Being Neighborly, Part 2

I ended up working through dinner. Mom came and told me — I must have forgotten — that she was going out to meet Dad for a cocktail party that his boss was holding. “Dad called me to say he’s going to have to go straight from work,” she said, looking harassed.

            “I don’t see why you guys have to spend your evenings this way.”  I twisted away from my desk, popping my neck joints audibly. “You both hate socializing with all those people. When do you get any time to yourselves?”

            Mom winced at the sound, but she reached out and smoothed my hair. “Evening schmoozing comes with the territory, sweetheart. It’s one of the prices of success.” She grimaced. “Would you check in on Elle in an hour or two, and make sure she goes to bed at a decent time? We’ll be back late.”

No surprises there, I wanted to say. But I saw the tired expression on her face, and I just nodded.

After Mom left, I finished my write-up and started plowing through history reading. I didn’t realize how much time had passed until I looked up at the battered alarm clock and realized it was almost ten, which meant Elle had been reading on her own for nearly two hours. Usually, if left alone for that length of time she would come around to bug me at least once. She should have dropped in ask if I wanted ice cream (decoded: “can I have some?”) by now.

I got stiffly up from my desk and padded out to the living room. Elle sat under the glow of a single lamp. Her book was spread open on the arm of the couch and she only looked up when I plopped down next to her.

“Hey, Earth to Scout — do you read me?”

She looked up, frowning. Her eyes were wide and full of story.

“Tom dies. He was innocent, and Atticus did everything right, and they still found him guilty. It’s not fair. I don’t know why this woman even wrote the book.”

Oh Lord. “Hey,” I said, “I thought you weren’t even supposed to read that far tonight.”

She squirmed a bit. “I know, I just got started and then I couldn’t stop. I wanted to see how the trial would end, and then it was so sad I couldn’t bear to stop...”

I looked at her for a while, thinking about what I could say. She was right. Finally I said, “It is sad. It’s unjust. But it’s a picture of an unjust world, and you have to remember that’s what it is. Tom’s not real. He doesn’t die; you just feel that he does. But maybe, when you’re older, you won’t feel it so much—”

Elle interrupted me. “Don’t say, ‘when you’re older;’ that’s so stupid. And, anyway, what difference does it make? It’s already been written, so it can’t change.”

“The way you see it might,” I felt like the old man of the mountain, dispensing pearls of wisdom, and I could see that her brow was still furrowed, and her eyes looked suspiciously shiny. So I changed my tactic. “But the trial isn’t the only thing in the story, right?  What about all that stuff about Scout and her brother and that other boy, what’s his name?”

“Dill.” Elle scrubbed at her face. “They found treasures hidden in the tree in Mr. Radley’s yard, from Boo. I wish I could find stuff hidden outside somebody’s house. I still think they’re going to meet him. I just need to finish.”

            “Uh-cha-cha-cha!” I cut in, “Haven’t you read enough for one night?”

            “But I want to know what happens in the end!”  Elle wailed, “Besides, what else am I supposed to do?  It’s not like you ever do anything with me anymore. Not like Jem and Scout.”

            I exerted my will, and sacrificed myself on the altar of good older sibling-hood. “Tell you what, Elle. Tomorrow’s Friday, so I’ll do something with you after school. We can do some of our own exploring, even if we can’t sneak into our neighbors’ houses.”

            Elle sniffed, “It’s ‘Scout.’”

            “Oh, honestly! Scout,” I poked her.

New Story! Being Neighborly, Part 1

Actually, this isn't completely new (I wrote it last winter), but it's been gathering dust in my (digital) trunk, and I thought I should put it up here, so I can at least have something going up, even if I don't get a chance to write any time soon.  Here is "Being Neighborly":

When Elle came home from school a month into the seventh grade, she announced that she wanted to be called “Scout” from now on.

“Elle!” I said, not even bothering to look around. “I’m busy working. Can’t we discuss renaming you later?”

“Not ‘Elle,’ ‘Scout’!” She left the doorway and sauntered into my room. “Like in To Kill a Mockingbird.”  She scrambled up on my bed and I sighed and swiveled my chair away from my monitor to face her.

“We’re reading that book in school. I like it a lot, although Mrs. Torres had to get ‘special dispersation’ from the principal to be able to assign it to us because it has mature content. I think I’m mature enough, don’t you? Anyway, the girl in it is a lot like me — we’re both named Louise (ugh!) She has an older brother, too, and a father who’s a lawyer. (Well, I have a mother who’s a lawyer as well, and she doesn’t, but oh well.)

“Do you think we have any crazy neighbors in hiding?” She gave a little bounce on the bed. “We could try to get them to come out!”

I laughed. “It’s dispensation, not dispersation.

“And I’m sure we have crazy neighbors, El—” she glared and I amended myself, “Scout. But you can’t sneak into their backyards or peer through their lace curtains, because they don’t have them in an apartment building. Also, I’m not sure they would appreciate you going around banging on their doors — I don’t think Boo Radley even did, if I remember correctly. He never came out till the end—”

“Don’t tell me!” Elle interrupted, “We’re not there yet. We don’t finish the book ‘til next week.”

“Oh,” I scuffled through my dim memories of the book, which I had read in eighth grade, two years ago. “What part are you at?  Has the trial started yet? I thought that was the most interesting part.”

“Yes; I have to read to the end of it for tomorrow. I’m excited.”

“I wouldn’t get too excited, El — Scout,” I had a bad feeling about her enthusiasm. “You know that book is really for grown-ups as much as for kids. It’s not going to have a ‘happily ever after’ at the end.”

Elle sat up straighter on my bed. “I know that. And I’ve read plenty of books not just for kids — a lot more than you, Mr. I’m Always on the Computer!”

I rolled my eyes, “That’s because I’m in AP Chem this year, not to mention math and IT lab. And I do read — books that get assigned for all my other classes. It’s not that easy to keep on reading for fun in the middle of all the excitement that is high school. Just wait; you’ll see.”

Elle was marshaling her forces into best unimpressed little sister form, when Mom knocked on my door, which Elle had left ajar, and stuck her head in. “Are you lecturing Elle on the responsibilities of studenthood, Noe? I’m afraid your words will be wasted if they actually keep her from doing her homework.”

“I told you, Mom, I don’t want to be called Elle anymore; I want to be called Scout!”

“Alright, Scout, then; wasn’t there something we were going to do together?”

Elle made a face at me, but she rolled off the bed. “Division is worse than Bob Ewell! I wish I could just read all the time...”

            “Don’t worry, Scout,” I put in, “Reading assignments never stop!” I jerked my head towards the pile next to my desk.

            Mom shook her head at me. “I know you feel like you need to excel at Orton, but don’t be a slave to your homework. Come out of your cave and talk to your family once in a while.”

            “Mom!  Orton feels like I need to excel at Orton. Do you think I assign myself all this work for my health?

            “Go on, Scout. Let Mom drill you in divide, multiply, subtract, and bring down for a while, and then you can get to your book. You can tell me all about the next part after dinner.”

            Mom gave me a quick smile as she shepherded Elle out of my room. I could hear Elle beginning to say, “Scout thought school was a waste of time, too—”

            The door closed on Mom’s response, although I continued to hear the sound of raised voices as they retreated and I went reluctantly back to my chem lab write-up.

It's not cliché, it's archetype

This post, which marks a much-delayed return to the venue, with no promises on when I may reappear again (I'm about to start that terribly grown-up thing called "working a real job"), contains some quasi-critical thoughts on a certain pop cultural canon. Brace yourself.

More specifically, I'm writing partly in response to recently seeing a movie you may have heard of, Chris Nolan's third Batman installment, The Dark Knight Rises, and partly in response to reading a review of said movie on Tor.com. I actually liked the review--I thought it made several good points, although not all of the reviewer's responses were identical to mine (I read it after I saw the movie, and I recommend that anyone who is planning on seeing the film wait until after they do to read any further; spoilers lie ahead). However, reading and reacting to the review got my thoughts spiraling around, particularly in relationship to one of the questions the reviewer asked: Is the movie's story cliché?

Does this outfit make me look predictable?

The conclusion the reviewer, Ryan Britt, came to is yes, in some ways, and no in others. I agree (although I saw different parts coming than he did), but I would go a step further than that and say that what makes the movie work and not work (and mostly it does work), isn't whether or not it's formulaic. It's something else, something more rarefied.

Lets take one of the clichéd elements of The Dark Knight Rises--incidentally a part I thought was predictable, although Britt did not. It's one of the central pillars of the story, the emotional journey Bruce Wayne takes from beginning to end. In fairness to Britt, his point was not that the story was original, but that it was one he didn't see coming in this particular context. My point, however, is that the character's development arc is one of the oldest of them all; one that can be traced back through the canons (literary and pop cultural), appearing over and over again as one of the basic stories that humans tell each other.

It's not a coming of age story (that would be a whole other post). It's a story that picks up in the middle--after all, there were two installments to lay the groundwork. Who else begins a story in the middle? Oh, only EVERY EPIC in the western tradition.... At the beginning of the movie, Bruce Wayne has lost his way ("Midway through my life's journey, I was wandering in a dark wood.") He is isolated from the world (Like Odysseus stuck on an island in the middle of the ocean, but without the attractive nymphs for company). He has touched greatness, and then lost it. He is mostly reacting to things that happened a Long Time Ago. This should look familiar, too. It's kinda like a captain who lost a rebel war and now has to make do by flying around the universe without a particular destination. It's also sort of like when you and your best friend conspire to kill a king, and half a generation later, the memory of that conflict starts everything festering again (well, that one's not really a story with classic heroes, but my point stands). That point is: the story of the hero who begins the story carrying his memories as a weight is an old and well-used one. Don't we all know it? Haven't we all felt the same?

The emotional path Bruce Wayne/Batman's character takes after this beginning is equally well-trodden. He is inspired--tempted--to take up his old mantle again; he is overconfident; he fails; he passes through the lowest trough of despair, where his old abilities are reforged in the crucible of this nadir of suffering ("the sword that was broken is remade"); he regains his powers, and is able to return to take up the fight one last time. It is a classic story, not of the emergence of a hero, but of the rebirth of the hero, the renewal of the protagonist who has been ill-used by the world but is able, ultimately, to learn from that usage. It's been done and done and done, but when it's done well, it still evokes something in us.

The word I would use for this is not cliché, but archetype. It's a story we keep coming back to, because it reflects an experience we all share--that of being experienced. We all feel burned by memory, at one time or another, unable to return to the paths that we've walked before. Frequently, it doesn't end like the story, we don't return stronger to fight another day, but we want that to happen, and we appreciate watching characters who pull through their dark nights of the soul (no pun intended, I promise!!!), with the hope that we would be able to do the same. The story progression rings true to us, and that's why, even though I could see the shape that Batman's story was going to take from the beginning of the movie, that didn't prevent me from enjoying it--and being moved by it--as it happened.

One last note: archetypes, as I define them, have to reflect human experience, but they don't have to be realistic. They can be the experiences we yearn for, that we feel we can almost taste, even if they never truly happen to us. At the end of The Dark Knight Rises, Bruce Wayne makes the sacrifice of his life, his career as a superhero, but somehow he survives, and in surviving is freed from the suffering of his past. Again, this is an image that echoes back through many traditions--the moment when, through some magic, a character is miraculously freed of the conflicts that have haunted him or her. It is the moment when Athena descends to decreed peace from unending feuds of family honor, or when Dante climbs down through the lowest bowels of Hell and experiences the twist of the world that allows him to emerge immediately under the stars. In reality, there are very few moments that allow us to leave our past behind with one momentous step. But we know what that desire feels like--and that is what keeps the stories with the clichés, the archetypes, coming back. They show us partly what we know, and partly what we wish for.

....and another story fragment

Nobody knows exactly when it was that Lily Mae went digital. We wonder about it, sometimes, because it seemed to come on so quickly. It is so recent, it seems, that she was rolling around stubbornly in her bed of a morning, refusing the persistent, cacophonous call of her clock radio (large and boxy, with big red numbers flashing the time it was already outmoded by), that she was tramping downstairs for breakfast, pouring herself bowls of Frosted Miniwheats and Cinnamon Toast Crunch and shrugging wordlessly in response to questions.

No one is sure when things began to change, either. Some of us are disconcerted by that, and by the speed with which she evolved. They say they feel like our grandparents, who can’t understand why all their grandchildren need cell phones, or even our parents, who don’t recognize the evolution of the social world into something that requires you to be plugged in, on line, charged up, and logged on. “It’s all so different so soon,” they say. “How can anyone keep up with it?”

It’s true; we were caught unawares when it happened, as floored as any Gen-Xer who realizes that his children can communicate faster, and more constantly, with the world of visual and auditory stimuli than his Walkman-toting teenage self would ever have dreamed of.

Looking back, we begin to ask each other, “What were the first signs?” What was the point of no return, after which all other changes, all the inevitable slipping away from tangible, analog selfhood became inevitable? Was it when the alarm clock stopped working—succumbing to both the entropy of passing time and the fast-forward march of technological abandonment—and Lily Mae did not bother to replace it? She had no need to get up for school anymore, because she had programmed the material from her classes to download directly into her brain. Was it when she stopped speaking because her phone and computer could convert text to voice and voice back to text again? Maybe it was before all of that; maybe it was the first time that her wide-open eyes reflected back nothing but the faintly blue glow of the monitor they gazed into for hours at a time. Some of us say that she used to go days and nights without seeing, or even looking at, anything else.

We are all in agreement, though, that the change was in full motion when she started disappearing. We were already used to not seeing her—the hours she spent in her room did not admit to much, if any interaction, and she ordered all her meals (what little she ate) online, emerging hurriedly to snatch her sustenance, like a hibernating animal, before disappearing back upstairs for days at a time. But then there was the fact that her very presence would fade away; the sound of typing keys and clicking mouse would stop, although the letters and numbers would still dance across the screen and the cursor loop obediently after them.

Soon she began appearing—although appearing is the wrong word, since it was merely the consequences of her actions, the manifestation of her intent, rather than her breath or flesh or presence that emerged—on other machines. Somebody would start away from their monitor in shock when her strings of code, easily recognizable by their insolent, adolescent attitude, would appear in whatever document might be open at the time. She would take over wireless devices, or handhelds, whatever was near at hand, and flash though their programs like a ghost as she went about her own business.

Nobody remembers the last time we saw her here, in this house, in this world of forms, but we know, for certain now that she has gone. She has flashed away in a flash of electrical impulses, a sparking chain of information that snaps its way across the world, into another form, another way of understanding.

Another Story Starter

Story Fragment 2:

Around noon, there was a tock-tock-tock of someone at my door. It hurt to leave the patch of sun by the window, and the stretch of hardwood flood was cold and empty. I walked across it slowly, feeling the chill coat the soles of my feet and curl up my legs, raising rough-edged bumps on my bare calves. My hand moved as if through honey to wrap itself around the doorknob. Before I could twist to open, the knock came again. I felt the rapping through the palm of my hand, jolting up through my whole body. As if a spring had been released, I yanked the door open.

Orphea stood on the mat, her hand still raised. We stared at each other for a long moment, with the look of two conspirators face to face across a corpse. I realized the pressure I felt was partly the urge to release carbon dioxide from my lungs and draw in more oxygen-laden air. Somehow, the need to breathe persisted. The thought cracked the stiffness of my face, and Orphea smiled back. The tension ebbed out of her, a bit, and I saw a flicker of the girl I had grown up with in the curve of her mouth and the tilt of her head. Not in her eyes, though. Never there.

“Come in, Darkness,” I said, using the name only I was allowed, and stepped aside.

She came in.

“I was worried about you, Chicken.” She acknowledged my title for her with hers for me, but she was careful not to touch me as she brushed past, going over to the table and setting down her bag, “We haven’t heard from you in two days. Not since—” she turned back around, leaning back against the table and bracing the heels of her hands on its edge, “Excision night.”

Her eyes were clear and empty, like water so cold it should be ice, but hasn’t frozen yet. The darkness of them had dropped back and away, receded, and it was as if I could see a void stretching backwards through the space where retina, brain, even the back of her skull should be. To look into them was to flirt with emptiness, to feel loneliness and agoraphobia rise up to fill a sense of echoless space.

Before, when she had first changed, I couldn’t bear the feeling I got from looking in Orphea’s eyes. Before, I would also have been angry at her for this passive aggressive beating around the bush; for coming and speaking to me with the voice of the group, rather than as a friend; for using the names of our friendship to serve Melinda’s purposes. Now, though, I watched those feelings move by me, touching me distantly, but not possessively.

I took another full breath in. The air was a river rushing through me. Did it oxygenate my blood, so that it could flow as well? What drove it? I reached up and felt the ridge of the scar between my breasts through the thin fabric of my shirt. The demarcation line above the emptiness. Orphea’s hollow eyes followed my movement.

“Are you alright?” She asked. Her voice sounded light, almost trivial, as if she was asking about work, grocery shopping, anything.

