totally random: I remember this dude from junior high

Dr. Geza Gyuk has certainly come into his own. I doubt he remembers me, and I doubt he remembers his time in junior high at Stephen Foster Junior-high School with much fondness (just as I do not). Geza supposedly had a 180 IQ even back then; the rest of us were mere grunting apes compared to him. I don't think he went to my high school (Mount Vernon High School, Alexandria, Virginia), so he and I lost contact after junior high—not that we were ever close friends, but I was nerdy enough to be at least partially in Geza's orbit.

While Geza doesn't appear to be famous enough to have earned his own Wikipedia page yet, he has a webpage that proclaims him to be "Director of Astronomy at the Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum and a Senior Research Associate, University of Chicago," which is the university where he got his Ph.D.

I vaguely recall hanging with Geza a few times throughout junior high, but we never became close, and I'm not even sure I was particularly nice to him. While I wouldn't call myself dumb, I can say Geza's intellect outstripped mine in almost every way. Back then, he was a shrimpy little guy who was constantly blinking too hard and too frequently, as if his eyes were always irritated. But he seems, now, to have outgrown all that; he may not even remember this trait of his if asked. His name popped into my head a few minutes ago, and I found him easily enough with a simple Google search. Based on the videos of him that I watched just now, he's no longer shrimpy, and he seems quite comfortable with who he is and what he does.

I feel no particular desire to catch up with him; I simply got curious when his name became a sudden earworm in my head, and I had to find out whether he was visible online. Anyway, I salute Geza and his achievements and wish him nothing but the best. I imagine he's got a family (we're old enough, at this point, to have grandkids), and I'm sure he's happy as a clam.

And now, should he ever Google himself (I doubt he has the ego to do that), he'll find this blog post and wonder who the hell I am.

Here's a weirdly nerdy video featuring the adult Geza: