Can the DSM-V Really Make Autism Disappear?

Posted on January 22, 2012 by

This week the New York Times published an article about a new study that suggests that the nearly complete revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-V, will have an enormous impact on the diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorders. Changes in the diagnostic criteria for autism in the DSM-V will literally change the definition of autism. This change has the potential to virtually erase what is considered to be an epidemic of autism by current diagnostic standards.

The pending change itself isn’t a surprise. Those in the mental health field, those with friends or family members with autism spectrum disorders, and those who teach and treat them have known about the coming change for some time and many of us have been dreading it. Why? Because most if not all of those with Asperger’s Syndrome and PDD-NOS will see their diagnoses vanish into thin air and they will no longer be considered to have an autism spectrum disorder, i.e. to the medical community and hence, the larger world, they will no longer have autism. A miracle cure. If only we’d known curing autism was that easy, we’d have insisted the American Psychological Association publish the manual ages ago!

Sorry to be crass. We all know that change can be unsettling, but the opposition to this particular change is understandable. Asperger’s Syndrome and PDD-NOS, considered to be milder forms of autism, in lot of ways can be “invisible disabilities.” Measurements of cognitive and language ability can suggest that kids with these diagnoses are just like anyone else. Yet they aren’t. In nearly every area of their lives, they are challenged and misunderstood. They experience failure constantly and the older they get, the more aware they are of this fact. Having a name for their difference can be an enormous relief for the individual and their families. It allows an opportunity to grieve and to prepare for the road ahead – an opportunity that will be lost when the DSM-V is finally published.

Already, even before the DSM-V has come out, the issue of morphing standards when it comes to autism has already reared its head.  Just a decade ago, diagnosis in children under two years of age was almost unheard of. Not so today. I know of a couple of cases of children in my own community who no longer meet the current criteria for autism and are being “released” from the diagnosis as an apparent result of receiving quality, intensive treatment starting at the age of 15-18 months.  Traditionally, autism has been considered a permanent, lifelong developmental disability – not something you can be released from. There are those that question the wisdom of “releasing” a child from the diagnosis, to say the least, but the fact is it’s already happening and will happen in spades once the DSM-V comes out.

And that’s just the kids. What about the adults that aren’t diagnosed with Asperger’s or PDD-NOS until they reach adulthood? It can be life changing for some of these individuals to finally understand why they’ve endured a lifetime of struggles and suffering. But if these diagnoses simply disappear in a puff of smoke, so to will treatments appropriately suited to their needs. And that’s a problem. Why? Because adults with normal cognitive ability in all areas except social cognitive skills (i.e. folks currently thought to have Asperger’s or PDD-NOS and have difficulty understanding social rules, initiating and maintaining social interactions, and dealing with the multitude of social problems most people solve with little conscious effort on a daily basis) experience a lifetime of social failure. Not surprisingly, they get depressed. The DSM-V would be happy to diagnose their depression and the pharmaceutical companies would be more than happy to continue to provide psychiatrists with a myriad of chemical options to treat their DSM diagnosed depression. But what kind of help will they get for the genesis of their depression? Without a name, will therapists and educators continue to explore new and innovative therapies for this unique population? No longer considered as having autism, they will be left with labels like unusual… eccentric… different. Unfortunately, these labels don’t come with treatment plans and interventions. They come with social isolation and poor quality of life.

There has to be a better way.  Maybe the way we’ve always done things no longer serves us. Maybe our culture has become overly reliant on what a single book has to offer when it comes to the mysteries of the human brain. Maybe it’s time to come up with something better.

Any ideas?

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Can I Borrow A Cup of Happy?

Posted on August 13, 2011 by

I work in special education. People who’ve seen me in action often tell me that I’m well suited for my job and what a loss it would be if I were to no longer do that job. A huge compliment and a huge standard to live up to, to be sure. I do my best to live up to it and sincerely hope that I do.

I don’t know if it’s more brain makeup or my value system, but I lean heavily on my emotional intelligence in the way that I interact in the world. I’m not a very calculated person. I don’t so much worry about getting ahead in the workplace or having more power than someone else. That isn’t what I’m about. That’s never been a problem for me before. In fact, in a lot of ways it’s been an asset. But like everywhere else in our country right now, there is sweeping change happening in my workplace and it now feels like it has become a liability.

