Out Of The Closet

So I have a confession to make this morning. I'm suffering from an extremely rare disorder known in the medical profession as Subdural Geekatomyliosis or Geekitis for short. I was first diagnosed with this disorder when I was about 11-years old, right after my uncle brought home our first computer, an IBM PS/2 Model 30 with 16MB of RAM and dual floppy disk drives.



Lord only knows how many hours I spent in front of that little machine writing programs in BASIC and playing popular text-oriented adventure games like Space Quest, Police Quest, and King's Quest. God bless Sierra Games for giving me memorable characters like Roger Wilco, Sonny Bonds, and Sir Graham to help get me through those difficult and extremely awkward teenage years!

Over the past two decades or so, I've made a huge transition from being the sheltered teen of to an older, wiser, more mature person capable of taking responsibility for himself and others; however, this does not meen that my Geekitis went into remission! In fact, it's gotten worse! You see, I've become a closet geek (shhh, don't tell anyone else out of the blogsphere just yet!) and sometimes I really do wish I was comfortable enough with my geekuality to express it to the rest of the world. But when you're a good-looking, multi-talented, ladies man like myself, it's really hard to come out of the closet you know!

How do you rationalize getting "warm sensations" about the latest iPod or that you enjoy writing useless programs in the nude late at night you enjoy thinking about writing useless programs while driving to work in the mornings, let alone the fact that you can summarize youe life and personality in a Geek Code Block which once served as your e-mail signature (see below foran example of Geek Code).

GED/J d-- s:++>: a-- C++(++++) ULU++ P+ L++ E---- W+(-) N+++ o+ K+++ w--- O- M+ V-- PS++>$ PE++>$ Y++ PGP++ t- 5+++ X++ R+++>$ tv+ b+ DI+++ D+++ G++++ e++ h r-- y++**

The worst part about the Geekitis is that it's contagious! Now my own students have fallen victim to the affliction and I blame myself completely. Nowadays, I have kids coming to my office hours just to tell me how funny it was for them to "use a recursive event handler for a Java button object to see whether or not they could spawn an infinite number of new windows that would all close once the parent object was destroyed". Or better yet, finding it funny when one of my female students comes in to my office and tells me that she was out at a club with her friends and some annoying older guy (of about 29 or so) kept trying to get her phone number and she finally got fed up and gave him a wrong number...in binary!


Oh well, I suppose now that I'm out of the closet, all I can do now is continue to work on loving my inner geek. After all, life is sweet and it takes all type to make the world go round. So, if you're the type of person who enjoys doing math equations just because, or if you're familiar with a dangling-else ambiguity, or if you can find humor in the most mundane of circumstances, or even if you love playing with the latest tech toys, embrace your geekuality and (imitating L'il Kim's voice) "Put your RAZRs up!!"