GeekFest 2007: The Perils of Geekdom

Not everyone knows this, but geekdom has the power to create its own altered state. It can seem like a certain type of person is drawn to the lifestyle of a geek (a particularly socially awkward, bespectacled type) but this is not always the case. Sometimes, the lifestyle chooses the geek and works its own magic.

I like to think that I am not someone you would immediately peg as a geek. I don't play MUDs (online, multi-user dungeon games), I don't wear the same T-shirt for a week on end, I don't tape my glasses together, and I don't drink Red Bull while scarfing down a bag full of drive-thru food at midnight. I have a life.

Well, most of the time.

When a GeekFest is upon me, all bets are off. Like a werewolf, I transform. It starts in little ways at first and then gains speed the longer I stay in the zone. The Geek Zone.

My entry point into the geek zone last holiday weekend was my big push to get the revamped AlixNorth.com online and fully functionally. This involved doing a lot of system administration and development-you know, unglamorous stuff like editing php code, testing spam filters, configuring modules, and entering UNIX commands at the command line.

If I do this for enough consecutive hours, I find myself plunged deep into the Geek Zone. That, my friend, is a very strange place to be, as weird and haunted as the waters At World's End. I look different, act different, and am very much not myself. Meet me during a GeekFest and you might think I spend my spare time hanging out with a bunch of Dungeons & Dragons buddies, arguing about which UNIX text editor is best.

The four-day GeekFest 2007 was necessary, though. I wanted to get AlixNorth.com done - at least, done enough - so I could get back to writing and making art. I had been running at half-a-geek for a couple of weeks, as the circles under my eyes suggested, so it was time to do the big push and get to the finish line, whatever the cost. And there is a cost.

The first thing to go was my sense of time. I had already gotten into the habit of staying up past midnight, fixing problems. For the GeekFest, though, my grip on time spiraled away completely. I would be up until 3 am or 4 am and then I rolled out of bed to at 8 am to log back in. Normally, I'm the kind of person who doesn't wear a watch yet will still leap up to run to the kitchen seconds before a timer goes off. But under the influence if a command-line interface, I couldn't guess the right time with even a four hours window of accuracy. The cats would tell me when to go to bed and then finally give up to go without me. You know you are in trouble then.

Shortly after I lost touch with time, my diet changed. I eat things during a GeekFest that I would never eat otherwise. I dream of Dr Pepper fountains. I absentmindedly chew Red Vines while opening support tickets online. Drive-thru food, which I would otherwise shun, is not just "acceptable"; it seems like the best food ever. All I care about is that I can solve one more problem before I call it a night, and often "night" is nearing dawn.

The wardrobe decline happens immediately, but this weekend it didn't look like a problem until day three or four. That's because the black yoga pants and charcoal gray skull-and-crossbones T-Shirt looked fine on day one. On day four, though, you had to wonder about my personal hygiene. In my defense, I must point out that I have at least four identical skull-and-crossbones T-shirts and I wasn't actually wearing the same one everyday, but it sure looked like I was! Rolling out of bed in the morning to start typing again immediately, my 2-1/2 inch hair standing wildly on end, I usually didn't tear myself away until noon to shower. (The wardrobe issue could have been worse. During GeekFest 2005, the elastic on the rather old stretch pants I was wearing started to give way, and I found myself reaching for a binder clip to fix it. Now that's a hot look.)

What is it about a techno-binge that creates this "other world" reality? I don't know, but I became familiar with it back in the 80s, when I was learning two programming languages at once and working full time. My head swirled with algorithmic design mixed up with cravings for Burger King; my dreams involved finding a keyboard that hooked up to my alarm clock so that I could reprogram it.

It was back then that I decided I did not have a future as a software engineer. I say this not because I was not capable; I was. But I realized then that the goddess of Geekdom was a possessive goddess. To worship at her altar demanded a personal price that I was not willing to pay.

And so, I function at best at one-quarter geek power, taking the requisite time to honor the Command Line Temptress in semi-annual festivals to keep her wrath at bay. Coming out into the light is always a good thing, though, and hey, check out this cool website.

She's still my goddess, in the end.

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