I am a geek.

I'm not what you probably think of as a geek, however. As a kid, I didn't spend time disassembling radios or cars, or playing with computers. No, no. My geekdom is more subtle and insidious than that.

I'm a biology geek. If it squishes, I'm interested.

Instead of disassembling machines, I was disassembling dead animals. Chickens taught me about bird musculature. Sow bugs taught me about crusteacean anatomy. I dissected flowers to look for the various reproductive organs. It was cool to clean fish, because fish are interesting on the inside. So are sea urchins.

When I couldn't get my hands on critters to see what they were like on the inside, I read about them. And about humans, as well. It helped that my mom was a nurse and had anatomy books on the shelf in the attic; by the time I was in fourth grade, I had a good grasp on the fundamentals of human anatomy, and by the time I graduated high school I knew more about how human and animal bodies worked than pretty much anyone else I knew.

I thought long and hard about becoming a doctor. In the end, I passed; you had to deal with people to be a doctor, and that's never where my skills have lain.

In junior high and high school, I was part of a program that, among other things, gave me a chance to practice my penchant for taking animals apart to see how they work inside. I dissected sheep eyes, a cow cardiovascular system (that was big and messy and FUN), and a few other things. In college, I dissected the usual fetal pig and preserved rat, as well as various plants.

I've just always wanted to find out about the machinery of life. The innards of a car always seemed so complex in a boring way to me. I mean, who *cares* that a computer works on on and off states? What's really interesting is the chemical signals that are sent between neurons, and the way we have capillaries touching almost every single cell in our bodies! Now, *that's* cool.

And brains. Brains are possibly the neatest thing EVER. I mean, they're these big squishy masses of neurons and tissue and they're firing all of these high-precision little bursts of electricity all the time, with chemicals bridging the spaces between them, and somehow this translates into the thoughts I have in my head. (Except that brains aren't really squishy. They have a texture that's sort of between *really* firm Jello and wet rubber. And they're surprisingly heavy. Er.) And the processing of everything happens really only in the thin little covering of the brain. All of which is really, really amazing if you think about it enough.

Even while I'm off daydreaming, my brain is gathering and processing all of the input from all of my senses. And at night, when the hyponogogic switch is thrown and it's safe to enter REM sleep, my brain actually *entertains* itself with dreams.

And in the brain my biogeekness and my wordgeekness collide; I am endlessly fascinated with aphasia and other brain damage that reveals stuff about how language works in the brain. Speech is such a fundamental part of being a human being, and it's such a late development, evolution-wise, that it's really interesting to find out more about how brains deal with it. Rare diseases are cool, too--as are epidemics. (Epidemics tend to be more statistics than anything else, but they're good at demonstrating social patterns.) There are so many things that can go wrong that it's positively amazing that any of us survive childhood.

I'm also interested in the endocrine system, mostly out of self-defense--it became interesting once I realized something was wrong with mine. And the skeletal system is very cool, and if I ever become rich I'm going to buy a skeleton of my very own. Just because.

Plants are fun, too. And people don't get *quite* as upset when you take apart a plant to figure out how it works than when you take apart animals.

What? What are you all staring at me for?

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