Tiiiiin roof...rusted...

I’ve been having some long telephone conversations with a married man (not my husband) recently. A few times we’ve talked for at least two hours late into the night.

Don’t get any crazy ideas though. I’m not having an affair or anything fun like that. I’m revamping one of our online courses, and it needs to be done before next Tuesday. The guy I’m chatting with, Larry, is the web master, and I am one of the curriculum specialists (that’s a fancy title for “girl who writes the crap that everyone teaches”).

Larry is a “Nervous Nelly” – that’s Poetroad’s characterization anyway, but I’d have to agree. Larry gets a little anxious about things (ha ha…isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black), and when we work on a project together, he calls two or three times a day on the days that he is webbing my stuff. I’ve finally figured out, though, that when I want something done on the site that a conversation will ensue. I always email the directions and the material, but he is a verbal processor. Larry needs to hear me say it in order to understand what I mean. Often I am simply reading straight from the email, and every time he responds as if he never “heard” me say that before. It’s not a criticism; he’s just quirky that way.

But this post really isn’t about Larry. It’s about how I’ve slowly begun to own up to my steady migration into geekdom. Often I find myself chatting with Larry about the course – talking through the problems and working the kinks out of the course navigation (our courses are a little bit like textbooks online because they are designed so that students can work on the work in an asynchronous fashion) – and the epiphany comes in short bursts. “I know what the word asynchronous means. I care about what the word means. He is speaking in computer speak. I understand him and I care.”

The descent was long in coming. Actually, I think that I was always there, and the veil is finally being lifted. I was a closet geek in high school. I’ve been in denial for a lot of years. When I had to purchase my first pair of reading glasses, that should have been a huge clue. Nothing is wrong with being a geek. I just tended to characterized myself as “athlete” or “parent” or “girl who likes to read and talk about literature” or “girl who likes to wear black and wishes she had a tattoo but won’t get one for fear that she will be seen as one of those large ladies who gets a cute little tattoo on her ankle to somehow make her jumbo calves look smaller” or just “sexy lady.”

Okay, I just threw that last one in for fun.