Yvette's Inner Geek Blog

My mom came out to visit a few weeks ago, and we were standing in the sun when Ben suddenly exclaimed, “Holy crap, you have the same eyes!” I knew it already, but it was fun to hear him say it (hope it didn’t weird him out too much, though). Ben took a photo:

The sun was really bright, hence the faces. Well, mine anyway.

I like having multi-colored eyes. There’s a dark green band on the outer edge of the iris and a starburst of golden brown around my pupils. In between is a medium green that battles with the brown starburst for real estate on a daily basis.

My mom’s father had similar green/brown eyes, though he was colorblind and insisted that he had blue eyes (and blond hair, though it was really gray). Interestingly, none of my Mom’s eight sisters have our hazel eyes —the oldest two have blue eyes and the other five inherited my grandmother’s brown eyes. What are the odds?

If I weren’t already an unemployed writer, I think I’d be a geneticist.

Will I take the red pill or blue pill?

When the line of salt is poured on the hangar deck, will I be on the right side?

Am I a Mac or a PC?

Among the important decisions one can make in life, the Mac vs. PC choice has drawn a hard line since its inception, and there’s little wishy-washiness permitted from either side. The new Mac ads and Microsoft’s response ads reinforce this notion of Identity via Platform. You either ARE or ARE NOT.

So what is one to do with a mixed background? I know that there’s a small percentage of people out there like me, who were not raised with hard-lined indoctrination.

My family’s first computer was a Macintosh 512K in 1985, but in school I was exposed to the Commodore 64 and the Apple IIe. Friends had IBMs with fancy color screens and floppy disks that were actually floppy. My family graduated to a color-screened Macintosh Quadra 610 at about the same time my high school put new 486 PCs in all the classrooms.*

In 1995, I helped my mom computerize her dental office with PCs that ran Windows 95, and subsequently inherited one of those PCs during college. Ben has built all of my computers from scratch since then, and I’ve watched him play around in Linux environments. In my last job, I worked closely with the art team (who of course used high-end Macs) and learned lots of Adobe tricks and developed a minor case of Mac Envy.

So that brings me to my current dilemma: My computer needs a serious overhaul, which under normal circumstances would mean that Ben would buy some new parts and reuse what he could to build me a new desktop. However, I’ve determined that a laptop will suit my needs better than a desktop right now. And Ben doesn’t have the manufacturing facilities available to build one for me.

For the first time in my adult life, I will have to choose a Mac or a PC.

I know the arguments. I’m familiar with the “Mac tax” and of the issues that come with the various PC laptops out there. I’ve recently touched and played with more laptops in-store than should be legal, and I’m trying to keep my biases at bay. I’m trying to be practical. I’m trying not to let the shiny, clever Get a Mac ads affect my choice (which is hard, considering that I am in their target demographic and they nailed it, man).

What it really comes down to is that I feel like my future identity will be shaped by the laptop I choose. Mac people want me on their side. PC people want me on their side. Open source purists chide me for not being geek enough to even consider Linux.**

There are four choices, as I see it:

1. Pick a side. Accept the identity of Mac or Windows PC.
2. Go underground and choose Linux or some other obscure OS.
3. Accept a dual life and learn how to be both a Mac and a PC.
4. Choose nothing and become a Luddite.

“Be grateful you even have a choice,” I hear my ancestors whisper from Beyond The Great Divide, because  they didn’t have the luxury of choices like these, and they probably also had to climb up a hill both ways in the snow to get the the outhouse, which wasn’t even an outhouse but just a deep pit in the ground that was surrounded by angry bears just waiting to come after them the minute they dropped their pants.

Dear readers, if you’ve been lucky enough to make The Choice, which probably means that a bear never caught you with your pants down, what choice did you make? Did you struggle like me? Has your identity been shaped by your choice? Do you really wish you’d been attacked by a bear just so that you would have been spared reading this whole blog post all the way to the end?

Thanks in advance for your comments.

* Ben was actually a student and an IT employee at our high school who helped install and maintain the school district’s network. I have a cute photo of us together in the high school server/computer repair room. Didn’t know back then that I would marry him and that we’d always have at least one room in our house buried under tangles of cables and scattered computer bits!

** Unfortunately, sometimes majority rules and this is what happens to open source purists who dare suggest that one has to be like them to be a real geek. Comic yoinked from Dueling Analogs.