My passion and creativity and desire to work with others toward a common goal will deliver me through the hardest of times at work. If I think it will serve the common good or a kid in need or morph a dysfunctional system into a workable, more efficient one, I’ll go to extremes to help make it happen. But I realized something recently. I realized that I’m mostly invisible.  And now that a bad economy has caused downsizing to trickle down from the corporate world into school districts, that’s not a good thing.

While I’ve been busy developing a program that I’m fairly certain is not only meeting the mandate we’ve been given and making sure that No Child Will Be Left Behind as I deliver my students to the doorstep of the public kindergarten classroom, I’ve been at the back of the bus. My program could not be more far removed from what goes on at my site. I am located at the back of the school with other specialized programs that serve children who are not yet kindergarten age (for those who are unaware, school districts are mandated by law to provide Individualized Education Programs for children with disabilities starting at age three.) Other than my instructional assistant, the staff I work closest with either are not located at my site at all or are only on site once or twice a week. I have little or no professional contact with the teachers on campus because we don’t share students in common. Parents know what I’ve accomplished. They’ve seen their child’s growth. My colleagues who place kids in my program know. But when you pull the lens out farther to the school level, to district level, what I do is invisible.

I have colleagues with the same job title but with very different job duties. They are more visible – they work mostly with students who’ve reached school age and are interwoven into the workings of the campuses where they work. That is going to become more true of me as well as my job duties are expanding. But regardless of how visible they are or I am, the expectations are changing for all of us. Workloads and caseload are increasing for everyone. But the law remains the same. There are rules we must follow. They are set in stone. There are serious repercussions for failing to meet each and every one. But still, we are given more – asked to do more.

There is fear. For some it is the fear of change, any change that disrupts the way we’ve always done things. But for most, the fear is that even with passion, creativity, and forward thinking we will be unable to meet the requirements of the jobs we’ve been given and that we will sacrifice our health, our relationships, our happiness in trying to do so.

A special ed colleague and friend told me about a beautiful private school in our area that is closing. A staff of young teachers is out of work, families are left to figure out what to do. For a moment, we mused about how nice it would be to do what we do best, helping kids, in such a great environment without the burdens we face in the public school system. If we didn’t have to pay our mortgages, provide medical insurance for our families, and were independently wealthy, we could scoop that school right up and focus on the passion for helping kids that brought us to our professions. It would be great if the world worked that way. If all it took was vision and passion to change things for the better. I want to believe that’s still possible. I hope it is. I suppose that’s why I love to work with kids. It’s hard not to absorb their vision, their passion. I will hold on to that as tight as I can.

Hopefully, when they reach adulthood, they’ll find solutions we’ve failed to find.

May your geek cup always runneth over. Life’s better that way…

- The Geek Sage

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Paving the Way For The Next Zuckerberg or Spielberg

Posted on August 10, 2011 by

If you’ve seen The Social Network, I’m sure you noticed that Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, didn’t seem to have a full grasp of the social world. (If the irony of that slipped by you, you might have a little something in common with him.) And while I’ve never seen or read anything official from Steven Spielberg’s “people” either confirming or denying that he has Asperger’s Syndrome, it’s been reported in the media, erroneously or not.

The list could go on, but I think you see where I’m going with this.

Some friends invited my husband and I for dinner last weekend. They do this from time to time. We even take our kids with us, despite that fact that our first-borns are a challenging pair of pre-teen girls. And it works. It works because our children have trained us to have cognitive flexibility and to accept managed chaos. In other words, the norm in their household is strikingly close to the norm in ours. We can be our quirky selves and so can they. (And we still get invited back!)

The conversation meandered to a place it has gone before – to a discussion of neurotypicals versus non-neurotypicals. Among parents raising kids with high functioning autism or attentional/behavioral/emotional challenges, that means we were talking about average joes versus those with average or above intelligence whose neurological makeup includes characteristics that fall outside of what would typically considered “normal.” I love this conversation. I love this conversation because I can hear the elephant stomp into the room every time. And what is written across the side of that enormous pachyderm? Maybe your daughters aren’t the only ones who aren’t neurotypical. We like the implication. We laugh about it. We celebrate it.

The discussion drifts to the future – what’s ahead for our girls. I wonder if my daughter’s verbal precociousness and ability to steer others towards her way of thinking will make up for her differences when she reaches college. I admit my fear that she won’t have the GPA and the list of extracurricular activities on her university applications to be offered admittance. He insists that my fears are unfounded. He points to famous movers and shakers that don’t seem to be so neurotypical - prominent, successful folks like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. He reminds me that smart, powerful people are raising kids just like ours and that they are paving a way for our kids. We are nearing critical mass, he says. What’s held kids like ours back in the past won’t matter anymore. Times are changing.

