On Geekiness in Semi-Public
First, of the frivolous:
Last night I had time enough before meeting up with others attending the movie (more, below) that I decided I would grab some dinner at a restaurant near the theater. Since I wasn't quite up to sitting in a loud establishment by myself, I decided I would get the food to go, and then go sit in my nice, quiet, and private car to read while I ate. This resulted in me having a slightly odd conversation with the girl at the hostess's station when I went into the restaurant, due to the two of us thinking we were having the same conversation when we weren't.
Me: Hi, I'd like to get a to go order.
Server{pointing outside} Is that you?
Me: Um. {pointing to self} No, this is me.
Server: Oh. Are you Tricia?
Me: Nope.
Server: Are you sure?
Me: Yes.
Server: {looks confused}
Me: {figures out the other half of the conversation} I haven't actually ordered yet. I'm here to place an order.
Server: OH! Okay. How can I help you?
Eventually, there was food, and I left a good tip, because one should be kind to servers whose day has been long enough that they've misplaced reality.
Second, of the Semi-Almost Serious, or At Least Very Long:
I am putting on my geek mantle for this post.
The movie last night, the Rifftrax screening of House on Haunted Hill (along with two shorts, one on helpful witches who want you to buy cheap food, and the other on demonic paper bags who kidnap small children) was very good and entertaining, and included good company. Unfortunately, it also included some bad company, in the form of a young man in the audience who could not shut up. However, since this was a specific form of being unable to shut up, it's a good opportunity for me to talk about a very particular form of not being able to shut up that is particular to geeks.
This was a case of what I am hereby calling That (Geek) Guy and I assume some of you are already going Oh, one of those, and having the reaction of recognition, mixed with compassion, annoyance, and shameful memory, based upon you own personality and mix of experiences. He was totally being That (Geek) Guy. As in "don't be that guy" (treating guy as a gender-neutral here).
The kid last night was young, best guess being around 15 or so (he was spotted after the show making a call to his Mom to come pick him up, which adds to the impression of youth). He talked a LOT. To EVERYONE. Whether they wanted to talk to him or not. He couldn't just move past people to get to his seat, he had to ask people questions and chat with them. Not content with just laughing or clapping during the movie, he yelled out commentary a LOT. He tried making jokes, which mostly didn't work. He yelled his approval of the insults at bits of pop culture he didn't appreciate. He yelled comments at the bits he did appreciate. He made some posturing comments about the women on the screen, the character's choices, so on. He made a strong point of making himself visible and showing that he knew what was going on.
A few years ago, the one and only time I went to Pennsic (high geek quotient), I went to a concert where a comedy singer was performing for a good sized crowd. It was an acoustic performance, in the woods, with the audience sitting on benches. A young girl, far enough in her teens that she had the look of someone whose bones were growing faster than she knew what to do with, was sitting up in the first or second row, full of movement and bereft of tact. She talked to the performer. A LOT. She made comments about what his songs meant to her, tried to interject her own jokes, responded to anything that even vaguely sounded like a question, and pretty much tried to add a second layer of performance. Eventually the performer, who had been trying to politely ignore her, stopped and reminded her that he was the one on stage and she was making it hard for him to be heard. Her mother, who had been off at the fringes of the crowd, had to come and lead her away. The girl was a deep-red embarrassed and crying.
In both these cases, you're seeing a young geek in some of their first largely unsupervised and unescorted forays into a geek-friendly setting. You can imagine (or in many cases, such as mine, remember) what it is like if you a geek kid who has grown up in a situation that isn't all that geek friendly. I mean, come on, we geeks tended to be the kind of kids who needed, upon being told to go play with others, to have someone to explain to us what game is being played, how to play it, what the relevant social shibboleths are, and if there's a book we can use to study up on it. We knew the word Shibboleths. We didn't know how to just play with others. We might have wanted to sit and observe for a while, come up with some theories before testing them out. A lot of geeky kids end up on the fringes of the social circles, often picked on, of feeling unwelcome, and quite frankly, a lot of us WERE poorly socialized (can I just go read a book instead?). We were picked last for teams, didn't hang out at the cool spots, didn't hang out at all, we didn't 'get' the extroverted kids, and we were sometimes a bit blind to interpersonal interaction's subtler nuances because we were used to books, where people explained what people are thinking* and you didn't have to figure it out for yourself, or at least you had time to analyze.