Not only did Ben use trigonometry last week, he built some damn sturdy shelves for our storage room. My photos, let me show you them.

You can see the lines from where the old, rotting shelves used to be glued, and where they interrupted the drywall and were subsequently torn out. Note the sawdust on the floor: real men use miter saws at the project site.

Another close-up of the fancy angled support beam (which was only necessary on one of the shelves because the wood warped a little). The cement floor was uneven and required the use of shims to even it out. I would have just stuck some folded paper towels or something under the wobbly corners, but that’s why I leave the engineering tasks to Ben.

Here you can see Ben sliding on the painted plywood shelves (with sanded fronts so that certain accident-prone wives get fewer cuts and splinters). The spiffy design of the shelf makes use of the rafters for no-tipping support, but these shelves are free-standing otherwise. The middle shelves are different heights to accommodate the different boxes and containers we plant to keep there.

The tools of the trade (miter saw and safety goggles not shown). Hey… is that a new staple gun, Ben? And a Home Depot receipt? The answer is yes, and I got to play with the staple gun. It was more fun to use than I expected, and all I did was shoot up some extra bits of wood.

Nice job, Ben! Now how about all the other stuff on your Honey-Do list, hmm? 

My enginerd husband has now finished buiding (from scratch) and assembling some sturdy shelves for our storage room. The frames are made of 2x4s (FYI: they are actually 1.5″x3.5″) and the 2′x4′ shelves are cut, sanded, and painted plywood. It’s all screwed together and even tucked behind the exposed rafters to prevent tipping. He’s so handy! (Sometimes I even the domestic chore score by heating up dinner in the microwave.)

One of the frames warped a little, which prevented the plywood shelves from properly sliding into place. I didn’t know anything about this issue until he asked for my help. When I entered the storage room, he handed me the rubber mallet and crawled into the frame. First I thought he had been huffing something out in the garage, since hammering anything is always his Duty As A Man, but then he told me what was going on.

He was going to use his Man Strength to straighten out the frame from the inside while I hammered a cross-beam into place that would keep it straight. Oh, hey! I suddenly noticed that there was a cross-beam on the bottom of the frame.

So he did his job, and I enjoyed wielding the mallet for a few satisfyingly effective whacks. As he crawled out of the frame, I marveled at his ingenuity because I probably would have tried to shove the shelves in and broken something and then gone out to purchase a prefabricated shelf. The corners were quite fancy, and by that I mean not cut at right angles.

Ben smiled, quite pleased with himself, and said, “I used trigonometry!”

What a nerd, right? And so adorable. I think I’ll keep him (especially now that there’s more space in the storage room).

(The awesome stains on the cement floor are courtesy of the previous homeowners. Ben scrubbed the area clean before setting up the shelves, but we didn’t think it was worth the extra hassle or expense to try to remove the stains or cover them up with paint.)

I won an eBay auction for a 4-day pass to the San Diego Comic Con!

It wasn’t a stellar deal compared to the face value, but reasonable compared to what some people are currently willing to pay the evil scalpers. Oh, I’m sorry, I meant to call them “people who are unfortunately unable to attend the event due to a wedding/flaky friend/business trip.”

Now I’ve paid my money and I am waiting quite anxiously to hear back from the seller, who has to contact Comic Con to transfer the registration. I don’t think that I can handle another post-elation-let-down, so I hope that all goes smoothly and I don’t have to track down a dishonest eBay seller and unleash the Brute Squad upon him/her.  Not that I’m preparing myself for the worst or anything.

It looks like Ben and I will be leaving on Wednesday, but the return date is still a tiny bit up in the air. Do we stay an extra day (with added hotel expense) to go to Sea World? If the Padres were in town over the weekend, we would definitely go to a baseball game… but they won’t play a home game until the Tuesday after the con.  And spending six nights in San Diego is not an option for us this time around.

Sigh. When you have the time to do the things you want to do, you rarely have the money. When you’re making  money, you rarely have time to do the things you want to do.

And sometimes, when you’re making money, you preorder books on Amazon that finally ship out (and are charged to your credit card) when you’re laid off. But what’s thirty bucks when it comes to graphic novel deliciousness?

