Emma Philbrook: STUDENT LIFE

Hey, everybody, guess what day it is!

(Well, not today, necessarily. I think it might be this weekend, or it might have been last Monday, but it’s this week and this is a weekly newspaper, so just play along.)

That’s right, it’s National Embrace Your Geekiness Day AND National French Fry Day! On the same day! It’s my favorite holiday for obvious reasons.

Obvious Reason #1: I am a geek. Big time.

Obvious Reason #2: I am a French fry connoisseur. I have an authoritative Top 10 list of the best fries out there which is widely regarded by my inner circle (read: me) as the last word in fried potato rankings.

I have done my honest best to promote this holiday and turn it into the bacchanalian blowout it deserves to be, but it’s not an easy task. Everybody loves French fries, but most people need to be convinced that they have geekiness to embrace.

Therefore, I have compiled a partial list of geeky traits. If one of these applies to you, congratulations! Grab a carton of fries and celebrate. (If nothing here applies to you, grab the fries anyhow. There’s a little bit of geek in all of us.)

*You repeatedly drop veiled references to Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Lord of the Rings, The Princess Bride, or Monty Python in everyday conversation.

*You have a computer screen that’s bigger than my television.

*You are willing to tackle anybody who comes between you and a new issue of National Geographic.

*You tell hilarious puns, but nobody laughs because they involve advanced or highly specialized vocabulary. (Okay, maybe this one’s just me.)

*You are building or have built an electronic device from scratch. (Kits don’t count unless you’ve built more than one or built something completely different than what was on the package.)

*You recognize the name “Hedy Lamarr”, “Ava Lovelace”, or “Maria de Agnosi”.

*Hedy Lamarr, Ava Lovelace, or Maria de Agnosi is your “dream girl”. (In that case, I’ve got some sad news for you regarding mortality.)

*You read ahead in textbooks “just for fun”. (This is also probably just me.)

*You are familiar with the phrase “to juice” as it relates to video games.

*You have seen all the Star Wars VII trailers and scour the internet for new ones on a regular basis.

*You do the above, but for the trailers of soon-to-be-released video games.

*Three words: Comic book stash.

*You consider science fiction anthologies to be the literary equivalent of a box of fine chocolates.

You are in a committed relationship with your graphing calculator.

*Alternately, you consider calculators to be “the cheater’s way out” and claim that they take all the fun out of math problems.

You write things in binary or hexadecimal format just to be mysterious.

*Scientific American doesn’t give you a headache.