More nerd than geek....

Lately, some conversations and choices of leisure activities have caused me to feel somewhat geeky. I've recently dredged up from my memory some embarrassingly specific details of science-fictiony things, I've been reading about sociology, ethology and geography for fun, I've completed a jigsaw puzzle and numerous NY Times crosswords, and I've become increasingly uninterested in clothes and fashion (hardly seems possible, I know).

These geeky behaviors, however, have not sprouted any new interest in the traditionally geeky fields of technology or computer programming. Although I'm computer literate enough to have this simple blog and watch videos of interest on You Tube, I have no idea how people achieved such funny and elaborate results with things like Stephen Colbert's Green Screen Challenge. Even if I wanted to participate, I would have absolutely no clue how to start (which is okay, though, because I'm not much of a joiner anyway). So, though I am enough of a geek to know about the Rancor Monsters and Daleks featured in some of those projects, I seem to be lacking in any real geek ability. (I admittedly even have a Rancor Monster in my closet (it's only a model) along with a Darth Vader shaped box of Star Wars people and an Ewok village. Granted, they're packed away in a moving box, so it's not like I'm staging blaster battles on a daily basis, but I just can't bring myself to give them away. I also just watched the latest Doctor Who out on DVD with Christopher Eccleston (good bit of casting) fighting a new wave of Daleks in a very entertaining update of the old series.)

I've never hacked into anything (or even tried to (or even ever thought about it really)), and I'm no good at video games (unless you count the Sims, which I did like when it came out, but you can hardly lose at that game unless you lock your person in a room with no doors and no food, which is a really cruel idea, but, of course, one that had to be tried). My method for fixing any computer problem after trying "esc" and "ctrl-alt-del" is to turn it off and on again (which, surprisingly, has been a very effective strategy for me).

So, to answer the question of my geekiness, I did the geeky thing and turned to the internet. First, I turned to a geek quiz to find my geek factor, which turns out to be surprisingly low--or not that surprising, it seems, since I don't like comic books, programming, or conventions of any kind. This low number came with a picture of Kirsten Dunst, which I guess means something good, although I'm not sure what.

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You are 29% geekYou are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator.

Normal: Tell our geek we need him to work this weekend.


You [to Geek]: We need more than that, Scotty. You'll have to stay until you can squeeze more outta them engines!


Geek [to You]: I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain, but we need more dilithium crystals!


You [to Normal]: He wants to know if he gets overtime.

I like this assessment. I've always felt that I could communicate with a wide range of people. So, by this website, I am not geeky, but definitely not hip. My next search, then, was to find the difference between being a geek, a nerd, and a dork. Not surprisingly, I immediately found a webpage for this as well, which led me to understand that I have been feeling nerdy rather than geeky.

My results:
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Pure Nerd

82 % Nerd, 30% Geek, 21% Dork
For The Record:


A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.

A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.

A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.

You scored better than half in Nerd, earning you the title of: Pure Nerd.
The times, they are a-changing. It used to be that being exceptionally smart led to being unpopular,
which would ultimately lead to picking up all of the traits and tendencies associated with the "dork."
No-longer. Being smart isn't as socially crippling as it once was, and even more so as you get older:
eventually being a Pure Nerd will likely be replaced with the following label: Purely Successful.
Congratulations!
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I'm glad to now know that the skeletons (Rancor Monster) in my closet mean that I will end up a huge success. All this time spent on the internet has been totally worth it!

Incidently, the screwy font sizes on this blog should be evidence that I'm not geeky enough to fix computer glitches!

Steven Colbert's Green Screen Challenge

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

Take the Nerd/Geek/Dork Test