I spent a few minutes on Christmas Eve trying to convince my friend John Redmond that I am indeed a geek. I have the entire Star Wars trilogy memorized, I told him, which he didn’t quite get -- John is a champion accordion player and a wonderfully creative guy, but he hasn’t got a geeky bone in his body, and I had to explain that that meant I could recite the dialogue (including all of R2D2’s beeps and clicks) from memory. He was still not convinced. Finally, I had to say, “Look, John, it’s Christmas Eve and this is a party and we’re playing Trivial Pursuit
I never like to let the holidays go: it starts for me and my geek friends with the Lucia party my friend Bonnie throws in mid December, in which I get to light my hair on fire and serve fresh bread to folks to commemorate the arrival of winter -- it’s one of those “Hey, you got your Christian martyrdom celebration in my cool pagan ritual” kind of things, but any opportunity to play with fire (even if it is the safe electric kind) is my kind of pagan ritual. And it’s a great alternative to, oh, honoring the changing of the seasons by dying in a riot at Walmart over a $25 DVD player.
And what about this week out of time, these days between Christmas and New Year’s? Mostly, I’ll be playing with my beautiful new iBook -- a painful expenditure on a necessary piece of business equipment for a freelance writer/editor/web geek that at least has the side benefit of being a lot of fun -- and eating all those leftovers from the Trivial Pursuit/Upwords parties that just happened to coincide with Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I’ll also be listening to DJ Lo-Fi’s (aka Andy Cirzan) bizarro compilation of weird Christmas music, an annual tradition about which I’ve only just heard -- if you hurry, you can still download the MP3s. I may just use this collection to experiment with the CD burner in the iBook. Maybe I’ll even make myself a Week Between, a cocktail -- or Spocktail -- specifically designed by the “selfless beveratologists of Spock Mountain Research Labs” to get you through this weird week.
More active geeks may prefer to spend this week building a gingerbread motherboard:
Or you could join the hipster Jewish kids who are tired of the Christmas madness too at the live-on-stage kitsch fests “A Jewcy Chanukah” or What I Like About Jew.
Geeks: they’re who I wanna spend the holidays with.