Most of us eventually learned how to play well with others and picked up on social cues of better behavior, but it didn't always come early or easy.
[Frankly, school is a lousy place to learn healthy socialization patterns. I like the observation that it shares its basic organization principles (involuntary association, lack of control, arbitrary measures of influence, shifting rules and supervision) with with prisons and socialite housewives circles, none of which are known for fairness, mental health, or valuing the development of the individual. These are horrible places to be on the periphery or lower on the pecking order, especially if you are someone who has a hard time grasping the (illogical, non-obvious, oppressive) rules. Anyway, this is a tangent, back to the main rant.]
As a result of this, we felt undervalued because we were geeks. This leads to two common coping mechanisms: to overvalue our geekiness as a means of protecting our egos (it becomes your singular identifying trait), and, conversely, to trying to hide our geekiness in socially normal settings. I totally get that and I have a lot of compassion for it. Been there, done that, wore the wrong outfit and nobody asked me to dance. This is, you know, a known condition with established patterns.
In our geek hearts, we dreamed of being in a setting where we could relax, let our geekineess shine, and our fellow geeks would rise up to embrace us, perhaps carrying us on their shoulders. There may be tiaras involved. At a minimum, we would be at peace among our kind of people and no longer hold back from being a geek. We could turn it up to 11. It would be a virtue, not a curse. A life of protective coloration in the drabs and greys is stressful and boring. We want to be seen. And heard. And noticed. And appreciated. And AND AND.
Which is great, except until you've developed enough social skills to pay attention to the people around you as well as yourself, you are at major risk of being That (Geek) Guy.
As a result of all this, a lot of geeks end up with two major misimpressions when it comes to socializing with others, particularly in a space that they have identified as geek friendly:
1- The only thing that really matters is how clever or smart you are
2- You must demonstrate how clever and smart you are at every opportunity
So you get the kid who has to share their thoughts on every part of the movie with everyone else, the person who wants the performer to notice her so much that she makes it difficult for others to notice anything else, the guy who can't ever just make conversation at a party but has to turn everything into a quip, a geek argument, or something with the eclat of a proverb. It is Geek Trying Too Hard.
And as fellow geeks, we totally identify, and feel sympathy, and therefore can't work up the courage to say "Dude, chill.", even though we want to throttle the other person, because we think it isn't fair to silence a geek who has finally found a place where they can be a geek in safety and understanding.
But we're not really helping them, because while it's great to be a geek, it's best if you can combine that with being a good person. It's great that you feel at ease enough to shamelessly quote Monty Python skits, but you need to learn to move on enough to let people see you as more than just The Geek. Which may mean learning to be more than just The Geek.
The problem is that valuing geekiness as the be-all and end-all of what makes someone a worthwhile person is as stupid as a jock** thinking that it's limited to how much you can bench-press, or a prep** thinking it's about how much money you have. It's a worthless measure in isolation- what can you actually do with it? Are you a good person by the measures of honesty, trustworthiness, loyalty, and compassion? Sure, you have a lot of SF books or DVDs, great LARPing costumes, go to cons, can name stats for your favorite series, and have signed copies of your favorite comics- but are you someone that your friends will call when they've had a bad day and need someone to talk to? You can code, you can hack, you can mcguyver a solution to any technical problem and you do it with the elegance and efficiency of a world-conquering AI. Hell, Artificial Intelligence programs that ace the Turing test and are even now plotting the path towards the singularity totally read your blog. But if you can't treat other people's needs and thoughts as anything more than the inconvenient pauses between your amazing oration opportunities, I don't want to hang out with you or share a theater with you.
