A funny thing happened to me yesterday and then again today. I’m not sure why I hadn’t consciously acknowledged it before, but for some reason it just became overwhelmingly apparent: there are geeks everywhere.
The first shoe dropped last night while watching the bonus features of Lost: The Complete First Season (a geeky endeavor in its own right – after all, who really watches all of the “bonus material anyway?). JJ Abrams was recounting how he had met Damon Lindelof, the writer for the pilot of Lost. Cue numerous cutscenes between the various network/producer people talking about the experience. What was scary was what they all remembered about meeting Damon for the first time: he had on this cool vintage “Star Wars” t-shirt. For a good ten minutes, this was what they talked about. Not the meeting of the minds. Not the creative powers, coming together to join forces. A freakin’ Star Wars t-shirt.
It struck me at the moment that film geeks might not be all that different from the regular IT variety. Here we had a bona-fide tribe of film/write geeks. Darwin, I think we’ve got ourselves a new species.
The other shoe dropped while watching an episode of Oprah (not intentionally, of course; Ashley had it on while we were eating dinner tonight), who was interviewing fashion designer Marc Jacobs. Enter Fashion God, clad in: plain black sweater over white collared shirt, plain jeans, white socks and tennis shoes, and a set of translucent military issue RPGs (rape-prevention glasses). Plus programmer-worthy unruly long hair. Cue another six shots of this same guy beside every hot model to grace the cover of a magazine for the past decade while wearing the exact same outfit!
That alone (nevermind the fact that in the wrong light, Marc Jocobs looks like a younger David Paymer or an older Tantek Çelik) was enough to justify the identification of yet another sub-species: the fashion geek.
The question is: when everyone is a geek, who’s left?