These are my favorite comics that I have been reading as they come out in graphic novel form. I am a sucker for almost any re-imagining of fairy tales and folklore, even if the story ends up not being as well-written as I’d hoped it would be (not the case for “Fables”). And what’s not to love about the post-apocolyptic scenario of one man left in the world? Whose name is Yorick? I’m also a sucker for characters whose names start with the letter Y. (Except for the reference to prostitutes named Yvette and Yvonne in the musical “Miss Saigon.” My high school theater friends got a good snicker out of that back in the day.)

I LOVE that the titles of Fables and (spin-off series) Jack of Fables are yin-yang: “The Good Prince” and “The Bad Prince,” respectively. I can’t wait to find out if there’s a reason for that in the storyline.

Oh hey, comics talk got my mind off Comic Con for a minute! Oh. But now I’m totally geeking out about it again because I remembered that “Fables” writer Bill Willingham will be one of the Special Guests! Officially on my list of things to do in the remaining 17 days until Comic Con: create three great questions that I would ask Mr. Willingham if I have the opportunity to meet him there. Because the last thing I want to do is to ask for his autograph and just stand there drooling geek-froth on him while he politely avoids eye contact.

One more thing before I end this undeniably pathetic written record of how much I need to get a life. I just found Bill Willingham’s website where he lists pieces of original artwork from his comics collection. Nothing there that I need to have, but it just reminded me of how quickly the San Diego trip could become a spendy adventure in Original Art Acquisition with a spin-off jaunt into Watching Ben Blow a Fuse as I try to convince him not to pass up the opportunity to purchase <one-of-a-kind-thing>.  Also officially on my list of things to do in the remaining 17 days until Comic Con: create a map of all microbreweries in San Diego for husband-bribery purposes.

Thanks to everyone who commented in answer to yesterday’s question of why I need to go to Comic Con. He read my post, read your comments, and posted a grumbly comment about your collective persuasiveness. Aside from him geeking out just a tiny bit about the mention of the Zombie movie marathon, which he had forgotten about, we didn’t talk about it much.

We emailed back and forth a little this morning (because real social interaction is for weenies) and here is a snippet of the latest email from Ben:

Sigh.

I don’t welcome your observation that I’m close to “giving in” to going to San Diego.  But the fact is, you’re correct.  The real (unresolved) question is, do we drive or fly?

OMFGBBQBACON I’M GOING TO THE SAN DIEGO COMIC CON!!!!!!!!1111111111111

*getting up to shake my geeky self in tempo with the House techno I’m listening to right now*

Okay, calming down for a second to let the world know that Ben is a manly man who never gives in easily and he is really just doing this for me, because he loves me, and that HE IS MY FAVORITE PERSON ALIVE ON THIS PLANET RIGHT NOW AND FOREVER and we’ll be BFF and *mwah* I love you, sweetie!

Calm just doesn’t seem like an emotion I’m able to write with right now. Sorry.

Let me give you a little insight into the timeline that has led up this glorious moment: I was already past the stage of dropping hints when I first blogged about wanting to go to Comic Con on February 22. This has been a long campaign and I’d like to thank all of my supporters out there who have helped make my dream a reality. If it weren’t for you, I might be… stuck in Utah being horribly grouchy and pouty from July 24-29. Ugh.

And special thanks to my one and only, Ben, who just made my day, month, year, life, etc.

23 Days left until Comic Con… excuse me while I go obsess about planning the trip. (Don’t worry, I’ve had the hotel reserved for a couple months already. Just in case.)

I really want to go to the San Diego Comic Con this year, and have nearly convinced Ben to take the time off from work to go with me. But he’s asked me what is turning into an existential question:

Why do I want to go to Comic-Con?

The easy answer is that “I just do, and please please please, I’ll do anything to make it happen…” But that’s not buying me the free pass I was hoping for.

Ben and I are both fair and reasonable people who like to agree with each other (or at least give consent) before making most medium-to-large decisions, and if I feel strongly about something I can often come up with a compelling argument to sway him in my direction. (Unless it’s about buying organizational storage or gadgets–he’s on to my weakness and I have to fight really hard for those.)

