I am a geek.
No, that's not the confession- that's a statement of chest-swelling pride.
No, the confession is that it wasn't until the past seven years or so that I could proclaim my geekdom without any sense of irony or slight shame. It's surprising, given the nature of things even seven years ago, but it really did take the explosion of the geek as an idea of celebration to really make me comfortable with the notion; the idea that I'm not the weirdo or the pariah. I am welcomed. I am valued. I am home.
Now before this begins to sound like grade A undiluted maudlin, I need to qualify the tone of this piece, so hopefully you will be able to see where I'm coming from and how earnest this confession really is. I'll be freely dating myself with examples here, so bear with me. Yes. I'm 31 years old. Yes, I saw the dawn of electronic man, utilized the crudely-shaped but purposeful tool that was dial-up, and bore witness to the ominous black monolith that bore the sigil of America Online. Can we all accept that and move forward? Excellent.
My cane has a +20 vs. Youthful Exuberance.
Get off of my lawn, etc etc.
The tone needs to be established, because this is a very personal piece for me. In my heart of hearts, I wish this could be the message I could send back to my younger self – provided, that is, that I could get a hold of a DeLorean, a flux capacitor, and an arbitrary speed prerequisite for time travel. I would love for past-tense me to be able to read this, but sadly he can't. He can't this see message, that is; I assure you that past-tense me is literate. He can read. Stop judging.
And, once again, I'm turning to humor to sort this out. Only this time, the humor's decidedly self-referential (necessity) and perhaps a bit self-effacing (unintended but ultimately unavoidable).
Right now, I have the latest sonic offering from Felicia Day and Jed Whedon (I'm the One that's Cool) blaring on my laptop, and I have to give credit where it's due. This song gave me the much needed push to write up this piece, and is in and of itself an empowering anthem in it's own right. I know, I know. That sounds completely fanboyish and silly of me. Yes, it is. I'm a fanboy. But silly?
Absolutely not.
After watching it with me last night, my wife Katy admitted that parts of it made her tear up as she remembered similar experiences that happened to her in school. I replied that it made me smile to the point of face-splitting threshold. The song says it all: You tormented me to secure your popularity and cool factor. Too bad that it counts for nothing outside of school.
While I'm not trying to co-opt an excellent campaign, the phrase “it gets better” really does apply here. That's what I want to convince my younger self of. It gets better. Not only does it get better, it gets downright fantastic.
This is what Google returned for "fantastic". If I have to suffer, so do you.
Up until my last two year of high school (and sometimes even then), I was in Hell. It was bad enough that I was almost perpetually the new kid due to my family's propensity for moving, but when you couple that with an introverted mien, add in a voracious love of knowledge and learning with little regard for sports, supplement a popular kid's wardrobe for whatever my mom could actually afford at the time, pump in a very early acceptance into the Gifted/Talented curriculum program, and liberally sprinkle in a runt's frame and penchant for actively seeking out trivia and pastimes that few others (at the time) cared about, you get a recipe for a world-class whipping boy.
This a completely accurate representation of my usual commute home from school. only, replace Jack Sparrow with a younger me, the cannibals with bullies, and the soaring orchestration of Hans Zimmer with my blubbering cries for help and shrieks of pain. Completely accurate.
Elementary and Junior High held a lot of similarities for me. I was perpetually beaten up. I was ostracized and ridiculed to the point of staying home as much as I could; not out of some slacker hooky mentality, but just to escape the aggressors. Those days found me in the Library on my free time, the Counselor's office, or hiding in my bedroom. I would poor over science and history books. tear through video games and sci-fi shows, and gorge myself on nerd-friendly memes before that word ever became a commonplace entry into our lexicon. The few (very few) friends I had were my only other outlet, and they too would often choose retreating to their room over any other social interaction. Instead of going out to the hang-out spots, we were beating the crap out of each other in Eternal Champions on the Genesis, or navigating out way through poorly lit pixelated hallways in Aliens vs. Predator on the Jaguar.
Don't laugh. This was the shit as far as we were concerned. Ok, you can laugh a little.
Yeah, my friend's mom was cool enough to buy him a Jaguar. I think they both feel very silly about this decision now, so let's not salt wounds.
