Of course, no matter how difficult life can seem when trying live fully, efficiently, and as wisely as possible, real life goes on.

A friend of mine just emailed me with a dilemma which, I admit, creates quite a conundrum.

Well, friend, aside from the fact that the mere act of starting a relationship with a g/f causes severe hit damage to your loser geek stats, this might actually be a good sign.

By speaking in psuedoL33t, your g/f is exhibiting a strong competence in the mental disciplines of manipulating phonemes and ontological symbols. According to Microsoft, "the leetspeek community encourages new forms and awards individual creativity, resulting in a dynamic written language that eludes conformity or consistency." Wikipedia traces this sort of behaviour to that of the protagonists in William Golding's Lord of the Flies.

So long as she does use non-alphanumeric characters interchangeably in her passwords, she should be fine. By improvising from the standard riffs of l33t, she may be using her m4d sk1llz0rz to create a middle ground -- an Island-- between normals and geeks, an artistic space of expression and life just for the two of you. This is especially encouraging if she is not herself of a geeky nature. As a hopelessly-single geek myself, I suggest you find that space and go there. Right now. Before it's too late.

Update: Wow. Microsoft pulled down their page on leetspeak yesterday. Was it in response to my post? There's even still a link to it at the bottom of their "Security at Home: Child Safety Online" main page. But The Wayback Machine doesn't forget. In response, I have changed the link to point to the archive held by The Wayback Machine