Though Ben is a geek in his own right, he doesn’t really care about going to the Comic Con and is having trouble seeing past the number of dollars that we’ll have to spend to make the trip happen (especially since I was just laid off, but I know we can make it work out okay financially). The thing is, if/when I go, I want him to be there with me and to share the experience. So I’m not going to up and go without him or storm off without his consent (though I did get huffy at one point early on and mentioned that was a possibility).

Ben and I have attended a couple Wizard World conventions (when we lived within driving distance of Chicago and Philadelphia) and he doesn’t think that Comic-Con will be much different. To be fair, I definitely enjoyed attending them more than he did. He likened it to taking me to a museum, which he generally dislikes because I have to study everything that catches my interest which means that we’re usually there much longer than he wants to be.

But my friend Liz and her husband will also be there to hang out with, and I’ve sweetened the deal and suggested that we also attend a San Diego Padres game. I’ve added a layer of complexity to this vacation and figured out how to spend a fun day at Sea World. I’ve tempted him with lots of delicious suggestions for dining.  Informed him that Mexico is just a trolley ride away. Mentioned that there was a Zombie movie marathon last year, which definitely piqued his interest. I’ve offered… a list of other things that might also pique his interest.

Then last night, after several weeks of serious attempts to acquire the green light on this geeky little vacation, Ben looked at me and said in a tone that I know means he’s about to break: “Why exactly do you want to go to Comic-Con so badly?”

And I faltered. I couldn’t pinpoint a reason when put on the spot.

I was imagining the swirl of people with their own motivations for being at the con: to buy exclusive comics and toys that would always remain in mint condition, to sell products, to hawk memorabilia, to be discovered as an artistic genius, to be the first to learn about all the new geeky stuff that will be released in the next year, to meet geeky celebrities, to attend panels and learn the answers to all the geekiest questions, to report on all things geeky, and to get some serious swag.

To be, for a short period of time, with a huge community of like-obsessed people in the same place at the same time and not understand until later the full extent of the experience.

To be a part of it all as a people-watching fangirl.

It’s hard to explain the giddy delight that swells up inside me when I think of this new adventure; when I imagine seeing San Diego for the first time and then entering that great convention hall full of the unknown-but-certain-to-satisfy geeky pleasures. Maybe it’s similar to the way a gambling addict feels when they enter a casino (but, you know, less destructive in the long run).

I know I’m not the biggest geek out there, but I’m partial to many geeky pursuits and there’s just something about the whole geek culture that keeps me wanting more. Wanting to know more, wanting to see more, wanting to be more. How else can I summarize my need to experience the Comic-Con? And how I feel a sense of urgency because I shrugged off my desire to go in previous years and this year just feels like the year to me?

Is just wanting to be a part of it a good enough reason to go?

My desire to attend Comic-Con is definitely more articulated here than what I could muster in conversation, but I’m still having a hard time determining how to answer to Ben’s question. Maybe Ben will understand more if he reads this post.

I’d appreciate any comments that might help me explain why I want to go to Comic-Con so badly.

I have one foot planted firmly on each side of the career doorway and am stuck doing repeated side lunges to the point where everything hurts all over… but when I try to stop, I end up teetering over the center until the side lunges start all over again.

I haven’t managed to do everything that I want to do lately even though I’m no longer working a full-time job. Crazy the way that works… but let’s go ahead and blame some of that on the fact that I am actually job hunting and so a fair portion of my days have been spent updating resumes and trolling Monster.com and local job postings and getting distracted by the online freelance writing advice or the pull of my growing You Can Do It And This Is How freelance writing books and becoming cross-motivated to still give the freelance thing a 100% try.

Blogging about this writing/career trauma I’m currently experiencing creates another conundrum: I need to start a second blog about Becoming a Writer so that I don’t turn this one into a play-by-play that will alienate readers who just want the really geeky stuff and don’t necessarily care about my writerly journey. (Which is okay, so don’t feel guilty if that’s you.) More on that when it happens.

For now, a few things geeky:

Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Gift Set was just released today.

Modofly. Speaking of RPGs, how about a beautiful Moleskine notebook with a laser-etched Cthulu-esque design on the front? Or a highly detailed locomotive? Or two old school joysticks? Or an emu? This artist collaborative offers several incredibly cool laser-etched artists’ designs on the front of Moleskines, which are the most beautiful, expensive notebooks out there. If I treat myself to one, I make sure to use a very nice, archival-safe pen to write in it. They’re also great for drawing in, but I’m not much of an artist so the most I usually have are little doodles for emphasis or detail. (Thanks for the link to the Wired article about this company, Erica!)

