Tuesday, March 30, 2010

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.

6 comments:

Suze said...

We're not caught up on Caprica, but now we HAVE TO because - SPIKE!! I didn't know he was in it!
I'm not really a sci-fi fan, but my husband is, so I've gotten sucked into some of the better shows (like BSG).

Jenn-Jenn, the Mother Hen said...

Please don't shoot me, but I never got into Buffy - not because I wasn't interested, but because I was going through major depression (not to mention pregnancy and dropping out of school) when it first aired, and I didn't really watch much TV during that time. Can't watch TV if you have no television. Then the whole "raising a kid by myself" thing happened, then Mom got sick and died with cancer... So by the time I could actually breathe and watch TV again, the show was too far along in it's arc for me to understand what the hell was going on. BUT - Buffy is in my Netflix que, and I cannot wait to discover it! Same with Firefly and BSG.

One thing I AM all "fangirl" about is "Avatar: The Last Airbender." I think I've mentioned it once or twice on my blog. ;-) You should check it out.

I'm done hijacking your blog now. Peace out.

Becca said...

I have this weird thing in my head that compels me to convert a simple phrase-- [Pronoun] [verb] the [noun] [preposition] -- into a particular bombastic line from Once More, With Feeling. The words are somewhat interchangeable, but the end result is the same:

"They backed the install out!"
"She checked the source code out!"
"He said the server's up!"

If anyone ever mentioned mustard and dry cleaning, I would probably have an aneurysm.

Becca said...

This just pooped in my head: A good chunk of people I work with (techdrones) are Office Space fans. A few years ago, my building was reconfiguring sections of cube farms and we were moving around quite a bit to clear out the next spaces and move into the new spaces.

After my 4th move, I was chatting with some teammates and one mentioned how he was getting fed up with all the movement. I said, "Yeah, if they move my desk one more time, I'm gonna burn the place down."

I now realize how lucky I am that all my teammates got the reference. I don't think I can websurf from jail.

Jenn-Jenn, the Mother Hen said...

Okay, gotta say - lurve Buffy! I have all the seasons in my "watch instantly" que. Thanks to major squishage of my right hand (and the fact that Jamie spent the day with his BB), I spent a large chunk of my Saturday in bed, sipping leftover prescription liquid painkiller with my hand propped up and encased in ice, watching "buffy". I watched all of season 1 and am now about a quarter of the way through season 2. I was just introduced to Spike. Gotta say, love it!

Jessi said...

Jenn-Jenn - I came late to the party, too. I got interested when Buffy was in its 6th season, by watching reruns on FX. Unfortunately, I didn't get UPN (which was what it was on at that point) so a friend of mine would tape it with her broken VCR that recorded in black and white and I would watch everything in black and white. The musical is much, much better in color, jsyk.

I'm glad you are enjoying it though, so very, very good. And it only gets better (well, except for season 4, which has the worst big bad ever.

Suze - I know! I was so surprised and excited. I haven't seen him in anything since Smallville.

Becca - I also love Office Space. I am often guilty of threatening my fax machine with a baseball bat and gansta rap.