Confessions of a Workrate (and Pop Culture) Junkie

First off, let me get this out of the way. For those of you wondering about the title or have wondered about the significance of my Twitter account name, let me explain “workrate”.

“Workrate” is a term used in professional wrestling to measure the amount of effort a wrestler puts into the match, both to make the match look good and to hide any potential flaws in any of the participants. A wrestler who shows good workrate doesn’t necessarily get top billing, but he is invaluable to a company; he can make bad workers look good, and good workers look great.

That out of the way, let’s get to the list. I promise “workrate” will come up later.

When I started putting this together, I wasn’t really sure how to define a “geek confession.” “Geek” is kind of mainstream now, with a lot of supposedly “geek-focused” entertainment reaching great popularity across the board with all demographics. We all here at the Bunker call ourselves “geeks” and wear that badge with pride, something that a lot of people wouldn’t admit to 10 years ago.

So what shames a geek? Is it things that are so mainstream popular that you’re ashamed to like them (like Elwood’s “Gossip Girl” fandom or Dale’s love of Paul McCartney), or do we go to those things that make the mainstream “trendy” geek kind of shy away, like Slick’s D&D relationship?

So you’ll excuse me if these seem a little scattered. There are five good examples in front of me and I’ve got a lot to live up to, so I tried to hit it from all angles.

5. MENSA

REPRESENT!

I don’t know if this really qualifies as a “confession”, since I’m sure there are a decent amount of geeks that would strive to be in a “smart people club”, but I actually went out of my way to join; took the pre-test, traveled like an hour and a half to get there, and hung out with a half-dozen ironic t-shirts just for the opportunity to pay an outrageous membership fee and carry a stupid card around.

So stupid I never leave the house without it. You know, in case I need it to gain entry into those special IT-themed clubs and the special yearly Mensa Jamboree.

(There really is a yearly Mensa gathering; they just don’t call it a “jamboree”)

4. MOVIES

White Russian. Jesus. Bowling. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... I don't get it.

Since I became a dad, I haven’t really had the opportunity to go out to the movies as much as I might have before. And by “as much” I mean “I’ve been to the movies once in six years”. That being said, there’s no excuse for things that have been released before 2004.

I have not seen the following movies: The Usual Suspects, Silence Of The Lambs, Memento, Dr. Strangelove, Taxi Driver, Alien, Reservoir Dogs, Sin City, Gladiator, Batman Begins, Good Will Hunting, Kill Bill (1 & 2), The Nightmare Before Christmas, and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.

I thought The Matrix was boring, but not as boring as The Big Lebowski. I found them both less entertaining than Hudson Hawk, but then again, I like Hudson Hawk.

I’m weird with my movie taste; I love great scripts like The Apartment and Twelve Angry Men. When it comes to genre though, I usually stick with comedy, and I’m not ashamed to laugh at stupidity or dick and fart jokes (see UHF and Kevin Smith’s Jersey Trilogy, respectively.) But one thing that absolutely kills a movie or TV show for me is what I used to call the “Titanic Effect” – the more people tell me that I just HAVE to see something, the less I want to do it to the point where I doubt seriously that I’ll ever see Avatar.

Speaking of the Lord of the Rings trilogy:

3. J.R.R. TOLKIEN

Which one of them is Frodo? Is Frodo the Hobbit? I don't know what's going on.

I haven’t read one word written by J.R.R. Tolkien. This is the one that usually makes the fellow geeks furrow their brow even more than their amazement that I’ve stared into a computer screen for 30 years of my life and still don’t wear corrective lenses (I’m actually 20/10, so I could be a pilot!) Tolkien has never interested me (I guess I was never much of a dwarf & warlock guy) so when the rest of the geek world first learned they were geeks in school when they grabbed The Hobbit as a book report assignment, I was still going with Dr. Faustus and Shakespeare.

Which segues to:

2. GRAMMAR SNOB

I'm assuming not a New York Jets fan, since those Jets fans can't read.

I’ll admit that I’m not too crazy about people, but I’ve learned to tolerate most things that people do. Grammar and punctuation are not included in that. I use capital letters and proper punctuation in IMs, texts, and message board posts. When you don’t, my opinion of you (at least my opinion of your intellect) takes a serious hit. I can take minor lapses for time or space, especially in texts or Twitter, but if you start misusing apostrophes, then you might as well start carrying around a jug with XXX on the side and dig your finger completely in your nose, because that’s what I’m seeing as I read it.

(Yes, I do understand that there are some of you out there who will read this and could point out several grammatical issues with my writing here. That’s nitpicky; the things I have issue with are just WRONG.)

And the grand finale:

1. E-WRESTLING

OK, being a pro wrestling fan is bad enough. But let’s take a bunch of those fans, put them in what amounts to competitive fanfic based on characters that are almost always based on their writer, require them to write several pages of content on a regular basis, and then choose a winner based on absolutely no set guidelines so that every competitor feels as if they were robbed if they lost and superior if they won.

I not only participated in this, I ran one of the feds for a period of time. Looking back at my “prime” in that era (1998-2003) I seriously have no clue how I wrote as much as I did so consistently. I guess I did it because of the people that I was in that handful of feds with – great writers themselves that made writing enjoyable and had fun characters to work with. I’m still friends with a lot of those people from that time, and to be honest, if the call went out today that they were getting back to do it again, I’d probably be down for it. I think.

My main character was a lighter wrestler named Tommy James. He originally had the nickname “Black Sunshine” but I put him into an angle that had him returning from Japan where his technical skills were much better appreciated than the American fans could. Over there he had the nickname “Mr. Workrate”, and that stuck with Tommy for as long as I wrote him, long after that angle died.

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