When they took Orphea’s heart, she told me, she didn’t hesitate. The moment that Melinda cauterized and sealed her chest closed, and placed her heart, warm and bloody, in her hand, she knew what she wanted to do with it. She didn’t tell me what she did. She couldn’t; I was an outsider then, a non-initiate. I knew from the space behind her gaze, though, from her new abilities to hide and to send things away, that she had destroyed her heart in depths and in darkness. Had she taken it to a cave, or a crevasse in the dead of night? Maybe she had just thrown it down a mineshaft or an old well. If I asked her now, she could tell me, of course, and she probably would. I didn’t feel any desire to know.

Orphea was still gazing at me, her face making the shapes of concern around those mineshaft eyes.

“Would you like some tea?” I asked.

She sighed at me, and shook her head. “If you’re brewing, I don’t object.” She bent over her bag. “I brought strawberries.”

There was a part of me that would have smiled with half-irritation—Orphea knows me so well—but now it was too far removed. I just nodded. “That’s good. I made madelines this morning, and they will be good companions.”

Orphea did smile. “I knew you would have something baked.”

I turned away to fill the kettle, and she was suddenly beside me. “I know it’s strange, now,” She spoke softly, intimately. “But you need to take the next step. Once you do, you won’t feel so—so insulated. You’ll come back to the world, only you’ll be stronger, better—one of us.”

I put the tea kettle on the range, and the blue flame flared out beneath it. It was easier to make tea than to talk to Orphea about this crossroads I was at, to fall back on the routine of water, tea leaves, milk, sweet—milk…

“You want me to get the cream out of the fridge for the strawberries?” Orphea asked.

For the first time in an eternity, I moved quickly. “No!” I crossed to the refrigerator, and gripped the door handle. “I’ll get it.”

I eased the door open, blocking Orphea’s line of sight with my body. The wan fluorescent bulb inside flickered on, lighting the pale inner skin of my wrist with a crepuscular glow as I reached through the chill for the milk carton sitting beside the Tupperware tub holding my heart.

Return - With New Fiction!

 It's been a while - ages, in the life of the internet - but I am making a return to blogging, particularly to fiction blogging...I hope the world is ready for it!!

Joking aside, I was actually able to write a lot of new stuff this spring, mostly because of a fiction class I took, which resulted in a whole bunch of fragments, or germs that could metamorphose into stories, if given a little time and energy. In order to narrow down the options, and decide for myself which little story stubs are viable options and which are not (mixing metaphors like crazy, here!). I am going to post what I think are my four best fragments from the last few months, and ask for reader feedback about which should get longer and more evolved. The challenge for readers, should you chose to accept it: read the following passage, and the next three that will emerge over the course of this week, and post back to me which you think it the best.  I'm calling this "market research." I hope you tell me what you like!

Story Fragment 1:

At night she dreamed that she was underwater. The surface above her, like great translucent panes of marbled glass tinted in shades of steel and cloud-damp skies, wavered and buckled, bending the bars of light in oblique angles as they bored their way downwards. Piercing the aqua shadows, the rays of illumination seemed impervious to the shifting swirls of current. Where their light settled on her skin, though, it shifted and danced, so that patches of greenish glow fluttered over her limbs, revealing them, from moment to moment, as the pale color of abalone meat.

The movement of the water tugged at her body, gently, but with a great inertia, as if the mass of the oceans moved around her, and the depths of that great, liquid space spread down and out beyond her perceptions, extending on and on, until the far reaches lapped at the shores of distant continents. Looking up, she saw a bright light flare and expand above the jagged glass ceiling of the sea. It reached long fingers of light down to her, turning the water to clear gold. It was as if the sun was sinking into the sea. Any moment it would break the surface and sink down, obliterating her in a rush of steam as the world’s oceans boiled away. She opened her mouth to shout in fear--or possibly just excitement--and the water rushed in, choking her senses.

She awoke gasping, and powerfully thirsty. As often happened, she had curled into a tight and protective ball in her sleep, her head tucked forward between bent arms. In this instance, she had even pulled the rucked and rumpled sheet over her head. The thin cotton pressed against her eyes and mouth like a shroud as she struggled awake. Finally free, she lay for a moment uncovered in the darkness, and then pushed herself upright, bare feet reaching for the dusty floor.

