Geek Limbo

Fantasy writer David Eddings passed away yesterday. It's only fitting then, that tonight, totally unexpectedly, I found myself geeking it out with a friend, both of us peeling back additional layers of geek/dorkdom as I sipped on my water and he downed a non-Belgian beer. We had started off at a safe place. Magic the Gathering. Dorky, but semi-mainstream (relatively). Then we dug a little deeper to talk of roleplaying games and Dungeons and Dragons. Then we went lower.

I generally love playing the "You can't out dork me game." I rarely find myself losing, and winning is oh so fun. But tonight, it was a challenge.

We spent the next half hour comparing notes on the Dragonlance animated movie, jogged each other's memory about obscure pulp fantasy books, and lamented the loss of his first editions due to a basement flood. Eventually, we started to frighten our other friends at the table, one of whom I share a not-so-secret comic book geekdom with. When a fellow geek is getting freaked out by your current geekery, that's like a new low.

Suffice to say, I've never had a conversation with someone where the words "Silvanesti, Qualinesti, and Kagonesti" were ever said out loud. I think I'll treasure tonight's conversation.

If you're a geek of the Star Wars variety, you have to watch Fanboys. I just watched it on DVD the other day and laughed like crazy. I need to rewatch it to get all the references and go memorize some more lines.

Tonight made me think about how the things you love and obsess over in middle school are so important. That's the age when you're still young enough to love something even if it sucks but not yet old enough to realize that nobody else likes it and being different might be bad.

I'm going to take a poll the next few days and test a new mini-theory: The stuff that adult dreams are made of, all started in middle school. Sounds like a good hypothesis, doesn't it?