ange posts again (after a two-week hiatus)

After years of denial, I have finally conceded to what most of you probably and already believe to be true – I am a geek. Through and through.

This startling - but not completely unexpected - revelation happened a few weeks ago as I was flipping through the newspaper and my eyes fell upon this one particular article: “Largest known prime number found”. I was all, that’s pretty cool, and I then proceeded to read article intently beginning to end with a great deal of interest. Then suddenly, I stopped as the realization hit me. “Oh my goodness,” I said to myself softly. “I think I’m a geek.”

The week before, Tim had been over helping me put up Christmas lights on my house. Having braved the climb up the ladder an entire two times to hang up the rather high-maintenance icicle lights to the roof, while 60 km/h winds gusted in the cold night air, I decided that Tim could finish off the paltry 5/6 of roof length that was left while I stood down below and hollered instructions and gave some constructive criticism on his icicle-light attachment techniques (I know, this is quite the run-on sentence, and adding this little statement isn’t helping matters much). “It’s crooked!” “They’re not spaced out enough!” and “What’s taking you so long anyway? And could you stop shivering so much? The ladder’s shaking and it’s scaring me!” I’m kidding about the last part, by the way. Really! I am!

Anyway, there is a point to this story. At one point, as Tim was climbing up the ladder I shouted frantically “Hey, be careful! We set the ladder up sort of crooked, so the load distribution on the edge of the roof is uneven!”

He sort of turned around from where he was on the ladder up near the roof, and even in the semi-darkness I could see him raising his left (or right, I actually don’t quite remember) eyebrow in a mixed expression of disbelief and perplexity. Afterwards, when he was back down on the ground again, he said to me, “Load distribution?! Ange…you’re a geek.”

“I’m so NOT,” I insisted to him stubbornly, even while I was mentally estimating the reaction loads on the roof. I can’t help it, I do this sort of stuff at work all day; I assured myself, albeit unconvincingly.

Then there was my snowboarding trip with Gamoon earlier this week (during which I fared much better getting off the ski-lift than my previous excursion to the slopes). The day so far had gone by without much incident although the slower runs resembled a human obstacle course with immobilized small children dotting the landscape like freshly fallen pinecones in the snow. “The run is going to be really packed now,” sighed Gamoon on one of chairlift rides up halfway through the day, as the line-up below started to become increasingly crowded.

“Yeah, but it doesn’t matter because the chairlift can only bring so many people up at a time, so the rate of flow to the top of the hill remains constant,” I replied matter-of-factly, without skipping a beat.

Gamoon snickered at me. “Tim’s right, you ARE a total geek.”

Fine, I’ll admit to it, I like watching Star Trek. And my friends and I have laughed at movies like “The Core” and refused to watch them solely because we knew the premise was scientifically impossible (or, highly unlikely). If anything, I blame my education. I blame every professor that cracked many a lame engineering joke until finally, we the students started laughing at them too. Maybe we all wanted to believe that we were merely sniggering at the lameness of it all, or politely chuckling to appease the professor and to fill the uncomfortable silence that ensued, but deep down inside, we were reveling in nerdish glee.

I’d like to blame my engineering classmates as well. (Now I sound like I’m accepting an award. “I’d like to thank the following people…”) Only, I won’t name any names here. But…oh heck. Rich, Shaun, John, Dave, Roopsy, Christine, Danny, and April have all had a hand on numerous occasions for nurturing what has inevitably become second nature. Like the time we gave each other nicknames (and may I add here that they were very short-lived) like “Eigenvalue” and “Laplacian Operator” during our BVP class and thought they were fall-down-on-floor hilarious. Or the time Roopa and I were walking down a hall in the McConnell Engineering building and saw this door down the corridor closing itself at the pace of a wounded turtle crawling through a vat of tar. We looked at each other, and said at the same time, “Too much damping”.

But I suppose the most concrete affirmation is when your own fellow engineering classmates bestow the title of geek upon you themselves. Wanting desperately to be reassured with a “Oh yeah, that totally happens to me too”, I told them the Christmas light-hanging incident today and instead found myself being laughed at.

So…there you have it. I’m a geek. Ah well, at least I drive a nice car.