Because Geek, Please, this is not a contest or a competition. You do not have to prove yourself by winning against some imagined set of judges, defeating some specter of past bullies, some invented quantifiable measure of absolute worth. I'd like to get to know actual people, not just their collection of quotes. Stop performing. It's okay. You are safe, among friends, and they'd like to see more than a childhood label. You won't get past the (reasonable, understandable) fear of rejection and your craving for acceptance until you get to a point that you can allow others into a space in your life that isn't defended with displays, but is instead accepting of other's need to interact on a more genuine and respectful basis.
Or at least shut up and let me watch my movie in peace.
***
Because I am talking to a geek audience here, and we all appreciate a little background reading and references, I ought to include links to some other fantastic articles that touch upon this and other closely-related content. So included in the see-also list here are:
- Geek Social Fallacies
- The failure mode of Clever is Asshole
- Reasons to be Polite and Decent to Other People in Online Fandom (because it contains the singly best summation ever, of One of the many ways in which fandom is not like high school is that fandom is full of extremely smart people. We are not short of clever around here. The bar for "So smart you will automatically be loved and admired, even if you behave like a wild squirrel brought indoors" is set much, much higher than you think it is, and you are probably in no danger of concussing yourself on it.
)
* sometimes with footnotes.
** please note: I am old and a cranky bat of a cat lady. I never was cool and I am far from school age. I am dredging the terms jock and prep out of my calcified and repressed memories of secondary school, and if You Kids Today are using some other terms or other social alignment classification system, you can Get the Hell Off My Lawn, you whippersnappers.
This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. You can comment here or there, using OpenID if you don't have a Dreamwidth account.
If you have never posted at Dreamwidth, you may need to authenticate your OpenID account to comment there.
Commenting on LJ will eventually be disabled.
Last night I had time enough before meeting up with others attending the movie (more, below) that I decided I would grab some dinner at a restaurant near the theater. Since I wasn't quite up to sitting in a loud establishment by myself, I decided I would get the food to go, and then go sit in my nice, quiet, and private car to read while I ate. This resulted in me having a slightly odd conversation with the girl at the hostess's station when I went into the restaurant, due to the two of us thinking we were having the same conversation when we weren't.
Me: Hi, I'd like to get a to go order.
Server{pointing outside} Is that you?
Me: Um. {pointing to self} No, this is me.
Server: Oh. Are you Tricia?
Me: Nope.
Server: Are you sure?
Me: Yes.
Server: {looks confused}
Me: {figures out the other half of the conversation} I haven't actually ordered yet. I'm here to place an order.
Server: OH! Okay. How can I help you?
Eventually, there was food, and I left a good tip, because one should be kind to servers whose day has been long enough that they've misplaced reality.
Second, of the Semi-Almost Serious, or At Least Very Long:
I am putting on my geek mantle for this post.
The movie last night, the Rifftrax screening of House on Haunted Hill (along with two shorts, one on helpful witches who want you to buy cheap food, and the other on demonic paper bags who kidnap small children) was very good and entertaining, and included good company. Unfortunately, it also included some bad company, in the form of a young man in the audience who could not shut up. However, since this was a specific form of being unable to shut up, it's a good opportunity for me to talk about a very particular form of not being able to shut up that is particular to geeks.
This was a case of what I am hereby calling That (Geek) Guy and I assume some of you are already going Oh, one of those, and having the reaction of recognition, mixed with compassion, annoyance, and shameful memory, based upon you own personality and mix of experiences. He was totally being That (Geek) Guy. As in "don't be that guy" (treating guy as a gender-neutral here).
