Geek, Nerd, Wats the diff?

Extremely long post coming up...

What makes a geek/nerd?
Whats the difference anyway?

Heres why you should date a geek/nerd aka me [Link].

I bumped into a friend just now when I was out having a quick stroll at The Curve just to get out of the room for a little while, and met a friend who had just finished studying architecture at melbourne uni. he looked so different now. back then, he was the prototypical yet not so prototypical art student - tall, lean, lanky, in his checkered shirt and bellbottom style jeans, alwiz carrying his black portfolio, wearing his suede shoes, alwiz listening to some avant garde music, poised, getting good grades, and dabbling in un-insignificant amounts of dope...he still seemed to epitomize academic coolness to me. being geeky n non geeky in his concentration on his craft. but now he was so different. wearing his corporate shirt n tie, complete with gold pen in breast pocket, no one could have associated the professional him (with more meat n weight, no longer the emaciapated art student look) with the student him of years gone by. smooth, confident, extending his namecard while exuding professional competency, i could see he was now doing well indeed.

When I was at uni, I used to take pride in having geeky/nerdy elements such as liking to read fantasy books (and i mean REAL fantasy, not the typical hogwash), i was enrolled in an IT engineering course, i was passionate about my programming, my need for spectacles (beyond a certain distance), my habit of taking a particular complex programming problem and locking myself in my room for hours n hours with nothing but a constant supply of whisky/coke/sprite (and sometimes kfc, sometimes pizza) and switching off the lights and playing my rock music while i hungrily sunk my teeth into the juicy world of how to make my coding more elegant, how to call subclasses from the class of a different library, how to use the catch to prevent exceptions rather than the more resource consuming but simpler if then else loop..etc etc.

I delighted in the geek culture of the faculty, liked stories like 'the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy', had no problems making a beeline for the software books section of any library/bookstore, had an endless stream of software websites i subscribed to and visited regularly, bought countless software magazines, delighted in using my holidays to do little projects for myself to improve my software acumen, and admired the guys like my polish friend who i personally saw live in action doing the below in this exact sequence:

1) open door for me to enter his house
2) explain to me briefly on his monitor what he has done and how to follow up
3) pour me a beer
4) finished his beer, mixed himself a drink
5) make out with girl #1 RIGHT BEHIND me..
6) receive a call. hush hush tones. went downstairs. comes back in 5 mins with some dope.
7) shares it with others in the room.
8) non stop drinking.
9) turns around n goes under the blankets with girl #2 while another guy is tackling girl # 1 and by this time everyone is more or less drunk esp the girls.
10) another guy yanks the blanket covering my polish friend n girl #2, revealing em in the full coital act in their full glory and they r too drunk to notice

all this while im sitting there, trying to converge various java code with asp.net and seeing how the hell to link it to my mysql database using ado.net.

how the hell am i gonna do that with the fricking zoo n the ruckus behind me?

so im stuck and i cant progress coz its too frickin complicated so i decided i mights well enjoy the show right? so im watching em. then polish guy is done. he rolls off. stinks of alcohol n weed, and comes up to me, with a small towel around his privates and a face thats beetroot from the alcohol.

"heyy...aarrlex...so..hauss eet going?"

slurred.

"hey simon. er i kinda did nothing. but that was a cool bit of code, how u laced the different functions together to form your own subroutine."

"yea? come, morve it...lemme see how far we are .."

he sits there.. then...looks at the stuff... moans.. says he doesnt understand it..(when in fact HE wrote everything all along..) gets up, goes n pours himself another whisky on the rocks, sits down, and then, i see this intense focussed look on his face. i talk to him. he doesnt answer.

i turn around n entertain myself looking at the various ppl in various states of undress n consciousness. this was a total deviation from what i was used to n culturally accustomed/exposed to, and i was alternating between a state of interest, excitement, curiosity, disgust, voyeurism, shy, embarassed, guilt, modest, didnt-fit-in. anyway i went downstairs to drink some water n get away from the smell of weed.

20 minutes later i go up. simon's getting up from the chair, he looks totally whacked, crawls into bed, and basically dies. i stab him with my toe, he doesnt respond. but heres the best part.

the FUCKING PROGRAM WORKS!!!

wat can i make of it? the bugger nerd/geek is a genius. he saved me and billy's ass ok for that assignment. btw billy was stoned out cold long before i went for my water downstairs.

wow..i jus admire his geek ability u know? to be so fucking good at such technical stuff..

i've alwiz believed geeks are smartest...and geeks do end up being the richest...examples abound. for a time a year or 2 back, geeks were COOL. everyone WANTED to be a geek in some way or associated in some way to being nerdy. i enjoyed geek/nerd themed shows [The Revenge of the Nerds].

much as i wanted to be a geek, i had a REAL BONAFIDE geek friend who told me, much to my heartbreak,

"alex...ur too fashion conscious, vain and articulate to be a real geek. real geeks dont have much of a social life. u have a little."

"but im not handsome! i wear the same shit to uni, in my small hat, im in my small world, i dont talk to nobody, and i dont drive a cool car. and i dont really hang out much or go out. it just seems dat way but in truth, im never really out"

"sorry...u still just dont cut it."

"why?"

"u've got to read more of our kind of books..u've got to be interested in diff kinds of things...u are too into sports...jus coz u love software doesnt mean ur a geek. u jus dont have the geek aura. stop trying. i mean, see, u dun wear specs. u have oakley sunglasses. and worst, u like techno and hiphop."

"wah, so now u've got this exclusive club eh? dont u think u are too stereotypical in ur definition of geek?"

"i dont get u"

"ok, nvm."

this coming from a non stereotypical geek. he doesnt wear his pants up to his throat, doesnt wear long sleeeved checkered shirts, doesnt wear glasses 2 inches thick and that covers half his face etc.

i wanted to be geeky in a way, but i didnt want to be a complete geek. sigh...when u have geeks protecting their turf so ferociously...wat can i do but give up trying to enter the vaunted club? their banding together actually is a collective response as a fightback/reaction to the perceived constant harassing they feel the world gives them. the collective feeling that the world perceives them as losers and perennial bully fodder and girl doormats.

so when the whole wannabe-a-geek thing exploded, they prolly jus felt it was another way of poking fun at them. i get it.

ppl...pls..take it easy on them... without geeky nerdy doctors, engineers, computer scientists... the world would be a much much much shittier place.