The Siren Song of Geekdom

I am a fangirl. I have spent a pretty large segment of my life being a fangirl. My fandoms are many. I am a card-carrying Buffyphile. (Figuratively speaking, I mean. There isn't an actual card. Is there? Because if there's a card, I'll get one!) I watched every single episode of Firefly when it was originally on Fox and then again when it was on SyFy (that just hurts to type). I adore Harry Potter, Twilight, Sookie Stackhouse and Harry Dresden. I watch Supernatural rabidly. I am waiting with bated breath for the new season of Doctor Who.

The only thing that I have thusfar avoided is Battlestar Galactica. Then, this weekend, I watched a marathon of Caprica and got totally hooked. (By the way, faithful readers, why didn't anyone tell me that, oh, I don't know... SPIKE!! I would have been all over this months ago if I knew that James Marsters was being a crazy religious nut in it. The only better than James Marsters is crazy James Marsters. I am not kidding.) About halfway through, I took note of the use of "frak" and then toward the end, finally heard the evil word: Cylon. So, it's a BSG thing. Prequel? I don't know, but I feel the landslide.

I can't explain, for those who aren't fandom obsessed, what this means. It's like being a part of a very small, very silent club. But, like the ancient Christians and the icthus in the sand, we have our ways of calling one another out.

Sometimes, it's a simple quote. "Dawn's in trouble. Must be Tuesday," is my go-to. If someone asks who Dawn is, I simply shrug and move on. If they get it, they get it and I have a new friend. "Never could get the hang of Thursdays," is a good one, too. They should be conversational. Quoting the Chinese curses in Firefly would rock, but I have never managed to memorize any.

Sometimes, you have to get fancy, though. Today, as I was dropping Brynna off in car line, I had the Buffy musical soundtrack on. "Where do we Go from Here" was playing when the teacher came to the car. There was a fleeting moment when the one teacher I have just never clicked with stuck her head in the car and looked around that I thought, just for a moment that maybe, just maybe, I would get that look. That excited, found a friend look.

"I thought for a minute that you were listening to something I knew," she said.

And that's the thing. The club, it is what it is. Sometimes you have those moments and sometimes you don't. And the people who aren't in the club, they aren't just not in the club, they look down on the club. They roll their eyes and shrug their shoulders and start to look at you like a killer tomato.

You can't push it. You can't say, "Oh, it's Buffy," because you don't know what'll come of that. And you can't predict. You can't look at the super-fashionable Coach bag and figure that they're just probably not that geeky. You also can't look at the lanky guy in the Star Trek shirt and figure that they must know all about Joss.

It's a motley club. Filled with soccer moms and astrophysicists and writers and dj's and teenagers and middle aged women. We probably wouldn't ever get along otherwise. It's a shared secret. A center to our universe. A neverending source of conversation and a haven from stress.

I secretly believe that world peace could finally be achieved through a shared fandom.