The kid last night was young, best guess being around 15 or so (he was spotted after the show making a call to his Mom to come pick him up, which adds to the impression of youth). He talked a LOT. To EVERYONE. Whether they wanted to talk to him or not. He couldn't just move past people to get to his seat, he had to ask people questions and chat with them. Not content with just laughing or clapping during the movie, he yelled out commentary a LOT. He tried making jokes, which mostly didn't work. He yelled his approval of the insults at bits of pop culture he didn't appreciate. He yelled comments at the bits he did appreciate. He made some posturing comments about the women on the screen, the character's choices, so on. He made a strong point of making himself visible and showing that he knew what was going on.
A few years ago, the one and only time I went to Pennsic (high geek quotient), I went to a concert where a comedy singer was performing for a good sized crowd. It was an acoustic performance, in the woods, with the audience sitting on benches. A young girl, far enough in her teens that she had the look of someone whose bones were growing faster than she knew what to do with, was sitting up in the first or second row, full of movement and bereft of tact. She talked to the performer. A LOT. She made comments about what his songs meant to her, tried to interject her own jokes, responded to anything that even vaguely sounded like a question, and pretty much tried to add a second layer of performance. Eventually the performer, who had been trying to politely ignore her, stopped and reminded her that he was the one on stage and she was making it hard for him to be heard. Her mother, who had been off at the fringes of the crowd, had to come and lead her away. The girl was a deep-red embarrassed and crying.
In both these cases, you're seeing a young geek in some of their first largely unsupervised and unescorted forays into a geek-friendly setting. You can imagine (or in many cases, such as mine, remember) what it is like if you a geek kid who has grown up in a situation that isn't all that geek friendly. I mean, come on, we geeks tended to be the kind of kids who needed, upon being told to go play with others, to have someone to explain to us what game is being played, how to play it, what the relevant social shibboleths are, and if there's a book we can use to study up on it. We knew the word Shibboleths. We didn't know how to just play with others. We might have wanted to sit and observe for a while, come up with some theories before testing them out. A lot of geeky kids end up on the fringes of the social circles, often picked on, of feeling unwelcome, and quite frankly, a lot of us WERE poorly socialized (can I just go read a book instead?). We were picked last for teams, didn't hang out at the cool spots, didn't hang out at all, we didn't 'get' the extroverted kids, and we were sometimes a bit blind to interpersonal interaction's subtler nuances because we were used to books, where people explained what people are thinking* and you didn't have to figure it out for yourself, or at least you had time to analyze.
Most of us eventually learned how to play well with others and picked up on social cues of better behavior, but it didn't always come early or easy.
[Frankly, school is a lousy place to learn healthy socialization patterns. I like the observation that it shares its basic organization principles (involuntary association, lack of control, arbitrary measures of influence, shifting rules and supervision) with with prisons and socialite housewives circles, none of which are known for fairness, mental health, or valuing the development of the individual. These are horrible places to be on the periphery or lower on the pecking order, especially if you are someone who has a hard time grasping the (illogical, non-obvious, oppressive) rules. Anyway, this is a tangent, back to the main rant.]
As a result of this, we felt undervalued because we were geeks. This leads to two common coping mechanisms: to overvalue our geekiness as a means of protecting our egos (it becomes your singular identifying trait), and, conversely, to trying to hide our geekiness in socially normal settings. I totally get that and I have a lot of compassion for it. Been there, done that, wore the wrong outfit and nobody asked me to dance. This is, you know, a known condition with established patterns.
In our geek hearts, we dreamed of being in a setting where we could relax, let our geekineess shine, and our fellow geeks would rise up to embrace us, perhaps carrying us on their shoulders. There may be tiaras involved. At a minimum, we would be at peace among our kind of people and no longer hold back from being a geek. We could turn it up to 11. It would be a virtue, not a curse. A life of protective coloration in the drabs and greys is stressful and boring. We want to be seen. And heard. And noticed. And appreciated. And AND AND.
