I prefer geek to nerd
And using this title, I shall say that I am an art-based geek. I share many of the basic characteristics of the common geek/nerd. I was on the sound and lighting team at school - a roadie in a girls' school uniform. I got bored during my German Oral exam and convinced the teacher that what I wanted to do when I grew up was to set up a commune of tree-dwelling hippies in the German forests, and I quoted Douglas Adams in my Philosophy A level paper. Although I watched but never obsessed over Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5 and The Matrix (the first one...the others do not exist, my fingers are in my ears and I can't hear you) I know the whole of the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy off by heart - not the books, but the original BBC radio plays as they are ON THE TAPES. I have the CDs now and I miss the gaps where I used to have to wait and then turn the tape over :( My Ipod is called Moya. When under hypnosis infront of an audience I was asked who my favourite movie star was and replied "I don't like movie stars, I like David Attenbrough!". I suck at sports and ride a trike because I never managed the art of cycling.

The only thing is, these come with a subtle twist. Par example: many obsessives keep their books in strict alphabetical order. Anal, but really rather practical. If, that is, you can remember the author. I have a visual memory. So how do I keep my books? By colour. At this point, most librarians cringe, but keeping your books strictly in alphabetical order without sub-catergorising is just as arbitrary as what colour the book happens to be. Why should Asimov and Aristophanes sit next to each other on a shelf merely because of the accidents of birth? The organisation by colour is also a more complex process than you might think. You can go by a spectrum of colours, the way that say yellow progresses to orange, through to the red which in turn go into purples, blues, blues to greens and greens back to yellows. But then there are shades from pale to dark. Black books need their own shelf, but do they progress to greys, and then from greys where do you go? Into white, or into grey blue, blue grey and then true blues? What about grey greens? What the hell do you do with two very pale blue books, one of which is a greeny blue and one of which a purpley blue so that if they sit together they clash horribly? One you've progressed from yellow to orange and then to red, where the hell do you put anything pink?!?

The mind boggles. In the end, you are left with a slightly frazzled but satisfied mind, very pretty and overall harmonious looking bookshelves and a subtle system that everybody gets but nobody truly understands. Oh, and a reject shelf for books that just have too many damn colours on their dust jackets!
( Hampster Squared has stuff at www.tilla.co.uk, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 0:45, 1 reply)

My girlfriend
...does exactly the same. Books by colour.

I tend to organise mine by topic.
(Le Misanthrope last procrastinated on, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 1:54, closed)