from Girl Friday to lead a discussion group about our group business model. Chatting with all those lonely freelancers made me appreciate anew my good luck at finding the Girls Friday.

A couple of years ago, I worked with the fabulous Pulitzer Prize Winning music critic and writer Tim Page on his memoir Parallel Play about growing up with Asperger's Syndrom. He spoke in an interview about how people sometimes assumed that you could put two Aspies (his term) together and they would be on the same wave length but that this could easily misfire because if you had one person who was obsessed with say, silent films and another who was obsessed with automobile engines they would be speaking completely different languages.

I think nerds are this way too. We need people we can go off on tangents with without worrying we're boring them and while a book nerd can surely befriend a computer nerd, sometimes you just need to be with your own kind. I think that book people can find this especially difficult given what solitary tasks writing and editing are.

How do you find your people?

get your geek on

Yesterday I wrote for the Gloss about why I'm having so much fun as of late being a dance geek and it got me thinking about that word geek and its many iterations.

Way back when I was a kid, you didn't want to be called a geek, it had negative connotations of loserdom. Being a geek was the antithesis of cool.

But this word has become transformed in our pop culture conception and colloquial use of it. The show Glee has spawned a cavalcade of fan declaring themselves 'Gleeks' and a couple of weeks ago the mighty Anna Wintour descended from her throne to accept a webby award and decreed that 'sometimes geeks can be chic'. 

In adult life we use the words 'geek' or 'nerd' not to describe some shameful state of ostracism but rather to illustrate how passionate we are about something: I'm a book nerd, a wine geek etc. When we're with kindred spirits who are similarly passionate about something, we 'geek' out about it. This usage is sort of fitting because in a way it did mean the same thing in childhood. When you're a kid and especially when you're a teenager, being too into anything besides a sport (and not every sport at that, badminton wouldn't really have cut it) made you automatically seem too earnest to ever be cool. But adults who are really into something are well-rounded and interesting, the kind of people you want to be around.

So go on, geek out. You know you want to.