The hot, dry air felt as gritty as the earth against her feet after the cool illusion of her dream. She pushed though it as she got up, padding out into the empty front room. It was almost as dark as her bedroom, with only a faint, amber glow from the ancient, incandescent light in the parking lot faintly delineating the shape of the window and outlining the harsh, aggressive angles of the shriveled cactuses growing up from below the level of the pane.

She went to the door and opened it to another breath of acrid air. The grit was even thicker on the concrete walk outside, and it rasped between her toes as she climbed the cinderblock stairway with its superfluous, overly ornate, cast-iron handrail, whose curlicues and twists of metal seemed both effete and out of place adorning the siding of a pay-by-the-hour motel, now defunct.

She reached the walkway along the top floor, and went past the line of close doors, their once-white paint flaking and chipping, and their numbers hanging askew, until she reached the fire escape ladder at the end. Via that rickety means, she finally attained the roof, and stood erect on the flat expanse of gravel and tar, looking out over the desolate expanse of desert, broken only occasionally by the irregular shapes of ruined buildings, skeleton palm trees, and shrubby bushes.

In the east, whose side of the motel was distinguished by the empty cavity of a dehydrated swimming pool, now half-choked with dust, her line of sight was less encumbered. And what buildings there were were more fragmentary, piles of rubble that hardly interrupted the expanse of flat land stretching to the horizon. At that seeming edge of the world, the division between earth and sky, a red glow began to make itself visible.

With a sigh, she eased herself down onto the edge of the roof, and sat, with her feet dangling, waiting for the sun to rise and explode the world into nothingness.

Geek Chic

We live in a post-Revenge of the Nerds era.  As the phenomenal success of certain famous (or infamous), ex-college dropout, computer whiz CEOs (not to mention every friend of yours from high school who taught himself to code in his basement and is now making more money than you) has shown, geekdom is no longer--if it ever really was--the province of a handful or outsiders (how many people are at ComicCon this weekend, again?). The myth that those who read fantasy, watch sci-fi movies, play video games, and pwn computers are doomed to scuffle on the the sidelines of life, reveling with a sort of abashed arrogance in their intelligence and sense of difference, needs to be finally put to rest. The Nerds have taken their Revenge already, and emerged into the light.

I don't think that this is a very controversial statement, and I am not writing this post to advocate any great increase in nerd pride (its out there, and I, for one, already have it).  Instead, want to make the point that in this era of nerd dominance (if I may be permitted the term), we need to acknowledge a change in image.

Let me put it simply: being a nerd (or a geek, or a dork), is not the same as not being cool. I will demonstrate with an example of what I see as the problem. I'll use visuals.

When I joined facebook (back in practically antediluvian times, when you had to have a .edu email address to do so, and things like farmville were only an irritating glimmer in some Zinga founder's eye), pretty much all you could do for entertainment was join groups that then did very little except for show up on your profile page. In a fit of self-description, I joined the group "I was a dorky kid." This was all well and good; it was true, and I was in no way ashamed of the fact. There was only one problem. This was the picture for the group:        

Now, I think it is a huge mistake to imagine that just because somebody is fully involved with the life of the mind, they can't be bothered to deal with the physical world don't know how to dress themselves. Put another way: Geeks can totally be stylesters.

With this in mind, I would like to present and example: Colin Temple of the British TV show "Primeval." Colin is totally dorky. He is a graduate student in computer science; he studies dinosaurs; he is so brilliant it makes it almost impossible for him to have a rational conversation; when you first meet him, he is writing a research paper about aliens...and yes, he is a little socially awkward. 

He is also, however, a totally snappy dresser. Colin definitely undergoes a transformation over the course of the show, becoming more grown-up, responsible, honest--in short, more of a man. However, he doesn't undergo this evolution at the cost of losing his own identity, and one of the things he keeps is his sense of style, which is personal, idiosyncratic, and very cool. It involves fedora hats, digital watches, striped vests, and fingerless gloves. Sometimes it threatens to slide over into hipster territory, but it never quite goes there. (Thank God.) Colin never stops looking like a geek, but also never stops looking original, and--in his own way--very stylish. It's awesome.

So it would conclude this post with a repetition of my rejection of the idea that dorky is code for sloppy and poorly put together.  Proud geeks of the world--and I know you're our there--reject tevas with socks; reject faded trenchcoats; reject black tee-shirts with anti-social messages. Embrace geek chic. I know you can do it.