Most artists spent a huge amount of time and energy creating opportunities for themselves. Sometimes the efforts pan out, and sometimes nothing but a big fat zero results from all the clambering. Or so it seems. But live long enough, sending out unknown, unseen tendrils, and sometimes a completely unsought, unhoped-for, super-sweet opportunity drops right out of the clear blue sky. That’s what happened to me recently when the folks over at the brand new blog Parental Planet asked me to write some pieces on the subject of geeks parenting geeks. I weighed the offer for about five seconds, four seconds longer than necessary to realize that my many families—nuclear, extended and otherwise—all offer me an infinite wealth of material to draw from.
My kick-off piece, “Be the Geek Parent You Are” reports on how my amazing nephew Kevin Mullin did such cool things with robots on his family’s farm in Maryland that he got invited to Governor O’Malley’s office. (Yes, that Governor O’Malley: the one likely to give Hillary a run for her money in the 2016 presidential primaries.) In the piece’s intro, I describe the different approaches to geek parenting my brother and I employ.
There are all kinds of ways to be a geek. Indeed, if you own an operating brain, it is hard to avoid being a geek of some sort. When distinguishing my own geekery from my brother’s, I find physics is a helpful guide. There are theoretical physicists and experimental physicists: those who think about particles and the forces acting upon them, and those who investigate actual particles and forces to observe the real-world results. I’m a theory geek; my brother’s much more about the practice.
I would love to write more of these pieces. So if you’re a parent, or have a parent, or are a geek, or know a geek, do me a favor and go check out Parental Planet. As you browse the site, remember that it is still in beta mode. If you find bugs, or problems of any kind, use the “Beta: report a bug” button, third from the left in the top banner to tell the nice folks about them.
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