I must admit, I do enjoy imposing order onto chaos, as long as I can do it at my own pace, which is pretty slow. I have no problem unpacking an entire ridiculously overstuffed closet, sorting through it, getting rid of the dross, and replacing everything as neatly and ergonomically as possible – provided that I have all damn day to do it and nothing else clamoring for my attention. Ask me to do the same thing, or even a half-ass reduction of the thing, in an hour or so and my brain just seizes up with misery. Ideally I’ll have advanced warning that the opportunity to do some organizing will arise, I’ll make whatever lists or spreadsheets will facilitate the effort, and I’ll check my way through the process to the satisfying end. If you know me and have ever hung out with me, you are probably calling bullshit right about now because you are far more likely to have seen my laid-back, agreeable, up-for-anything fun-loving follower side. But I swear, that’s just a function of time. I switch back and forth based on how much time I have to work with, and there usually isn’t enough time for me to be hyper-organized. It’s not “hyper-organized or nothing” with me, it’s “disorganized most of the time, hyper-organized on rare occasions of luxurious opportunity.”
I have a spreadsheet on my laptop to keep track of the household budget, and another spreadsheet to keep track of how well (or not) I’m eating and working out. I have idle fantasies about buying another bookcase for the basement, not only because we are running out of shelf space but because it would give me the opportunity (excuse?) to re-organize the books themselves, which are kind of stacked pell-mell at the moment but which I would love to see grouped and alphabetized, with non-fiction here, literature there, fantasy in one section, sci-fi in another, maybe urban fantasy bridging the divide … I could go on.
I’ve noticed, in both myself and other geeks, a very high correlation between the depth of the geekiness and the organizer mindset. To a certain extent, the geek archetype looks like an overgrown kid – thirty or forty years old and still playing games, reading comic books, wearing (XXXL) Underoos. But the games are complex, and the more codified the rules, the better. (For the geeks’ enjoyment, that is – I’m not saying elaborate is superior to simple across the board.) If you watch a bunch of kids playing on the playground, pretending to be soldiers, they’ll most likely be running and yelling and making sound effects and falling down and getting back up again and switching sides and basically behaving like rowdy plasma particles, the essence of kid-dom. But, if you can identify the one kid in the bunch who is trying (not necessarily successfully) to impose some order – telling his friends that once they get shot by a bad guy they HAVE to stay on the ground, or suggesting that they take turns for half being the good guys and half being the bad guys, or insisting that everybody with a stick has a machine gun but only the kid with the big dead branch has a rocket launcher – that kid is the future geek (or to use the term my friends and I tend to favor, the “rules lawyer”). Someday he will collect board games like Axis and Allies (or RTS video games or tabletop miniatures or whathaveyou) and he will enjoy the framework that settles the I-shot-you-NO-I-shot-you-FIRST questions definitively.
A couple of days ago I mentioned my Green Lantern obsession and the non-zero measure of shame that goes along with it, but I was probably being overly self-critical. I do love the comics and following and acquiring them makes me happy, so much so that I still collect them even though I categorically do not have room for them in my house. (Luckily I have a friend who lets me store the comics (in alphabetical order of course) in long boxes in his basement. I AM SO NOT KIDDING.) I do try to remember that on the one hand, everyone is a geek about something, whether it’s being a foodie or a gearhead or a superfan of a certain actor or band or sports team or whatever. So being a comic book geek does not make me a total inhuman freak. But on the other hand I think it’s only realistic to acknowledge that my geek wheelhouse is practically custom-made for the way my brain works, the hyper-organizer who, given enough time (like, close to thirty years) can come up with a system for remembering the convoluted-but-internally-consistent ways that an endlessly ongoing story gleefully violates the laws of physics, biology, time and narrative logic. Comic books (superhero comic books like Green Lantern at any rate) are a chaotic mess that are only fun if you enjoy doing the work of imposing order on them. And that’s not everybody’s thing in the same way that everyone likes good food or appreciates a nice car. I’m not really ashamed that it happens to be my thing, just slightly self-conscious and aware that it’s kind of out there. Classic over-thinker, that’s me.
All of which apparently makes me highly well-suited for government contracting, to boot. So ... yay?
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