I’m a geek and I’m proud! 

Last night my husband and I watched the movie “Role Models“.  In the movie there’s a kid who’s really into a group that stages mock fantasy “battles” a la Dungeons and Dragons.  They were obviously making fun of a real life group that does this called the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) which I mentioned to my husband assuming he knew all about it being the hearty geek he is.  I was horribly shocked to learn he had never heard of it and told him that his lack of knowledge in this area was a serious blow to his geek cred (since I not only knew about it but have attended more than one “war”). So we had some discussion about what sort of things you have to have in order to be a geek’s geek and here are some of the things we came up with.

1. Science fiction and/or fantasy must be your favorite genre of entertainment including but not limited to books, movies, and for extra geek cache: science fiction/fantasy conventions and extra points if you dress up, and even more extra points if you dress up as some obscure Sci fi or fantasy character such as Taarna from “Heavy Metal“.

2. Comic Books.  You don’t have to collect them but should have some passing familiarity with their style, tone, and content–enough to understand and find hilarious the opening scene in the movie “Chasing Amy”.

3. Must have read at least two (or all for the most cred) foundational science fiction/fantasy books:

—Neuromancer

—Snow Crash

—Dune

—The Martian Chronicles

—The Foundation Trilogy

—Stranger in a Strange Land

—Lord of the Rings

—Brave New World

—Ender’s Game

—Ringworld

—Hyperion

3.  You must be interested in science and/or technology and actively read news/magazines/non-fiction books/journals (such as Nature and Science) in that general area. 

4. Be able to quote and/or understand amusing quotes from classic sci fi/fantasy t.v. shows/movies such as “We’ll nuke the site from orbit, only way to be sure”, “What are you doing Dave?”, “It’s People!”, “You maniacs! You blew it all to hell! Damn You!”.

5. You get extra points if you actually managed to become a Dawinian fit geek and produced a homozygous geek (one having two seriously geeky parents).

My 6 year old lost her first tooth today prompting her to ask this question:

“Is there any scientific proof the Tooth Fairy exists or is it just the parents?”

She hasn’t asked about Santa yet, but I’m sure it’s coming.

I answer about 1500 of them a day.  Out of those, around 1000 require me to make a decision of some mundane type–”Mom, can I have a popsicle? Mom, can I, can I, can I”.  It can be really exhausting.  However, the other questions–the ones that don’t require a decision but instead an explination–are one of my favorite parts of parenting because when your kid asks you about something in the world, you can answer however you want! Or as Homer says “Kids are great, you can teach them to hate the things you hate”. My answers are always based in science, always. I think about everything in a critical, scientific way–there are no exceptions, no subject exempt from this. 

My daughter’s questions range from the amusing:

-Do spiders have families?

-Can frogs drive?

-Why are trees green? (Never ask someone trained in biogeochemistry this question, the answer is 10 minutes long)

-Why is a there a pyramid on the one dollar bill?

To the heavily extistential, theological or epistemological :

-Is there a hell? (she saw it on the Simpsons episode where Homer steals cable)

-What does our cat think about?

-What happens after you die?

-When will I die?

-Where did we come from? (this required a clarification I wasn’t sure if she was asking where babies came from or people in general–it was the latter.  Another 10 minute explination).

When you take nothing for granted in the world, you come up with some really interesting questions.  What freaks me out sometimes however, is thinking about how other people might answer their kid’s questions–if they say “don’t ask”, “who cares”, or worse “that’s a stupid question”.  There is no such thing if you are forming your framework about reality.

Many of the questions my daughter asks are at heart, questions about science, most of which I can answer or explain correctly, but a few (like, why don’t we name black holes?) I have to look up.   You don’t need graduate training in science to raise a toddler but considering the questions she asks, it sure helps.

My husband told me last night about a show he heard on a NOVA podcast about the construction of a space elevator.  This idea I’ve heard bandied about in the scientific community for some time.  My husband said he was discussing the story with coworkers when one of them asked, “How long would it take to get to the top? [in orbit around Earth]”, to which the reply was “4 days”–my husband commented, “That’s a long time to have to listen to that music!”.

ha ha.

