Dan's House of Foo

Not just a nerd: a *Jewish* nerd!

So Rands wrote this thing about nerds, and M. read and told me it made her sad.

"Why sad?" I said.

"Because it's all true," she said.

I pointed out a few important things:

• I'm not that bad, socially; I can hold my own in front of a crowd quite well, and I'm quite charming when meeting people for the first time (if I do say so myself!).

• I'm pretty good with change; I can go to new places and not freak out.

• Lastly (and most interestingly to me), I don't have a "cave".

Actually, that's not exactly true. What I don't have is a cave like the one Rands describes, mostly because I don't have room for a dedicated space like that in my tiny little house. But, as M pointed out to me, I do seem to have a virtual cave: it's a state of mind, and it exists in time.

When I want to "check out" as Rands puts it (or, as I prefer, to "get work done"), I pull out my twelve-inch iBook G4 laptop, wherever I happen to be: the living room couch, my bed, the dining room table, wherever. I use various techie tricks (e.g. Desktop Manager and QuickSilver) to render the lack of screen real estate irrelevant, plop my headphones on and off I go: it's as if I'm in my own little isolation unit, from which, as I've said before, it can be difficult to retrieve me. This isn't limited to home, either; I can do this on the subway, at the office, in a crowded shopping mall, while out of town at relatives' houses, on various forms of travel between cities... my "cave" goes with me wherever I go.

M says that if you approach the "cave" boundaries (a four-foot radius around the open laptop), the whole thing goes WOM WOM WOM WOM and the intruder is magically repelled, as if they'd never existed. Perhaps she was speaking metaphorically. But the interesting part is, it occurred to me as I was discussing it with her that this is a totally Jewish approach to the problem of needing a controlled environment in which to get work done:

• my "cave" is portable;
• it is as much a state of mind as it is a physical location or state of affairs;
• it is temporary; and,
• I enter my "cave" through a ritualized set of actions (opening the laptop lid, typing my password, putting my headphones on, arranging the windows on the screen just so...).

The whole thing struck me as a delightfully Heschel-esque solution to the problem of needing to be able to get stuff done in a very specific way: to be able to stand aloof from of the rest of my life, but in a multifarious and unpredictable list of locations.

Isn't it neat when I make use of the heritage of my forebears?