geeky--Mame Dennis Burnside, Auntie Mame
I am freqently struck by the phenomenon of people who like ONE thing -- whatever that thing may be -- and couldn't care less about anything else. For some people, it's Star Trek, for others it's hockey, for others it's macro wolves stomping on people. But whatever it is, the folks I'm referring to seem to fixate on that one idea ... and the more obscure and highly-specific it is, the more fixated on it they tend to be.
Note that I'm not talking about kinks or fetishes necessarily, although they can be. The behavior encompasses all types of human activity, including sexuality, but hardly limited to it.
I understand having favorites. I've posted recently about my high interest level in Wing Commander for instance. But WC isn't all that I'm about, by a long shot. As much as I love WC, if that's all there was to my life, I'd get bored so fast it would cause science to reevaluate the processes of human thought. And that's what I don't get about these one-trick pony people...
How do they keep from getting bored?
If you're a Pern geek, for instance, once you've read the Pern stories for the fiftieth time, played your hundredth character in the Pern RPG, seen every piece of Pern-related artwork, read every Pern fanfic, and written your own 20,000 word essay on the religious, ethnic, and political symbolism of Pern, don't you get even a little craving for something that doesn't have dragons in it?
Ditto for Trek geeks, D&D geeks, Babylon 5 geeks, people who only like pizza, foot fetishists, people who live in their fursuit, football-obsessives ... whatever. Or as I once asked somebody who expressed contempt for some topic I was interested in at the time -- based largely on the fact that it wasn't his particular obsession -- "How can you stand to live in a world that small?"
Maybe it's just the human tendency toward specialization? Or maybe I just hang out with too many geeks. ;)
-The Gneech
