Still Just a Geek, page 34
Okay . . . something geeky . . . something geeky . . .*
I’m a geek! Everything in my life is geeky!
It’s going to be okay, Wheaton. Just sit down, and write about what you know.*
Okay. I’ll do that . . . later.
And that’s what I did for months. You have not experienced procrastination in its purest, most distilled form, until you’ve been asked to give a speech to a room full of people who are Mensa members. On paper, it sounds like a wonderful opportunity. Here is the chance to talk about ANYTHING I want to talk about to a group of smart people! But I have to tell you—trying to choose what that topic should be evokes the same kind of anxiety that walking into a hardware store or art supply store can induce.* All that straight up, raw potential—it’s exhilarating! It’s exciting! It’s invigorating,* it’s . . . massively terrifying and overwhelming.
I want you to imagine that you’re an explorer, hundreds of years ago. You are standing on the deck of your ship, and your crew is waiting for you to tell them where you want to go next. You look out toward the horizon and there is nothing but ocean in every direction. Now, you’re an explorer, so this is EPIC. No landmasses, no birds, just uncharted sea that as far as you know eventually pours off the back of the turtle we’re on, and down onto the backs of all the other turtles that hold up our world, all the way down, because science.*
If you’re an explorer, this is awesome, because you can just let the wind fill your sails and then you get to explore that vast, blank expanse of water until you find something. You get to make the map.
For me, this is terrifying, because I don’t want to make the map. I want the map to show me where I can go, and what I can expect to find when I get there.* So it’s like I have this beautiful work of cartography with some landmasses on it, a compass that’s really a butt if you look at it the right way,* and, where I’m going, written in the most gorgeous calligraphy you’ve ever seen, the phrase “HERE THERE BE GEEKY THINGS.”
As recently as ten years ago, “something geeky” would have been easy to define, because those of us who self-identified as geeks or nerds—and who solidified our membership in our culture by arguing what it meant to be a geek or a nerd, and why you were one but not the other because the other was weird—we were all part of a relatively small subculture, and we found our way to the things that we loved (and continue to love) because we weren’t particularly welcome anywhere else . . . or at least we didn’t feel very comfortable there.
And, right now, it is delightfully and magnificently difficult to choose one geeky thing to talk about, because the thing is . . . we won, you guys.* The geeks have absolutely inherited the Earth,* and all the people who tormented us in our lives because we were smart and weird and couldn’t catch a football* will be first against the wall when the revolution comes!
Yeah! Nerds rule! Good night!
[TRANSITION]*
I eventually figured out what I was going to talk to you about tonight, and I hope you like it, but before I get there, you have been promised SOMETHING GEEKY,* so I’m going to briefly go through some of the things that have been instrumental in making me the person I am today, all of them geeky.
Let’s start with science fiction, specifically in books.
In third or fourth grade, part of our curriculum was a monthly trip to a local library in Tujunga, California. One of the librarians would read us a short story, give a short talk about a literacy-related topic, and then let us pick a book off a table of paperbacks that we could keep. We were also allowed—no, encouraged—to check out up to three books, which we would have a month to read.
I was a nerdy, shy, awkward kid who was scared of everything, and the library intimidated me;* I never knew where to start, I was afraid I’d pick a book that the Cool Kids would tease me about reading, and I always felt lost in the stacks. This librarian, though, reached out to me.* She asked me what sort of things I liked on TV and in the movies, and recommended a few different books based on my answers, including the first real sci-fi book I can recall reading, Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O’Brien.* I loved it so much, when I went back the next month, she taught me how to use the card catalog* to find other books like it, entirely on my own. On that day, the library was transformed from a confusing and intimidating collection of books into a thousand different portals through time and space to fantastic worlds for me to explore.*
I don’t remember her name, but I do remember that she was in her fifties, wore epic 1970s polyester pantsuits, huge glasses that hung from a long gold chain around her neck, and had a hairdo that was ten miles high.* She was friendly and helpful, and when she reached out to that nerdy little kid, she changed his life. If you’re a librarian today, you probably don’t hear this very often, but thank you. Thank you for making a difference in people’s lives.*
I didn’t know it then, but one of the things that drew me to science fiction and then into fantasy was how it rewarded me for using my imagination. And it wasn’t just using my imagination to picture myself on a space station or riding a dragon;* it was using my imagination to visualize and believe in a world where the things that made me weird and awkward would actually make me cool and valuable. And in using my imagination to experience that reality, I was inspired to work hard to create that reality. I know that I’m not alone in that. Over the last twenty-five-ish years, I’ve met engineers, chemists, scientists, astronauts, doctors, and professors who all chose their fields because they loved science fiction, specifically Star Trek, and even more specifically, the character I played on The Next Generation. Whether they are male or female, whether they were kids who watched our show when it was first on in the eighties, or if they are the children of those kids, they all tell a similar story of being inspired by a young person who could use his intelligence to be valuable to the adults around him.*
