My Friends are Awesome: Greg

Latest in the ongoing series! I've got a bunch of these half completed My Friends are Awesome entries, and I was trying to decide which one to clean up and post, when Jen started reading something out of a book of poetry. It was by Emily Dickinson, so of course, it fit into the Gilligan's Island meter of all Emily Dickinson poetry.

For instance:

The distance that the dead have gone
Does not at first appear —
Their coming back seems possible
For many an ardent year.

Try it yourself someday!

Nowadays, it seems like everybody knows this little bit of trivia, but I heard it first from Greg. So this post is all about Greg, or as Facebook calls him, "G. Gregory", the "G", standing, of course, for "Gorgeous".

I usually bicker endlessly with Greg during our online (and offline) interactions, but sometimes we join forces to team up on his brother. I remember the time we first met. I was already dating Jen and we were meeting some of Dave's friends at a local carnival. Neither of use was impressed with the other. The only thing we had in common was that we thought that the other was kind of an aloof jerk. (And neither was wrong)

And we became friends because there was a large group of loosely affiliated gamers. We'd get together to play Magic and eventually I had a weekly game session with Greg and another buddy of ours, Timur. These were always fun because each of us knew with utter certainty that we were smarter than our other two guys in the room. Greg's catch phrase is "You're wrong and let me tell you why."

I cherish all of my friends, but there are things that Greg will appreciate that none of my other friends will. He's as big a fan of Dune and Lord of the Rings as I am (even to the extent to introducing me to a Middle Earth MUD that I played for a couple years) . I remember one time we were in Philadelphia for something. We'd been playing 20 questions to kill time. It had started out with animals and transitioned into fictional characters. The game had kind of tapered off until I started a new round with "I'm thinking of an elvish dialect."

Greg "Is it Quenya?"

"No,"

"Well, is it Sindarin?"

Heh, heh. Always nice to have friends to share your geekery. ("Yeah, so how come Eagles didn't just fly the ring into Mordor?")

And Greg is among the geekiest of my friends. He's been building his own computers for longer than I've known him (and doing it now isn't all that unusual, but Greg's been building his own for more than 15 years.) He was the first person to correctly quote Moore's Law to me (most people, to the extent that they know it at all, they just simplify it by saying that computing power doubles every two years) and he's even such a gentleman, he's not going to point out that infinitive I just split.

He also laughed at this joke, when I was commenting someone's misunderstanding of science: "Max Planck is spinning in his grave. Whether it is spin up or spin down is for someone else to determine."

He's said that people have told him that he looks like Chris Elliot, but I really don't see it. He reminds me of Enrico Colantoni who is apparently even playing a character named Greg on his new show! The circle is complete!

Greg is also working towards his PhD in Hitler Studies (Don DeLillo shout out!), which is pretty cool, and will someday let him manage a Barnes & Nobels. (Okay, I was kidding about the Hitler studies. I can never remember his exact specialization, but it's some kind of Arthurian Lit)

Finally, my mom rates him at 996 milli-Tims on her scale of kissability, a very high score indeed. Who am I to argue with that?