Not that kind of geek!

This is an eventful week! Monday was International Grover Appreciation Day, and Tuesday was almost as momentous: It was on February 16, 1978, that software developers Ward Christensen and Randy Suess invented the Internet. Okay, they weren’t exactly creating it from scratch, or even starting the World Wide Web—but it was the beginning of the BBS, or electronic bulletin board system, a network of loosely linked online communities, accessible by modem, that occupied my thoughts and dreams throughout much of high school.

Oh, those days of printing out reams of bad jokes from a dumb terminal! arguing with anonymous Ayn Rand die-hards! debating the merits of US Robotics’ HST vs. traditional modem standards! and, of course, downloading ASCII porn! Yes, I was a geek.

But an odd kind of geek. As much time as I spent online, I was also a skateboarder, one who hung out with a weird array of misfits and geniuses. Going further back in time, the same dichotomy applies: I whiled away afternoons soaking up “The Tomorrow People” and “Dangermouse,” a tub of Breyer’s mint chocolate chip on my lap. Also, I’d meet up with numerous and varied friends to explore the creek behind my house or the chain-link-fence maze at UMass.

If there’s anything uniting these two perhaps-antithetical behaviors, it’s that I engaged in them with a near-total obliviousness to–I guess you’d call it–reality. My friends, some poor and troubled, others rich and even more troubled, were my friends precisely because I entirely failed to notice external circumstances, focused as I was on pages of BASIC code and the myths behind the Monster Manual.

When I got older, this became a bit of a problem, although my humiliations were generally internal and private: I’d suddenly realize I’d said or done something crass and insensitive—sometimes years later—and blush for no reason apparent to anyone else. But with each cringe-making epiphany, I was emerging from my geek shell, and learning to navigate the wider world.

All of which is to say, if my Sasha shows signs of geekery early on, well, what am I going to do about it? Distract her from hacking Facebook? Force her to play with the kids downstairs? Geeking out is a state of mind more than anything else, an ability to focus on the minutiae of life (and A-life) and, in children at least, to master a small corner of a wider world that, in general, they have no control of over. To deny a kid that control is pointless at best (a geek will always find a way), and at worst a cruelty.

So, is it wrong to raise a geek? It’s not wrong—it’s impossible. Geeks are born, not raised.