What makes a Geek a Geek? Lots of things, yes, I know. But there is one characteristic that I’ve noticed in myself and the majority of my geeky friends that I think is kind of a defining trait of geekdom: Research.

Seriously, whether a Geek is a Geek for only one subject/genre or many, Geeks do love the research. And this came to the attention of my conscious brain the other day while I was, ahem, researching something. See, I just got a couple of bettas, in addition to a larger aquarium. So, I’ve been researching bettas and the different species of fish that I could put in fresh water aquariums, what kind of plants thrive best, what sort of lights I should use, the ph balance of the water, how to breed bettas if I were so inclined… And after about three hours of this I just had to stop and say, “Whoa. Okay, yeah…” Because I realized that I do that with EVERYTHING.

Got back into needlework after several years of not doing it. Within two days I had researched not only the types of needlework I was doing, but also several I wasn’t and probably never would.

Koi ponds. We have one, and I got tired of it looking all algae-filled and generally meh. Three hours later I knew exactly what kinds of things I’d have to do to un-algae it, what to do to keep it algae-free, what sort of plants it needs to be healthy…

My degree in history. This was just one big, long excuse to research. A lot.

Sex. Yup, I research sex. Not only can I practically recite the Kama Sutra, but I can also tell you about how crocodile dung was used as a method of birth control in ancient Egypt and what the first dildos were made out of.

Regardless of how many things a Geek geeks out about, most of us research them lovingly. Whether we limit our researching to the net or actually go into libraries and dig through dusty tomes or ransack Amazon.com or Bookfinder.com, many of us just love to KNOW. It’s the KNOWING that makes these subjects fun and interesting.

Case in point: A couple months ago someone sent me a long list of “How many X does it take to change a liglhtbulb?” jokes. One of them was:

“How many Dragonball Z characters does it take to change a lightbulb?”
“One, but it takes five episodes.”

My husband told this to a friend of his who was really into anime and what he got instead of laughs was a twenty minute rant on how Funimation was destroying animation in general and Anime in particular, how much it sucked, why they did what they did, and on and on and on.

Once the Geeky little mind gets hold of something it likes, it’s almost a compulsion for many of us to find out absolutely as MUCH about that subject as we possibly can, whether it be comic books, movies, anime, fish, cartoons, the Medieval period, Bolshevik Feminism in the Russian Revolution, or even sports. Yeah, the sports geeks are a little more socially acceptable to most people, but they’re Geeks just the same. Deep down, they have that drive to KNOW just like we do.

It’s that passion and need for knowledge that makes us Geeks.