Which is great, except until you've developed enough social skills to pay attention to the people around you as well as yourself, you are at major risk of being That (Geek) Guy.
As a result of all this, a lot of geeks end up with two major misimpressions when it comes to socializing with others, particularly in a space that they have identified as geek friendly:
1- The only thing that really matters is how clever or smart you are
2- You must demonstrate how clever and smart you are at every opportunity
So you get the kid who has to share their thoughts on every part of the movie with everyone else, the person who wants the performer to notice her so much that she makes it difficult for others to notice anything else, the guy who can't ever just make conversation at a party but has to turn everything into a quip, a geek argument, or something with the eclat of a proverb. It is Geek Trying Too Hard.
And as fellow geeks, we totally identify, and feel sympathy, and therefore can't work up the courage to say "Dude, chill.", even though we want to throttle the other person, because we think it isn't fair to silence a geek who has finally found a place where they can be a geek in safety and understanding.
But we're not really helping them, because while it's great to be a geek, it's best if you can combine that with being a good person. It's great that you feel at ease enough to shamelessly quote Monty Python skits, but you need to learn to move on enough to let people see you as more than just The Geek. Which may mean learning to be more than just The Geek.
The problem is that valuing geekiness as the be-all and end-all of what makes someone a worthwhile person is as stupid as a jock** thinking that it's limited to how much you can bench-press, or a prep** thinking it's about how much money you have. It's a worthless measure in isolation- what can you actually do with it? Are you a good person by the measures of honesty, trustworthiness, loyalty, and compassion? Sure, you have a lot of SF books or DVDs, great LARPing costumes, go to cons, can name stats for your favorite series, and have signed copies of your favorite comics- but are you someone that your friends will call when they've had a bad day and need someone to talk to? You can code, you can hack, you can mcguyver a solution to any technical problem and you do it with the elegance and efficiency of a world-conquering AI. Hell, Artificial Intelligence programs that ace the Turing test and are even now plotting the path towards the singularity totally read your blog. But if you can't treat other people's needs and thoughts as anything more than the inconvenient pauses between your amazing oration opportunities, I don't want to hang out with you or share a theater with you.
Because Geek, Please, this is not a contest or a competition. You do not have to prove yourself by winning against some imagined set of judges, defeating some specter of past bullies, some invented quantifiable measure of absolute worth. I'd like to get to know actual people, not just their collection of quotes. Stop performing. It's okay. You are safe, among friends, and they'd like to see more than a childhood label. You won't get past the (reasonable, understandable) fear of rejection and your craving for acceptance until you get to a point that you can allow others into a space in your life that isn't defended with displays, but is instead accepting of other's need to interact on a more genuine and respectful basis.
Or at least shut up and let me watch my movie in peace.
***
Because I am talking to a geek audience here, and we all appreciate a little background reading and references, I ought to include links to some other fantastic articles that touch upon this and other closely-related content. So included in the see-also list here are:
- Geek Social Fallacies
- The failure mode of Clever is Asshole
- Reasons to be Polite and Decent to Other People in Online Fandom (because it contains the singly best summation ever, of One of the many ways in which fandom is not like high school is that fandom is full of extremely smart people. We are not short of clever around here. The bar for "So smart you will automatically be loved and admired, even if you behave like a wild squirrel brought indoors" is set much, much higher than you think it is, and you are probably in no danger of concussing yourself on it.
)
* sometimes with footnotes.
** please note: I am old and a cranky bat of a cat lady. I never was cool and I am far from school age. I am dredging the terms jock and prep out of my calcified and repressed memories of secondary school, and if You Kids Today are using some other terms or other social alignment classification system, you can Get the Hell Off My Lawn, you whippersnappers.
This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. You can comment here or there, using OpenID if you don't have a Dreamwidth account.
If you have never posted at Dreamwidth, you may need to authenticate your OpenID account to comment there.
Commenting on LJ will eventually be disabled.