I REALLY Need Some Geek Friends.

So this morning I got out of bed and Sunny said:

“I read your blog this morning. What’s that all about?”

She was, of course, referring to my post on my sadness at missing PAX, and the total nerdgasm that was Jonathan Coulton and Felicia Day singing ‘Still Alive’ live on stage.

“Oh, PAX.” I said. “It’s the Penny Arcade Expo.”

In return, I got a blank look.

“Yeah, Jonathan Coulton is an awesome singer/songwriter/musician (I’ve got pretty much his entire collected works on my iPod) and Felicia Day is from ‘The Guild’. ‘Still Alive’ is the song from the end of ‘Portal’”

…Still a blank look.

“It’s a gaming/geek culture convention.”

“Oh.” She says.

“Yeah, it was funny…in the same show Jonathan Coulton Rick-rolled the entire audience!”

Blank look…

At this point it really struck me that since leaving England I have no geek friends left.

This time five years ago, I could’ve gone into work or called up a buddy on the phone and I would have received the proper response to the news that Felicia and JoCo had sung the theme from ‘Portal’ live….or that JoCo had successfully Rick-rolled most of PAX…which, of course, is: “Holy SHIT! That’s AWESOME!!! Is it on Youtube?”

I started thinking about what it would be like to take Sunny to an event like PAX. The more I thought about it the more I realized it would be almost exactly like introducing your new girlfriend to your family for the first time…only your girlfriend has completely different customs and traditions and doesn’t even speak the same language.

This isn’t a black mark against Sunny, but the two of us going to PAX would be almost totally taken up with me answering questions such as:

“Who’s that?”

“Why’s he doing that?”

“Why is that funny?”

“What does ‘grok’ mean?”

“What the hell is a ‘zerg rush’?”

So another thought struck me. As I’m a married guy now, I don’t need a geek friend…I need a geek friend who is also married to a non-geek who would get along with Sunny.

I mean, let’s face it, there’s no way in hell any married woman is going to let her husband head off for a three-day convention on his own…especially if you throw a few booth-babes and voluptuous cosplayers into the mix. What I need is a geek friend with a wife…so the wives can keep themselves from stabbing themselves in the forehead while their husbands line up to try the latest version of Rock Band.

I should explain, just in case Sunny reads this and gets mad…I’m not looking down on her because she doesn’t ‘get’ geek culture and would consider a Wil Wheaton keynote a snore-fest… or not get why someone like me would consider singing along to ‘RE: Your Brains’ in a live concert with thousands of other geeks an almost spiritual experience.

All I mean is that Sunny would probably love to go to an interior design convention and could spend three whole days looking at furniture…but I would personally prefer to have my testicles chopped off with a rusty, dull butter knife and fed to me out of an incontinent homeless guy’s soiled underwear.

I’m guessing she’d feel the same way about spending three days surrounded by people talking about Guitar Hero, X-Box vs. PS3…and, of course, John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad theory.