To digress into* that for just a moment: my character on Star Trek, Wesley Crusher, wasn’t beloved by everyone.* In fact, while he inspired many people to challenge themselves to do great things with their lives, he also inspired some people to develop complex Rube Goldberg machines that resulted in his gruesome death and dismemberment, in ways that I have to admit are pretty creative and clever. I hope that at least some of those people went onto careers designing courses for American Ninja Warrior.*
I bring this up because over the years, I’ve determined that the writers on Next Generation missed a huge opportunity to portray something that was happening to me at the time, something that I have learned is really common when extremely intelligent young people are put into an environment like mine. See, I was the only kid among a group of adults, and we were together five days a week, ten hours a day, and while I loved them and they loved me and we were very much a family, there was always a generation (or two) gap between us, because I was a kid and they were adults. When work was finished, they could all go out for dinner and drinks, and I went home to do homework. When Depeche Mode came to town for a concert, I couldn’t get them excited about it any more than they could get me excited about the Tower of Power show they were going to see, together, without me.* And this created a tremendous amount of angst in me, because I so desperately wanted their approval, and I so desperately wanted them to think that I was as cool as I thought they were. I was very good at my job. I knew my lines . . . most of the time . . . and I got to work on time every day. I was present as an actor in the scenes we had together, and when it was time to roll the camera, I was focused and professional. I could relate to the adults around me on that professional level, but it was impossible for us to have a similar personal relationship, because I was not just a teenager, but an awkward, nerdy, frequently obnoxious teenager who was too smart for his own good.* For years, I’ve wondered what could have been, if the writers of The Next Generation had incorporated that kind of emotional conflict into my character. I wonder if that would have made him less of an idea and plot device, and more of a person, who screws up even when he’s trying his best, and then is so embarrassed by it that he can’t bring himself to apologize.*
Epilogue to that whole thing, by the way: as I grew up, the generation gap got smaller and smaller and eventually closed entirely.* Now, the rest of the cast and I are all just adults, some of them are my fellow parents, and we all hang out. Sadly, I was never able to help them understand why Black Celebration is superior to Violator,* but screws fall out all the time; it’s an imperfect world.
So to go back to the pre-TNG years: my imagination was where I was most comfortable, and not just because I got to be the hero of every story I told, but because I was good at imagining things. I couldn’t look at anything and take it at face value. I was compelled to think, Yeah, that’s fine, but what if . . . ? and then I’d tell a story about it. This is not always awesome.* Sometimes, my imagination gets away from me. I’ll look at a tide pool, and then glance up at the ocean beyond it, and completely freak myself out imagining that we are right now in something similar to that tide pool, and who knows that the hell is in the ocean beyond our perception.*
I know I’m not alone in this. One of my favorite smart people in the world, the physicist Michio Kaku, wrote a book that changed my life called Hyperspace.* At the beginning of it, he tells a story about how his parents took him to a botanical garden when he was small, and while looking at koi fish in a pond, he wondered what would happen if one of those fish was a scientist, and that fish scientist was pulled out of the pond by a human, then put back. That fish scientist would tell its colleagues that it had seen this amazing other part of the world that was just beyond the limits of their perception, and while it was in that world, it could even look back and see their world. Then, just as quickly as it was taken out of its world, it was put right back in . . . and no, it can’t replicate the experience because it has no idea how it happened and why are all of you other fish scientists looking at me like I’m nuts.
That story blew my mind when I was seventeen and first read it. It fired up my imagination in a way that hadn’t ever happened before. It made a lot of sense to me. Nature likes to replicate tiny, simple things into incredibly complex things—like the basic, fractal patterns that you can’t unsee once you know how to look for them in everything from sand dunes to oak trees*—so it stands to reason that we are in something like that pond, and there’s something just beyond the surface of the water that we can’t perceive, or even prove is there . . . and holy shit that’s awesome and terrifying all at once, and TO SERVE MAN IS A COOKBOOK.*
That is one of the things that binds all of us geeks together, I think. We all have vivid and active imaginations, and we all, in our own way, look at the world around us and say, “Yeah, but what if . . . ?” For me, as an entertainer, I write and tell and perform stories that answer that question. For someone who is a physicist or a doctor or an engineer, they actually do something about it. And when everything works out, one of those smart people sees something that an entertainer like me did, and an entire generation takes for granted that they grew up with a phone in their pocket, the least interesting thing about it being that it makes phone calls. I mean, it’s really distracting when my camera rings, or I get a text message in the middle of a game of Carcassonne, and it can be catastrophic to get an e-mail popup notification when I’m in a timed challenge playing Alphabear.*
So I guess this is a good time to talk about that other geeky thing that was instrumental in shaping my human existence: gaming.* Specifically, Tabletop gaming.
Of all the things I do that make me a geek, nothing brings me as much joy as gaming.* It all started with the D&D basic set, and today, it takes an entire room in my house to contain all of my books, boxes, and dice.
