The Odd Couple

"You're not at all the funny, awkward little girl I knew. Oh no! I was mad not to have seen the change in you. When did your sparkle turn to fire and your warmth become desire?" -- Alan Jay Lerner

As you all know, I'm a trained geek working as a geek. And though I've always recognized different breeds of geekery in society, it took a comment on this blog for me to recognize different brands of geekery within myself. A few days ago, Red remarked that my posts tend to show off my dorkiest colors. I always have been -- and still am -- a dork, but lately, I seem to have morphed into a new breed of dork.

There's a part of me who lives to get her hands dirty and loves to experiment -- let's call her The Mad Scientist. She thrives is tank tops and Chuck Taylors and thinks best at three in the morning. She's not afraid to use trypan blue as a plaster dye, mix concrete and wood hardener to invent a new type of sealant, pop the lock off of someone else's milling machine to do some impromptu woodcarving, or explode a capacitor or three trying to perfect a wave-generating circuit. She's always the first to pull out a Leatherman, always the fastest to dream up an alternate solution, always the last to settle for something that doesn't look quite right. The Mad Scientist is a little scatterbrained, but she treads that fine line between genius and insanity with practiced precision.

Lately, though, another geek personality is starting to dominate: The Researcher. As the Keeper of the Protocol (or seven), she has no time for imagination. She plays by the rules -- and Lord help you if you don't. She strolls around in a suit and stilettos on most days, calmly handling the affairs of patients and physicians and firmly handling the FDA and the networks. She's perfectly kind and perfectly patient, but she's efficient and super-knowledgeable and isn't afraid to show it. The Researcher commands respect. She double-checks every move she makes and triple-checks every move her colleagues make because, in her world, one mistake can put someone in his coffin.

The Researcher thrives whenever I find myself on the upper east side, but sometimes, The Mad Scientist comes out to play. She emerges whenever the copy machine breaks, whenever an odd piece of code is needed for something, whenever someone needs to know which test tubes contain clotting factors or what metals are MRI-compatible. And though The Researcher is a good person to be in this world, I was The Mad Scientist for so long that I can't help but miss her.

The Mad Scientist was the woman who knew entirely too much about Materials Science in the elevator earlier in the week, and for one beautiful moment, she made everyone forget that she was a mere intruder on The Researcher's workday.