I hope so. I want to believe my friend. Whether what he says pans out or not, it’s always a lively discussion and it makes me feel hopeful about the future.

But what if he is right? And if he is, how do we help that process along? How do you steer a kid who is smart but different toward success? How do the parents of a Steven Spielberg, a Mark Zuckerberg, or a Steve Wozniak help them overcome their weaknesses and channel their strengths? I don’t know the answer to those questions, but I do think I know what makes most smart but different folks succeed – a high degree of goal-directed persistence and dumb luck. The dumb luck has to do with being in the right place at the right time. Goal-directed persistence is one of the twelve executive functions our frontal lobe is responsible for.

Our frontal lobe is like Captain Kirk on the bridge of the Enterprise (I’m going to visualize Chris Pine as Kirk. You can opt for William Shatner if you like. I’m choosing Chris mostly to have mercy on the folks who’ve been following my blog long enough to know that I always sneak in a celebrity crush and I think it’s safe to say pretty much everyone is tired of hearing about Russell Brand by now – sorry Russell.) Captain Kirk can’t pilot the Enterprise alone (and for all you Trekkies out there, I’m sure you can come up with some Star Trek trivia to counter me on that, but for the sake of my example, hang with me). He barks orders about warp speed, asks for coordinates, insists Scotty finds a way to give him more power down in engineering. He needs Chekhov, Sulu, Uhura translating into Swahili, and Spock not getting emotional to keep the Enterprise from wandering aimlessly through space. Everyone has a role. And when it comes to our frontal lobes, everyone needs at least a little ability to plan, prioritize, initiate tasks, inhibit responses, be flexible, and a host of other things to meet even the simplest of goals. But goal-directed persistence – not giving up on the prize and doing everything you can to realize that goal – can make up for weaknesses in those other eleven functions. Why? Because if you want something bad enough and stick with it, you can compensate for all the others or delegate to people who can do those things for you. Successful people do that.

So if you ask me, goal-directed persistence is what we should be fostering in all kids, above all else. Because that is the place from which all success comes. Luckily for my daughter, she came out of the womb with way more than her fair share of this – so much so that I’ve spent most of the last thirteen years actually trying reduce her goal-directed persistence because she tends to direct it at things that make everyone around her miserable. (Have you ever had a ten-year-old child at your beside at 6am insisting that you need to drive her to Wal-Mart immediately so she can feed a crane machine addiction so intense it would make most crackheads look like casual wine drinkers? Nobody warns you about THAT possibility before you decide to have children. Brutal.) But I do realize that appropriately channeled, her persistence has the potential to serve her well in life.

In the meantime, my hope is that teachers, parents, and everyone with the power and opportunity to mentor the next generation will help pave the way. There is a generation of kids out there with gifts that our planet needs. Let’s choose not to waste them.  Let’s channel them for the benefit of everyone.

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Which State Test Measures Namaste?

Posted on August 8, 2011 by

My son’s a giggler. Once he gets going, he can’t stop. He gets it from me. All it takes is that one person, the one look, and within a few seconds it’s all over. He can’t stop.

It’s been a problem in the classroom since preschool. No amount of punishment has worked to stop it. Someone just looks at him and it starts. I’ve felt bad for his teachers. I know this must have derailed things in the classroom on many occasions. And I am enormously grateful for the teacher that took the time to understand him, to figure him out, to help him get a grip on it.

This teacher understands Namaste. A greeting that comes from India, it’s modern usage roughly translates to, “The spirit in me respects the spirit in you.” She’s never used the term with me. I don’t even know if it’s part of her vocabulary. But I see it when I interact with her and it’s obvious that it is from this fountain that most everything in her life flows and since teaching is a major part of her life, it applies to that as well. She spends precious time fostering Namaste in her classroom. It isn’t in the state standards and I’m certain it takes away from the time she has to teach her students to pass the standardized tests required to prove that No Child Has Been Left Behind. If any child has been left behind, it is not this woman’s fault, I can assure you. She lives and breathes her commitment to teaching every day of her life and well beyond the hours for which she is paid. (She actually passes out her home number and encourages parents to call it. If that’s not dedication, I don’t know what is.)