We would opt out of wine-cooler laden underage parties in favor of anime marathons on the Sci-Fi channel. We'd argue the nature of A.I.'s and what the future would really look like. We'd rent Nintendo, then Super Nintendo, then Playstation games and anime titles from the video store, and annihilate our weekends. We'd drown ourselves in a whirlpool of liquid nerdgasm.
We'd have fun, and I'd hate myself even more for it.
Bruises healed, clothes were replaced, lunch money would come again, but nothing would convince me that things would ever improve. So, like any awkward geek-fledgling, I retreated even further into my off-kilter pursuits as a form of escapism. The problem was, I began to associate my hobbies and favorites with the trauma of whatever fresh torment was visited upon me.
In short, my geeky loves (the things I pursued to comfort myself) were not only the solution to my pain, but they were the cause of it. I was a Geek because I loved what it offered, and I was routinely punished for being a Geek. It's easy for me to disabuse myself of such a circular fallacy now, but remember that at this point and time I was a scrawny nothing with no support system and no other empirical evidence beyond the simple equation that Dungeons & Dragons earned me a black eye, and that the only way to feel better or forget about that fact was to roll up another character.
For me, "parties" had a significantly different meaning, and I could get drunk with no real lasting harm, save to the campaign.
The only thing that seemed to alter this infernal-circle-that-Dante-forgot-to-mention-in-his-fucking-book was a late term growth spurt that shot me up almost a foot and added almost one hundred pounds to my frame during my last two years of High School. (Thanks, genetics. Had to take your sweet fucking time, didn't ya?) Suddenly the visual cue for the bullies went from “he's a dorky toothpick, sic'em” to “He's in my weightlifting class, and can bench 250...let's just walk around him”.
Now, by no means did my metamorphosis suddenly transform me into one of the cool kids ala a John Hughes wet dream. It just meant that the ridicule was no longer overt. It also bears saying that at this point I discovered my high school's outstanding theater and AV program, but that hardly helped my credit score with the popular-crowd loan sharks. I was still a social pariah. I was a geek, a theater-nerd, a chess-club-member spaz, and all-around uncool character. I spent more on Magic: The Gathering cards than my mom did on my first car. You know: back when Chaos Orb was still something new, and whispered about in hushed tones of paralyzing deck-destroying fear.
I'm old. Shut up.
In my day, we had standard lands for our mana pool, and we LIKED it!
Oh, and did I mention I was on the school newspaper, culminating in an Editor position by my senior year? Toss in a stint with the marching band and I'd be a perfect storm of youth-culture leprosy.
Oh wait. I did do a stint with the High School marching band. Fuck.
This wasn't me, but good lord it might as well have been.
So if anything could be said for those last two years, it's only that my Hell became more quiet, with less active clear-and-present torment. Fortunately, Dante DID describe that circle. It's the one that describes the Ice Capades as directed by H.R. Geiger. I went from physical torment to purely psychological torment, and for the life of me I still can not decide which one was worse. Is it better to at least get some form of social interaction, albeit twisted and corrupt; or to stand on the fringes and deal with it in forced silence?
It doesn't help that this was also around the time that the female sex became REALLY interesting to me, and I was still only as interesting to them as a creepy insect might be interesting to your average high-school prom queen candidate.
But still, I had friends here and there. I repeated process with the games and movies and tabletop adventures and futurism debates. I hated myself some more. Lather, rinse, repeat.
By the time I got out, I had made it a point to forgo everything I loved, because I had come to the mistaken conclusion that my hobbies were intrinsically linked to how I was to be accepted or rejected by society. In short, I became a raging asshole on the same echelon of the ones that hurt me. I abstained from the slices of fantasy and sci-fi that thrilled me and gave me hope; or at least license to dream. I laid aside video games in the pursuit of getting “mad game”.
And I hated myself even more for what I was turning into.
My life in the years between 18 and 21 were a sublime (sublime here having the meaning of soul-crushing) stint of introspection and identity search. I came to more incorrect conclusions; the chief of these being that there was simply something undeniably wrong with me, and that I was simply destined to not be happy. And then? I met Katy.
Halle-fucking-lujah!