That time in my life I talked about a few minutes ago, when I was feeling weird and confused and frustrated and my awkwardness was set to maximum? That’s when tabletop gaming became the foundation of the best friendships I’ve ever had, and it’s the mortar that has held my group of friends together for almost thirty years.
And like science fiction, gaming inspires my imagination, because when we play a game—any game—we are using our imagination to bring a world to life, and that’s truly special, because while all destruction is essentially the same, when you create something, it’s different every single time.* When you create something together, you’re building bonds with your fellow gamers that could last for your entire lives. The Venn diagram of my best friends, my gaming group, and people from high school I still hang out with is one perfect circle. And the whole reason I created my show, TableTop,* was because I wanted to help other people find the same joy, the same friendships, the same enduring relationships that I found, because of gaming.
[TRANSITION]*
The last geeky thing I wanted to talk about before I get to what I’m actually going to talk about is what it means to be a geek, or a nerd.*
When I was young, and those magical pocket phones I spoke of only existed in speculative fiction, I privately mocked jocks for their tribalistic football rituals the exact same way that they openly mocked me for playing D&D, never realizing until very recently that though we loved very different things, we loved them the same way, and that’s when I started talking about how being a geek isn’t about what you love; it’s about the way that you love it. My friend John Rogers once observed that fantasy sports is D&D for jocks, and I love that, because it means that everything is geeky if you do it right. (Parenthetically, I won my fantasy baseball league year after year by drafting overvalued fan favorites early, and then trading them to people who didn’t understand sabermetrics. Because, you know, game theory and stuff.)*
I mean, that’s the really great part about being a nerd, isn’t it?
A normal person just turns on their computer and is happy that it works. A normal person can’t understand why you’d want to compile your own Linux kernel on a Slack-ware installation that you’re running on a virtual machine, but I wonder why you wouldn’t want to do that.
A normal person sees a movie and enjoys it. They maybe even talk about it a little bit afterward. But we see a movie as source material for our fan fiction, headcanon, and thousands of hours of . . . lively . . . discussion about our fan theories.
A normal person turns on a light bulb, and never even stops to think for a second about how much Edison screwed over Tesla, and they probably don’t even want to attempt to build their own Van de Graaff generator or Tesla coil.*
Where a normal person sees something like . . . a slice of sourdough bread, a baking geek sees a starter that’s been carefully fed for years and wonders how long the dough was allowed to rise, and was it folded?* Or was it punched and kneaded? Or maybe it’s no-knead! Maybe I can get some of that starter, grow my own starter from it, and then do a side-by-side comparison of my own loaves, accounting for humidity, ambient temperature and oh god I forgot that there are fifteen people in line behind me and I haven’t ordered my sandwich, yet.
In my defense, he did ask me if I wanted to try their new sourdough bread.
So when I think about what it means to be one of us, when I think about what it means to be a geek or a nerd or a dweeb or a dork or a doofus or a weirdo,* I think that it means that we love things in a uniquely enthusiastic way. And we get so excited about the things that we love, that we can’t help but share them with other people, long after they’ve lost interest and really just want us to tell them if we want the sandwich toasted or not.*
And while our enthusiasm for the things that make up what we tend to think of as “geek culture” is awesome, I have to say something about that:
We don’t get to decide what the right way is to be a geek about a thing.* We don’t get to decide who gets to buy a ticket to Comi-Con any more than a baseball fan gets to decide who gets to buy a ticket to see the Dodgers. (Oh, side note: Fuck you, Time Warner Cable. Give me my goddamn Dodgers back on television you scabby bawface dobbers*).
And I can go on and on about how those of us who are elder geeks probably feel like it’s just so damn easy to be a geek right now, the damn kids today don’t know how good they have it!* And if everything is geeky, maybe nothing is geeky, and that means that gate-keeping in geek and nerd culture is a pointless waste of time.* So when someone tells you that they love X-Men, or Game of Thrones, or Star Wars, or learning to program in Python, the best way to respond is with a high five* (or sci-five*), not a pop quiz and a summary judgment. Because every single one of us, when we were protonerds, met someone who said, Oh, you like this thing that I like? Cool! Let’s like it together and meet some other people who will like it with us. And, BOOM: the first Star Trek convention happened. And it was awesome, and then there were conventions everywhere for everything nerds loved, and it gave us a place where we could be who we were without being afraid of the cool kids making fun of us.*
HASHTAG PRIDE*
And when shitty corporations tried to turn conventions into an efficient way to separate fans from their money, it was people like us, who shared our passions and enthusiasm, who stopped them, and made conventions about celebrating the things we love.*
So, if I may: It isn’t enough to be kind and welcoming to the people who want to join us in celebrating all the amazing things that we love. When we see someone being a gate-keeper, we have to walk right up to them, say “Don’t be a dick,” and bring that person they were trying to keep out right into our clubhouse. Because the next Joss Whedon or Elon Musk or Kelly Sue DeConnick* is just discovering nerd culture for the first time, and I promise you that we want them to be part of it.