Kung Fu Panda opens in the theaters today, which I’ll probably wait to see on DVD. But I’m looking forward to the next few geeky movies that are coming out this summer!

That’s all the geeky links I have for you right now. This evening I’m picking up my friend Liz from the airport (YAY!) and I’m looking forward to hanging out with her for a couple days. My, how plans change… I was going to take Monday off work, but obviously that’s not an issue right now. Ben was supposed to be here this weekend, but unfortunately he’s on his way back to Ohio right now for a funeral. I’ll try to spend a little more time formatting my blog and website this weekend if Liz and I aren’t too busy being as Wild and Crazy as you can be in conservative Utah (which basically means adding some Peach Schnapps to orange juice and watching R-rated movies).

I’ll feel guilty trying to have fun while Ben is grieving with his family, but I sent along some heartfelt sympathy cards and I don’t think there’s much else that I can do at this point. I also can’t help but look forward to Ben’s return because he took a decent-size suitcase that could potentially transport a new-in-the-box Atari 2600 that is reportedly lurking somewhere in a closet at his parents’ house.

After the first full day alone in my house as a laid-off writer/editor, I’ve had plenty of Thinking time and Doing time and Reading time. (I’ll get Exercise time tomorrow, I swear.)

The Doing time was more tedious and less rewarding than I would have liked it to be, but I tied up some loose ends with my former employer and spent some time on my resume and job sites. 

Then the Thinking time took over and caused bouts of anxiety about The Future and Becoming a Writer. Oh gawd, THIS again? Haven’t I already droned on about my "becoming a writer" drama enough, like back THEN and THEN and pretty much every November when NaNoWriMo comes around? Yes, I have. And yes, it all still scares me.

Reading time was the highlight of the day for me, because I caught up on blogs, news, random internet pages, and a book that one of my coworkers loaned me a couple months ago that sat neglected on my shelf for too long (Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale, which was a good YA story based on a fairy tale but with some distracting choppiness). For me, Reading time generally leads to Thinking time, which then sometimes leads to Writing time. Obviously, it’s Writing time as I write this.

My friend Steev is in the throes of a defining period in his comedy career with Blewt Productions, and I’m wildly happy for him and my other friends from college who have followed down that same path. If they make it big, it’s because of serious hard work and dedication in addition to raw and crazy talent and imagination. I feel really lazy in comparison. But I found inspiration in something that Steev wrote while blogging his adventures in L.A.:

"Act like a big production company, do the things a big production company does, and before you know it, you’re a big production company."

I’m starting to act like a writer and do the things that a writer does. Sooner or later, I hope to discover that I’m actually a writer. Until then, I have a lot of work ahead of me.

(But oh, please, never let me stoop to even whispering the cliche that it turns out I was a writer all along, even if it’s really true.)

Because I’m a "high functioning" geek, I can typically blend into normal society and maintain a normal job for a non-geeky company. Even though I’m more comfortable in a geekier environment, I can still go for hours on end without mentioning the new action figures coming out or how the story arc of my favorite graphic novel has left me hanging.

But sometimes I realize what a geek I really am when geeky topics find their way into my mainstream conversations.

At work today, a few coworkers (who are in their mid-twenties) started talking about the Iron Man movie and how much they liked it.

I made a comment about how some people have a hard time with Iron Man’s character because of his responsibility for the recent death of another comic book hero (because saying "Captain America" wouldn’t mean anything to them).

"What do you mean?" one coworker asked.

Happy to play the knowledgeable geek, I told her a little about last year’s Civil War comic book arc.

"I didn’t know those things are still going on," she said.

"…" was my initial response. She was referring to comic books in general.

And then I blurted out something like, "Yeah, of course they are! How could you not… I mean…"

And my coworkers started at me, probably wondering if I was going to spontaneously combust into amusing little geek particles.

I returned to my cubicle and took solace in the plastic Spiderman toy that I got at Burger King last year. His eyes light up when you stick his magnet feet to metal, so I popped him on and off my metal shelf for a little while as I pondered my status as "high functioning" geek.

"Maybe not so much, perhaps?" I said to myself in a Zoidberg voice.