Katy must be credited here, because she was instrumental not only in snapping me to my senses, but making me feel comfortable in my own skin. Here was a Geeky gamer chic who was beautiful, smart, independent, and most importantly proud of the things she loved to do. We watched toonami together, Rurouni Kenshin on old VHS tapes, played Dead or Alive on Dreamcast till the wee hours of the morning, and she introduced me to her group of friends who were all like me. We started up a roleplay group, watched the Gorillaz special on Cartoon Network, ran a Highlander marathon-
There can be only one ... television series. There can be as many movies as we damned well please.
We drowned in a whirlpool of liquid nerdgasm. Again. Only this time, finally, I was coming around to where I did not feel completely ashamed.
The years passed, and I slowly but surely became more comfortable with the idea of being a geek. Being me. The taunts and jeers faded into the background, muffled by the love of my then fiancee and the solidarity of the circle of geeks I had found myself lucky enough to stumble upon. The internet began to take shape and form under the guiding influence of like-minded geeks, and I realized that there was something magical happening; Geek was slowly but surely becoming something to not only aspire to, but to completely revel in.
This was further impressed upon me by the conventions I went to, first as a visitor, and then as a special guest. I felt even more welcomed and wanted and appreciated, and suddenly my vast catalog of trivia and knowledge was no longer a handicap, but something bordering on a celebrated mutant power.
Excelsior, bitches.
I suddenly went from feeling beaten down by the world around me to feeling empowered by it. Here was the nation without borders, and our standard is whatever we personally want it to be at any given time. Our Constitution is written in ascii, pascal, java, c+; printed on the vellum of html, css, flash; it bears the legendary signatures of millions of fans and creators; its tenets are ever in flux and ever the same. Here is the promise of equality- where politics, religion, sex, and creed might intrude, but never truly guide our laws and interactions with one another. Here is the country where the fiercest debates are the pros and cons of Picard or Kirk, Baker or Tennant (or any of the timelords). Trek or Wars; Apple or Windows or Linux; The Three Laws or the Prime Directive; Dub or sub. Here, finally, was home.
We are the Geek Nation. Look upon our works, ye jocks, and despair!
To be a Geek is a wondrous thing in a time where your nation is just clicks of a mouse away. Sure, there will be struggles; there will be hurdles set in your path by the school kids who don't get it. There will be times where you will think that you're a freak, and damaged, and that what you love is wrong. I'm here to tell you, because I can't tell my past-self this: that is utter and complete bullshit.
I won't wax the platitude about “we're running the show in the real world”, because that's simply not true. The reality is so much better than that. SO much more exciting and fantastic. The truth of the matter is, that geeks are not running the world outside of your school days. We're not in charge of the goings on. We do not rule the world. However...
Look at the most popular money-earning television shows. Check out the past five years of blockbuster movies, or other entertainment. Check out the rise of gaming. Smartphones? Computers? Text-speak? Fashionable bits and accessories and art for all of that? Increased speed and bandwidth in your lovely wi-fi connection? Notice anything, yet?
We did that. You're most welcome. Feel free to bow, or kneel in awe.
Hey. The man said KNEEL.
We drive the industries, and other industries benefit because of it. Like your celebrity gossip? Think it's not geeky? Bitch, please. We crafted the allure and dedication to trivia and communication needs necessary to bring you TMZ. Like football? Enjoying the new graphics and animated segments and real-time information relays that help you know what's-what? Hi. We're the gamers that you can thank for informing those creative decisions at the corporate level. Don't even get me started on “fantasy football”. Did you enjoy The Dark Knight or Iron Man? Ha. We have number 1 issues, mint condition. Love being able to text those silly little acronyms to save you time on your smartphone? Lovely. Newsgroups, alt.vista, mIRC, IM, Lan games, MMO's. We ARE your precious shorthand Oxford.
No. We do not rule the world. We fucking CREATE it.
To my past self, and all adherents and patriots of our proud Geek nation: you are powerful and needed. You are the dreamers that will craft the future, even as you argue over what that future might be. Like the 10th Doctor, YOU ARE NOT ALONE.
To the cool, the bullies, or the tragically hip of the world, I'll simply leave you with this, as Felicia and Jed said it better than I ever could:
Now WE'RE the ones that are cool. The rest of the world failed their saving throw.
My name is Xero Reynolds, and I am a proud Geek.
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