Upstate fucking glory, books

Erica Firment

Spring birds are yelling from snowy trees this morning. It’s spring, despite wind, snow, roaring wood stove, and other evidence to the contrary. I’m taking today off of work. I’ve got nine stitches. I can do whatever I want.

I finished re-reading Microserfs by Douglas Copeland yesterday. This book was important to me at a formulative time. It helped convince me it was cool to be a nerd. It introduced other tech-inclined women to my humanities-girdled world. It drew a model of unashamed geekery, separate and outside of a traditionally-female need for perfection and image. It was pretty liberating.

An excerpt:

Susan is 26 and works in Mac Applications. If Susan were a Jeopardy! contestant, her dream board would be:

* 680X0 assembly language
* Cats
* Early ’80s haircut bands
* “My secret affair with Rob in the Excel Group”
* License plate slogans of America
* Plot lines from The Monkees
* The death of IBM

Susan’s an IBM brat and hates that company with a passion. She credits it with ruining her youth by transferring her family eight times before she graduated from high school – and the punch line is that the company gave her father the boot last year during a wave of restructuring. So nothing too evil can happen to IBM in her eyes.
…
Susan’s a real coding machine. But her abilities are totally wasted reworking old code for something like the Norwegian Macintosh version of Word 5.8.

Thanks for your kind comments last night during my Dark Night of the Beer. Friendly words were unexpected and wonderful. I often forget that there are people out there. Hello imaginary people. It’s as though my fictional heroes (Elizabeth Bennet! Harriet The Spy! Meg from Wrinkle in Time!) suddenly started interacting.

Off to haul wood one-armed and scour Craigslist for cars. What would your Dream Jeopardy! categories be?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 at 7:59 amand is filed under Books, Feminism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

9 Responses to “Upstate fucking glory, books”

  • Bill Says:
    March 22nd, 2007 at 10:32 am

    Ah, yes, “Microserfs”! Loved it. But I always approached the “Jeopardy” problem from a glass-half-empty perspective. My nightmare categories:
    – The Bible.
    – Classical music.
    – Shakespeare.
    – Mythology.
    – Science fiction.

  • Erica Says:
    March 22nd, 2007 at 10:49 am

    Wow. Gotta say, I think I’d do pretty well in all but the first category. My nightmare categories would be:

    - Vector Geometry
    - Doing things half-assed
    - The delightful flavor of peanuts
    - The poetry of John Ashcroft
    - Old Norse

  • Dream Jeopardy! categories at geistweg Says:
    March 22nd, 2007 at 11:55 am

    [...] Erica, the Librarian Avenger, wrote an entry today about a section of Douglas Copeland’s Microserfs that she really enjoyed. In essence, Copeland describes a character’s personality based on her perfect Jeopardy! board. At the end of the entry, Erica asked “what would your Dream Jeopardy! categories be?” [...]

  • Linda Says:
    March 22nd, 2007 at 3:57 pm

    Dreamy Dream Categories for me would be:
    – Blown interview questions
    – Jelly making
    – Nora Roberts novels
    – Movie quotes
    – Childrens books re: childrens librarians
    – Reasons mullets are wrong

  • Eric Says:
    March 22nd, 2007 at 5:44 pm

    - College basketball
    - Bible
    - Sherlock Holmes
    - German literature
    - Star Trek
    - Camera anatomy

    Okay, now I’ve scared myself. That’s a freaky mix of subjects.

  • Alexis Says:
    March 23rd, 2007 at 1:19 am

    Dream Jeopardy categories:
    Caltrain Trivia
    Children’s Literature of the 1980s
    English Usage and Abusage
    The System of the World (all about Neal Stephenson)
    Road Cycling: Laws and Best Practices

  • Bill Says:
    March 23rd, 2007 at 4:08 pm

    Dream categories:
    – English usage and abusage
    – Tennis
    – Muhammad Ali
    – Las Vegas
    – The Kennedy assassination

  • Erica Says:
    March 24th, 2007 at 1:26 am

    Dream categories:

    Beekeeping
    C64 Text Adventures
    LGBT History
    Lyrics to The Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs
    Why I left Flint, MI
    CSS
    Transmission of the 1986 Chevy Nova

  • strange librarian » Blog Archive » your dream Jeopardy! board Says:
    March 29th, 2007 at 4:10 pm

    [...] i’d love to claim credit for this, but i got this idea from the “Librarian Avengers” who was citing Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. [...]