Last week actor Matt Damon spoke at a Save Our Schools Rally in Washington D.C. His speech challenged the notion that the standardized testing required in schools improves the quality of our children’s educational experience. He is not the only one challenging it. Most everyone I respect in education and beyond challenges it, too. But I’m grateful for his willingness to add his high-profile voice to the rebel yell that I hope is gaining momentum.  Here is an excerpt from his speech. (You can find the full speech by following this link: http://www.bostonherald.com/blogs/entertainment/the_assistant/?p=5865

…As I look at my life today, the things I value most about myself — my imagination, my love of acting, my passion for writing, my love of learning, my curiosity — all come from how I was parented and taught.

And none of these qualities that I’ve just mentioned — none of these qualities that I prize so deeply, that have brought me so much joy, that have brought me so much professional success — none of these qualities that make me who I am … can be tested.

I said before that I had incredible teachers. And that’s true. But it’s more than that. My teachers were EMPOWERED to teach me. Their time wasn’t taken up with a bunch of test prep — this silly drill and kill nonsense that any serious person knows doesn’t promote real learning. No, my teachers were free to approach me and every other kid in that classroom like an individual puzzle. They took so much care in figuring out who we were and how to best make the lessons resonate with each of us. They were empowered to unlock our potential. They were allowed to be teachers.

Now don’t get me wrong. I did have a brush with standardized tests at one point. I remember because my mom went to the principal’s office and said, ‘My kid ain’t taking that. It’s stupid, it won’t tell you anything and it’ll just make him nervous.’ That was in the ’70s when you could talk like that.

I shudder to think that these tests are being used today to control where funding goes.

I don’t know where I would be today if my teachers’ job security was based on how I performed on some standardized test. If their very survival as teachers was based on whether I actually fell in love with the process of learning but rather if I could fill in the right bubble on a test. If they had to spend most of their time desperately drilling us and less time encouraging creativity and original ideas; less time knowing who we were, seeing our strengths and helping us realize our talents.

I honestly don’t know where I’d be today if that was the type of education I had. I sure as hell wouldn’t be here…

My son is returning to school next week. I get his teacher assignment this week and my hope for him is always that he will get a teacher who understands the limitations of teaching to a test and takes the time to fit in the facilitation of real learning.  I know she has no choice but to make teaching to a test a major thrust of her instructional time. That’s what she’s been asked to do – that’s become a job requirement. But I know it is not her incentive to work hard. That comes from somewhere deep inside her and no amount of legislation can impact (or needs to impact) that.

There are countless examples of successful people who struggled in school. And if you were to ask them to identify the reasons for their struggle, I highly doubt that the absence of proper standardized testing or pay incentives for teachers based on improved scores would make their lists. British comic, Russell Brand, detailed more information about his childhood than most people would ever want to know in the first installment of his autobiography, My Booky Wook. I don’t recommend this book for the faint of heart but it does underscore the importance of recognizing that teachers don’t educate student profiles, they educate children - in Russell’s case, a child whose parents divorced when he was a baby, a child whose mother fought cancer over and over throughout his childhood, a child who was molested by a tutor and a babysitter (and that doesn’t even take into account the unique brain makeup that he came into the world with.) Here’s a peek at one of his school progress reports, an excerpt from My Booky Wook.

Progress NIL! …Generally speaking a ‘waste of space’ has no interest in subject… does not make any effort to change his approach.

Hmm. Perhaps Russell wasn’t the one in need of changing his approach.

If we want to keep our children from being left behind as that famous piece of legislation, No Child Left Behind, mandates, I think that’s exactly what will be required – a change in approach.

May your geek cup always runneth over. Life’s better that way…

 - The Geek Sage

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Don’t Blame the Mummified Barbies

Posted on August 1, 2011 by

The Geek Sage is feeling a bit cranky this morning. Generally a happy person with a positive outlook (“That cup is half full not half empty. Are you mad?”), I’m not the least bit accepting of this state of being. So I do what I do at these moments. I go deep inside myself searching for answers. I shine a flashlight into the darkest, deepest corners of my soul in search of the offending antecedent. But alas, nothing to be found but a few cookie crumbs and a crumpled pamphlet on perimenopause.

No reason for my funk in sight, my eyes drift out the kitchen window. I notice the three mummified Barbies in a neat little line on the patio chair. Could this be the cause of my foul mood? No. I harbor no bad feelings toward them. They’re the result of my twelve-year-old’s summer boredom and were simply abandoned as the online instructions shed no light whatsoever on what to do with the mummies once the mummification process had been completed. Turns out, there is no precedent in regard to burial rites for mummified Barbies. Mummified orphans now, they sit ignored.

