It is my birthday, and so far it has been awesome. Technically my birthday has consisted of: twenty minutes standing on a train platform, forty minutes riding that train, one hour watching t.v., six hours sleeping, fourteen minutes and twenty seconds talking to my mother, one minute and forty seconds talking to my father (we got disconnected,) another hour falling in and out of sleep, and around five minutes with Doc concocting the most disturbing body we can for him out of animal parts. And it has been awesome.

I personally think giving gifts is really fun but that’s because I rarely take into account what the other person needs or wants. That is not to say I don’t try to give them something they will like. A gift is supposed to cement social ties and say “I know who you are, I was thinking about you, and I like you.” That said, I have never tried to get a gift for my own child, especially one that lives in a grown up-ish body. I would imagine that would be hard because everything they have is already a gift. You are a river unto your people. It’s hard to play on an inside joke because since you live in another city you probably miss the funniest stuff that happens. I mean, I tried to convey the humorousness of the time I got handcuffed in Dallas by the DART police to my parents but instead of laughing they just told me I was an idiot. I also just don’t want as much stuff as I used to. In fact, I only want things in the way Miss America contestants do; i.e. things ludicrously out of reach.

That’s why the twenty bucks they surprised me with in the mail was so great. As someone who has no money of their own, but still manages to have quite a bit of stuff, this may sound weird but it has been a long time since I had that kid feeling of “this is mine, all mine, and I’m going to blow it!” Like an eight year old Wil Wheaton with five bucks in his pocket, I thought of a myriad of ways to spend it. I could wait until Friday and share my wealth with people at The Broken Record in the form of fifty cent Pabsts. Do you know how many beers that is? Forty! (Minus tip) I, like Wil Wheaton before me, thought of saving my money and putting it towards something later but that is a slap in the face to the spirit of the gift. After calculating how many lemon drops I could buy, I ultimately decided to spend the entirety of my fortune on w00tstock and watch Wil Wheaton talk about how awesome having five bucks could be.

There was a brief moment where I wondered if I was geeky enough to go to this. Generally we like to think that geeks are a friendly and accepting bunch; but, as more and more people come into the geek fold, there are those who suffered for their preferred recreations who are wary of people who didn’t pay their dues. And I’m a kind of cheap guy. I watched my friend Patrick get kicked out of D&D club because he wasn’t a serious enough geek and, for my part, was never even allowed to play a game. To this day people laugh when I say not playing D&D is a regret of mine but I’m 100% serious. It was my own fault though. I can still remember the day when I told my friend Michael that we probably shouldn’t talk about Star Wars so publicly anymore. I remember guiltily looking on as Leif was mocked for trying to explain the difference between an AT-AT and an AT-ST to someone who mislabeled them. (I actually remember being a little confused as to why I should have to jump in since I thought everyone already knew the difference.) In high school I quickly learned that correcting people, in general, was just a bad idea. Sure, I still memorized most of the items in Diablo II and could call them without the use of an ID scroll but I was coordinated enough to skateboard and experienced a pretty decent and stigma free adolescence. Plus, as long as we’re being honest, video games are geek amateur hour. They’re almost the new football at this point. In high school my friend “D” made graphs plotting what he was going to do per level with his Diablo characters; he also carried a switch blade, was actually on the football team, and had his hands in a number of illicit ventures.

My fears were completely unfounded and the fact that there were so many moments of mixed laughter coming from different parts of the hall only served to remind me that there is no one type of geek. There were word geeks, programming geeks, gaming geeks, young geeks, old geeks… I could go on and on.

I started this post with the intention of talking about how much fun I had at w00tstock. I wanted to talk about the feeling of belonging and how funny everyone was, including the audience, but instead I wound up talking about geek guilt and thinking about labels. I wasn’t sure I could live up to the title of a Geek last night and today I don’t think it matters. I feel like today there are more things than ever to be interested in but instead of viewing ourselves as a huge ven diagram (the kind that Wil Wheaton and Paul of Paul and Storm made when designing W00tstock) we are defining ourselves and each other more narrowly than ever. “I’m a geek,” we say, or, “She’s the vegan one.” Maybe Chuck Klosterman is right and it’s all The Real World’s fault for casting stereotypes and editing people into one dimensional characters. I don’t know. What I do know is that there are vegans out there who love shooting guns and there are English scholars who still watch T.V. So yes, we should celebrate the fact that everyone at The Swedish American Hall last night wanted a secret passageway activated by book and we should hold on to that feeling of saying “ARRR!” with a roomfull of other people; I just don’t want to forget that all those people were different.

Today is my birthday and for the first time in twenty three years I feel different than I did the night before. (Unless you count nausea.) Thank you Wil Wheaton, Adam Savage, Paul and Storm, Molly Lewis, Kid Beyond and every single person in attendance last night for making me feel like I was a tiny part of something and bigger than it at the same time.

Moments from w00tstock

I got my w00tstock poster signed! Adam Savage laughed at my friend Josh Wood in print!

Kid Beyond was the only one with a pro body-graph stance and no one had given him the chance yet. I was happy to oblige.

The happiest and saddest song

Paul and Storm from the night before

Molly Lewis

The previous Kid Beyond link was for his official site but I recommend checking out his blog My Idea of Fun which focuses on the supervocalic (and has cool videos pulled from the youtubes)

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It is my birthday, and so far it has been awesome. Technically my birthday has consisted of: twenty minutes standing on a train platform, forty minutes riding that train, one hour watching t.v., six hours sleeping, fourteen minutes and twenty seconds talking to my mother, one minute and forty seconds talking to my ...