Southern geeks
Jun. 12th, 2006 08:28 pmI'm finally getting caught up on my entries here. This is something I wrote Memorial Day weekend, when D and I went to Tennessee and I got to meet his mom's family, which was a lot of fun.
D's grandmother is 98 and still totally sharp. She still whupped all of us at Scrabble. Boy, I hope he got some of those genes. She's also an advertisement for having lots of kids-- she had six. It was fantastic to see her grinning, surrounded by loving family, lots of them. All true wealth is biological-- for the first time I really viscerally got that. It also worked out very well practically-- three of them moved away, but three are still living near her and help her a lot so that she can live independently like she wants. (They'd actually be willing to help her more, but she is independent enough that she doesn't want to ask.) Of course, from all accounts she was Super-Mom, which I am pretty certain I will not be. But most of the people I know (as usual, I have to put the caveat: except the Mormons) aren't really planning to have a bunch of kids, so it's neat to see someone for whom it really worked very well.
So D's immediate family is ultra-normal-- like, Norman Rockwell WASP normal, so normal it's actually kind of weird; family dinners and long car trips to national parks when they were little and packages of cookies sent to the kids on their birthdays. I don't think I know any other families that are that stereotypical normal. I always kind of wondered how D came out of that family; it's not that he isn't normal... well... okay, maybe it is. Although he's far on the normal end for how geeky he is, and he looks like a perfectly normal sort of guy, he is definitely waaaay out on the geeky end. Like, he works math problems (old USAMO tests) in his spare time. He knows more about The Lord of the Rings than I do. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nolly knows how many copies we have between us. It's a little embarrassing.)
But now that I've met his mom's family, I understand better where D came from. They are all super nice and really cool people, but all a little weird as well-- all obsessive, like D is about math/physics/Perl. One of the brothers is totally obsessive about an engine that he has a patent on. At least one of the other ones is obsessive about physics in general. One of the sisters is obsessive about crafts. D's mom, now that I think about it some more, is obsessive about languages (I think she speaks all the Romance languages, well enough to teach them to high-schoolers) and doing family things (photo albums, reunions, etc). The guys in the family are all engineer types; I don't think I can really call them geeks because they're too old, but they are definitely prototypes.
I also found out that D and his brother and sister all know the Greek alphabet in order, even though his siblings aren't in technical fields now. (His sister was at one point but is now in medicine.) This made me feel totally inadequate in my geek credentials. In fact, although I know all the Greek letters, I don't have a whole lot of idea what order they go in-- that's not usually necessary for physics problems, darn it!
D's grandmother is 98 and still totally sharp. She still whupped all of us at Scrabble. Boy, I hope he got some of those genes. She's also an advertisement for having lots of kids-- she had six. It was fantastic to see her grinning, surrounded by loving family, lots of them. All true wealth is biological-- for the first time I really viscerally got that. It also worked out very well practically-- three of them moved away, but three are still living near her and help her a lot so that she can live independently like she wants. (They'd actually be willing to help her more, but she is independent enough that she doesn't want to ask.) Of course, from all accounts she was Super-Mom, which I am pretty certain I will not be. But most of the people I know (as usual, I have to put the caveat: except the Mormons) aren't really planning to have a bunch of kids, so it's neat to see someone for whom it really worked very well.
So D's immediate family is ultra-normal-- like, Norman Rockwell WASP normal, so normal it's actually kind of weird; family dinners and long car trips to national parks when they were little and packages of cookies sent to the kids on their birthdays. I don't think I know any other families that are that stereotypical normal. I always kind of wondered how D came out of that family; it's not that he isn't normal... well... okay, maybe it is. Although he's far on the normal end for how geeky he is, and he looks like a perfectly normal sort of guy, he is definitely waaaay out on the geeky end. Like, he works math problems (old USAMO tests) in his spare time. He knows more about The Lord of the Rings than I do. (
nolly knows how many copies we have between us. It's a little embarrassing.)But now that I've met his mom's family, I understand better where D came from. They are all super nice and really cool people, but all a little weird as well-- all obsessive, like D is about math/physics/Perl. One of the brothers is totally obsessive about an engine that he has a patent on. At least one of the other ones is obsessive about physics in general. One of the sisters is obsessive about crafts. D's mom, now that I think about it some more, is obsessive about languages (I think she speaks all the Romance languages, well enough to teach them to high-schoolers) and doing family things (photo albums, reunions, etc). The guys in the family are all engineer types; I don't think I can really call them geeks because they're too old, but they are definitely prototypes.
I also found out that D and his brother and sister all know the Greek alphabet in order, even though his siblings aren't in technical fields now. (His sister was at one point but is now in medicine.) This made me feel totally inadequate in my geek credentials. In fact, although I know all the Greek letters, I don't have a whole lot of idea what order they go in-- that's not usually necessary for physics problems, darn it!