Maybe it’s my blog, I think to myself. I’ve now reached my sixth posting and have not yet defaulted on my goal of posting every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I’ve done it now for a full two weeks. So far so good. I should feel a sense of accomplishment, shouldn’t I? But instead, I am already feeling like I’ve painted myself into a corner.

That’s it! I’m feeling constrained by my very own blog. How did that happen? And in only two weeks time.

I do this. All the time actually. I start things. I get excited. And it isn’t that the excitement goes away. It just wants to shift, to morph, to meander a different direction. It rebels against the status quo, the perfect plan, the expected. It wants something else. And here I find myself, textured drywall at my back and every inch of the floor between my bare toes and the door covered in wet paint. Again.

As with anything in life, we choose paths constantly. Some are inconsequential, like whether to go for red sauce or white sauce. Other choices have more impact, like whether to start training for that marathon or to go back to college. But regardless of the context, with each choice comes another set of paths to select from. Some of those chosen paths lead to a dead-end. And when that happens to me, a little voice inside pipes up and says, “It’s time to retrace your steps back to the place you started from.”

So here I sit, thinking back to the reason why I started this blog. My initial reason was pretty general. I wanted a platform that would force me into a commitment to write three chunks of output a week just for the sake of the creative experience. After nearly two years spent on a novel that I still don’t feel finished with, I decided that a little freedom and breathing room from the story and its characters might be a good thing. And so far, I think it has been.

But why TheGeekSage.com? Why did I feel the need to change the way the world looks at geeks? The answer to that would be an autobiography. Don’t worry. I won’t make you sit through THAT. But going back to what was on my mind at the time, it was a music video for Katy Perry’s new song, Last Friday Night. The video features Katy’s new alter ego, Kathy Beth Terry, a stereotypical geeky middle schooler with obnoxious orthodontics and awkward speech. The clothes, the nerdy glasses – none of that bothered me really.  It was the bits at the beginning and the end, before and after she sang in Katy Perry’s perfect and familiar voice, when she was speaking as Kathy Beth. I listened. I watched. And I couldn’t deny what I felt. I didn’t see a girl having difficulty speaking because of her orthodontia as I think Katy Perry intended. I saw a girl with a developmental disability.

Now I’m going to tread very carefully here. (I like Katy Perry and as you know if you’ve read previous posts, her husband, Russell Brand, is one of my favorite comics.) I mean no disrespect to Katy in the least and I’m fairly certain she meant no disrespect when she created Kathy Beth. She was trying to be funny, to entertain. I get that. And I don’t fault her for that in the least. But her video made me sad. It hurt. She’d probably be surprised to know that. She might even think that I missed the point or that I don’t have much of a sense of humor. She’d have the right. It’s her work. And in all fairness, I do have to acknowledge that there have been times that my own expressions of humor hit people in a way that hurt even when I hadn’t intended it to. I imagine that, if it hasn’t happened already, someone will come across my blog, misunderstand my intentions and feel the same uncomfortable feeling in their gut that I felt watching Kathy Beth Terry.

As with every human being on the planet, my humor meter is inextricably linked to my story – the set of life experiences that have been shaping who I am since before I could eat solid food or even walk (some people would say before that, but that’s another post altogether). I work with kids whose brains are not typical.  I also live with one. And she will be starting the seventh grade – yes, middle school – in two weeks. She is already worrying about who she will sit with at lunch, whether she’ll know what to say to the other kids if they actually decide to talk to her. I suppose it isn’t so different from what other twelve-year-old girls think about. Except my twelve-year old girl was born with neurological differences that set her apart from most girls her age. You probably wouldn’t guess it if you glanced at her walking down the street. She looks like she just hopped off the set of a Nickelodeon sitcom. That’s because she goes to great lengths to try to look like everyone else, to sound like everyone else, so she can be accepted by everyone else. But she hasn’t been. She wanders from clique to clique on campus, trying to find a home she never finds. She smiles at school and cries at home and sometimes I do, too.