You know you have kids when you go into their bathroom to clean because Grandma’s coming over for the weekend and find this kind of shit: an Angelina Ballerina playing card smeared with toothpaste and shoved under the baseboard behind the toilet.

Now, I can’t really point fingers (although I showed it to her and asked her not to do it again) because when I was a kid I distinctly remember conducting similar messy and I’m sure infuriating science experiments.  I took this one calmly because I figure it’s karmic retribution for the time I froze a banana when I was 7 and threw it against the wall of our living room to see what would happen (testing the properties of matter).  Predictably, it made a large hole in the drywall which I blamed on my teenage, perpetually pissed-off brother; I got away with it then so I have to pay for it now.  I know one of my husband’s childhood science experiments was in physics–specifically gravity and trajectories: He threw a rock up in the air and then moved to watch it come down–it came down on his head, creating a huge dent that’s still there today.

What I am NOT looking forward to, is the universal justice for the time when I was a teenager and two friends and I drove a Ford Bronco onto a very large swath of lawn in the front yard of the house of a boy who had jilted my friend (the driver).  We put the car in neutral, hit the gas, and left a 50 foot, double furrow in the turf.

I know I’m going to pay for that one eventually.

My daughter is obsessed with the idea of alien life. She started off obsessed with the solar system when she was 2-3 or so; we took her to the planetarium and saw a show about the universe.  After that it was endless rounds of questions on the topic of astrophysics, most of which I knew but some I had to look up.  We spent time discussing how all elements in the universe, including those inside our bodies right now, were create by supernovae–we are all children of the stars to be romantic about it.

From there it moved on– I’m not sure exactly how–other than my husband and I spend a lot of time discussing this subject and subjects about space in general–she started asking if aliens were real (I think Scooby-Doo probably also had something to do with it).  And when I explained to her what we know about life in the universe: the commonality of the building blocks of life, the existence of life on Earth even in the harshest conditions, the size of the universe and the likelihood of other planets hospitable to life, she asked, “Where are they?”, which is of course, Fermi’s Paradox.

This is what happens when two geeks breed.

Mentally, it’s difficult for children to distinguish between fantasy and reality for years after they are born (at least they have the excuse of immature brain development, unfortunately this excuse wears thin for adults), but I imagine with the computer graphics we have these days, it’s a whole hell of a lot harder than it used to be.

My daughter and I frequently watch animal shows; the weirder the animals are, the more I like them.  We have watched numerous shows about deep sea life and all the bizarro creepy crawlies down in the dark, we watch countless shows on bizarre bugs, and have a large collection of bug books featuring creatures seemingly evolved as a bad joke.  On my coffee table I have a large book dedicated to animals who go all out for camouflage, each one a more extravagant assemblage than the last.

Recently we were watching one of the “The Most Xtreme” animal shows–this time “The Most” being “Best of the Bizarre”. The show included the platypus, naked mole rats, and others of similar ilk, and one in particular caught my daughter’s attention: the deep sea angler fish. Deep sea angler fish have one of the most bizarre reproductive strategies in the entire world: Male angler fish are about 1/50th the size of females, and when they find a female in the long, cold, dark, they attach themselves and never let go (although to anyone who’s had a super clingy ex this may come as no surprise).

Eventually, the male almost disappears entirely into the female’s body (I could make a joke here but won’t); their head disappears, they form a cooperative blood supply, and they look like they are some type of parasite or nasty case of the deep down warts–which scientists assumed for a long time they were until they figured out the truth.  After this section, for some inexplicable reason, there was a section on mermaids.  I didn’t pay close enough attention to see what parallel the show made between the bizarre but true and the bizarre but bullshit, but it confused my daughter.

Right after the show we were just about to eat dinner and I was busy prepping stuff.  My daughter was saying something about how strange the angler fish was; I was only half listening and distractedly commented,

“Yes, honey, the world is full of strange and wondrous things..” To which my daughter replied with the half question, half statement,

“But not mermaids”.