Articles in “Strange Conversations”

The joys of iPhone applications at midnight:

ME: Honey? What on earth’s happening?
NICK: I’m composing award-winning music!
ME: Excellent. In bed?
NICK: Maybe I should stop.

Nick and I are both in the living room, but this happened over Facebook chat nonetheless:

NICK: Hello!
ME: Hello, honey! If you reply to this, I will come over to the sofa and kick you.

Really, from different rooms? Fine.

From a sofa just over on the other side of the room? Just silly.

Second-generation lapsed-Catholic guilt speaking:

ME: Sometimes I worry that I’m frivolling with the blog. Maybe I spend too much time on it, which I could spend doing more productive things.
NICK: You’re using it as a very valuable writing tool. It’s all grist for the mill. (Pause) Ha! Grist for The Mills.

There’s nothing like a bad pun to pull you out of downward-spiralling existential angst.

After yesterday’s introductory lecture, the first for the new semester:

NICK: How did the lecture go?
ME: Quite well, I think—but I can’t be sure.
NICK: I’m sure it went well.
ME: You can’t be sure: you’ve never heard me lecture.
NICK: Oh, I hear you lecture all the time.

Hmmm.

While briefly watching NCIS and cursing Michael Weatherly:

ME: You leave David McCallum alone!
NICK: Yeah! He was Steel, for god’s sake.
ME: And Illya Kuryakin.
NICK: Yeah.
ME: The only way he could be cooler would be if he’d also played Steed.
(Pause)
BOTH: Or Doctor Who.

ME: Honey, why, when you took the dinner plates out of the living room, did you not take the sauce bottle, as well?

NICK: I probably didn’t have enough feet.

Nick and I have just had the nerdiest conversation I think we’ve ever had, just because I picked up a new Lois McMaster Bujold book for him yesterday:

ME: She’s not writing science fiction any more.
NICK: No, I know, and I find that very sad.
ME: I wonder why?
NICK: Well, I suppose fantasy is more profitable.
ME: But she can’t be short of money. I mean, she must sell the rights to everything she writes to the studios, although they’re never made into films, which I imagine she’s happy about.
NICK: I think she’s thrilled, given the draft to Warrior’s Apprentice that was floating around. All the Dendarii mercenaries had basically become space hillbillies by that point.
ME: Maybe that’s what happened to it: it became Firefly. Although you can’t imagine a much broader difference that between Captain Mal and Miles Vorkosigan. But he gets better, doesn’t he? Miles?
NICK: It takes quite a bit of brain damage and some nasty injuries.
ME: Well, it must be inconvenient, having such a damagable hero.
NICK: Oh, he doesn’t get less damagable.
ME: It’s brittle bones, isn’t it? From the gas exposure in utero?
NICK: Yep.
ME: And didn’t the gas make Cordelia infertile? I imagine that’s why Aral was persuaded into using the uterine . . . whatsits.
NICK: Replicators.
ME: Uterine replicators. Because they replicate a uterus?
NICK: Yep. Well, they’re not replicators in a Star Trek sense.
ME: Not in a Star Trek or a Stargate sense.
NICK: Well, that would be bad on both counts.
ME: I don’t know—imagine how easy having a baby would be via the Star Trek replicators: “Child. Male. Lukewarm.”

The lesson to be learned is this: there is no conversation among geeks that will not, if pursued long enough, end on a Star Trek joke.

Example One: You really shouldn’t keep computer hardware in your pants, sweetie.

A conversation emblematic of the difficulties in talking to a geek:

NICK: There’s about two megs of that still to download.
ME: What does that mean in minutes?
NICK: Well, it’s about 380 megs in total . . .
ME: Nick!
NICK: (hurt look).
ME: In minutes.
NICK: Well, it’s about 98% done.
ME: Minutes!
NICK: Anywhere from two to twenty five.

Well, that was helpful, honey: thank you.

A telephone conversation this morning:

MAM: Hello?
ME: Hi, Mam: it’s me!
MAM: Oh, god.
ME: Pardon?

Nick was fulminating after leaving the ATM about the irony inherent in the fact that “Please insert your card” was crushed down into the corner to make way for an enormous, flashing “We care about customer service!” sign.

ME: It’s like when we used to have those “Keep Left” signs in the stairwell in my building, remember? And the Socialist Alternative would always stick their rally posters over them. I thought that was hilarious.
NICK: Hmmm.
ME: “Keep Left”? “Socialist Alternative”? Get it?
NICK: Hmmm.
ME: You don’t get it, do you?
NICK: Oh, I get it.
ME: But you don’t think it’s funny?
NICK: I’d just be annoyed that a sign that was intended to assist people had been obliterated . . .
ME: You pompous twat!
NICK: I’m a UX guy, Treena.

I have no real idea what prompted this, except for Nick’s constant habit of strewing bits of his work clothing around the house when he gets home.

ME: Nick, is that your shirt you’ve left lying over the back of the sofa?
NICK (whisking his shirt away): I have no idea what you’re talking about. Have you been at the laudanum again?

To provide context, I am addicted to Wii Tennis, as result of which I think I have Wii-Tennis elbow.

NICK (freshly home from work): How are you?
ME: I think I’ve done myself an injury.
NICK: A ninja-ry? Is that like when you’re a ninja . . .
ME: Go away.
NICK: . . . . and you have an accident. Like, you drop a shuriken on your foot.
ME: What type of ninja would drop a shuriken on his foot?
NICK: Well, not a very good one.