I’m not complaining. Many kids on the autism spectrum are not as fortunate as my daughter. She is one of the lucky ones. I recognized the signs of an autism spectrum disorder when she was a baby. My husband and I turned our lives upside down doing everything we could think of  to help her and we celebrate the girl she is today. Her progress has come at a heavy price (I could write a book on that, let me tell ya), but we’re hopeful that one day she’ll be able to live on her own, have meaningful relationships, and find satisfying work that can support her. In the meantime, unlike Kathy Beth Terry, my daughter spent last Friday night at a party for kids and teens with social challenges experiencing what it feels like to belong, to fit in. She met me with a smile when I picked her up and she can’t wait to go back next Friday night.

Earlier in the day, she’d been busy mummifying Barbies – alone (with the exception of the five minutes I made her brother join her.) But despite her lack of social success at school, she can’t wait to go back . She craves the routine, a distraction from the constant failure she experiences on an almost daily basis in our neighborhood. (The neighborhood kids mostly shun her and any success she finds is with kids five years her junior.)

So from where I stand now, in the corner I’ve painted myself into, I realize that there is only one way to go with my blog.  Back through the wet paint, to the place where I began. A vast expanse of roads await me there. Which one will I take? That story hasn’t yet been written. But one thing is for sure. I will continue to write from a place that insists that we all have a right and a responsibility to be authentic to ourselves, to find our passions, and not to care so much what other people think. That’s what being a geek is all about. And if you aren’t one already, I hope you’ll aspire to be one.

May your geek cup always runneth over. Life’s better that way…

- The Geek Sage

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What the Heck is a Geek Sage?

Posted on July 19, 2011 by

The Geek Sage. What exactly does that mean, asks my husband? And do you really have to use that word?

Let’s start with the second question. Do you really have to use that word? I suppose I should start off by clarifying that I’m pretty sure he was referring to geek not sage. Sage seems like a pretty solid choice. Why wouldn’t I want to include wise man in my title? (Or correcting for gender, why wouldn’t I want to include that wise chick in my title?)

So assuming he was referring to the word geek, which I’m fairly certain he was, the answer is simple. Yes. I did have to use that word. And why, you ask? Because the term geek deserves some good press (no wordpress.com pun intended) and a quickie divorce from it’s near constant association with males who spend 80% or more of their discretionary income on technological toys. Hire a stylist, find an A-list PR agency, and get that poor word an agent. A geek revolution is at hand, folks, so put on your fanny packs and let’s march!

And as we do, let’s take a moment to review how far the term geek has already come. Take a stroll with me now into the halls of geek history.

Traditionally, a geek has been thought of as the eternal outsider with nothing but a well constructed pocket protector, glasses in a perpetual state of disrepair, a complete and total inability to determine the natural resting point for the waistline on a pair of pants, an allergic condition no doctor on the planet could ever seem to treat effectively, and not a snowball’s chance in hell of ever hearing the words, “That geek’s girlfriend is hot!”

While we can find many of examples of traditional geek stereotypes in 80′s flicks, we can also look back to 80′s films for the beginnings of a sort of geek renaissance. Thanks to the movie making magic of such geek film masters as the late John Hughes (think Duckie from Pretty in Pink and Anthony Michael Hall’s characters in Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Weird Science), the term geek began to be redefined. No longer were geeks represented simply as scrawny little boys with the aforementioned pocket protectors and glasses with masking tape across the nose bridge. These were real people with characteristics that even non-geeks could relate to. And now modern film makers like Judd Apatow have expanded the concept of geeks even further, taking them somewhere they’ve rarely been before in movies – outside of high school and college and into romantic comedies set beyond the adolescent years. In these films, geeks are no longer just the bumbling loser side kicks of the lead characters, they are the lead characters (think Steve Carell in the Forty Year Old Virgin, Kevin James in Hitch, Jonah Hill in Get Him to the Greek and in all fairness to the female gender, let’s throw in the leading woman, Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaids – my hands down favorite comedy of 2011). Apatow picked up the baton and has nearly taken geeks across the redemption finish line. Geeks have become, well, almost cool.

You’ll notice I wrote almost. Almost cool. And that’s what this blog aims to change folks. The almost. It’s time to celebrate being a geek not run from it. The chains have been severed. Let freedom ring.

So back to that question,” What does The Geek Sage actually mean?”

I know what you’re thinking. Is she a sage trying to further the cause of geeks everywhere or is she just a geeky sage? Most people who know me well would probably say both, but I’ll let you decide…every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with the occasional half price Tuesday and lazy Sunday morning thrown in. You be the judge.

May your geek cup always runneth over. Life’s better that way…

- The Geek Sage

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