I will not obsess, I will not obsess, I will not obsess...

So anyway, a year and a half ago, I -- like too many Generation Xers -- found myself suddenly getting buried under too much credit-card debt. I mean, it had been there for years, accumulating as I luxuriated in the opulence of regular fresh groceries and new underwear in the very lean years before, and especially after, 9/11, when the New York economy went to hell, especially for freelancers. As it suddenly seemed like it was all going to collapse around me, I set myself -- okay, I decided it would be my new obsession -- to get rid of the debt once and for all. Which means that for the last year and a half, I have been working like a dog, literally barely taking a break, and dumping every penny that isn’t going to bare necessities and promoting my work (I felt a trip to WorldCon last summer to sell and promote my book was justified, for instance) to paying off the credit cards. And now, assuming that the dollar doesn’t crash and the New Great Depression doesn’t land on us and force us all into bread lines soon, I will be in the free and clear by the end of this year... after just 11 more months of doing almost nothing but working my ass off. (You know those numbers you see, about average CC debt? Hah. My debt was helping to skew those averages waaaaay up.)

And you know what I recently realized? The slow-but-sure hacking away at this debt, a dollar at a time, has been very much like the slow-but-sure hacking away at my overweight, a pound at a time, that I dealt with in the year before I came to this decision about getting rid of my debt. I have no doubt that the discipline that allowed me to lose the weight is exactly the same as the discipline that’s allowing me to knock down the debt. And more, and much more pertinent to geekiness: the same attitude that finally prompted me to lose weight is the one that partly prompted me to lose debt. Geeks like to pride themselves, I think, on being different, on NOT being normal (I had a “Why Be Normal?” button as a teenager, of course), and it was when I suddenly realized that being fat was now, in our obesity-epidemic times, “normal” that I told myself the way to stand out now was to not be fat... and if it was now normal to be carrying outrageous debt, then by God, it was time for me to get back to being the odd woman out and NOT be deep in debt.

I’m not saying it’s a healthy frame of mind. I tell anyone who will listen that I’m not a well person. But I’ve had to admit to myself that this is part of what drives me. And I think it’s something that many people who call themselves geeks with pride will acknowledge about themselves, too. We don’t want to be ordinary. And we push ourselves in our attempts to not be ordinary.

Anyway, the real gist of what I’ve been trying to get to is this: Geek Philosophy, as a nonpaying proposition, was one area of my online endeavors that has fallen by the wayside recently, not just because it doesn’t bring in any dough I can turn right over to Citibank, but because I’ve been obsessing about the kinds of posts I want to be posting. I gather links to things I want to write about and envision grand philosophical essays tying many disparate things together, and then I never get around to writing them because, god, who has time to write a book every week? (I do: no, I imagine I will, and then I beat myself up when I don’t, and Geek Philosophy goes un-updated yet again.)

But now I’ve told myself, I will not obsess. I won’t expect to write massive tomes about what a love of toys by grownups means for the long-term survival of the human race, and instead I’ll just post stuff off the cuff and see where it takes me in the aggregate. I’m putting aside Geek/Dork/Nerd for the moment, because I feel it’s run its course for now, but I am going to try to post at least one thing every weekday.

Of course, I won’t be obsessing about that. I’m trying to relax. But I’m a geek -- relaxing is not in my nature.