Speak Out With Your Geek Out
I grew up in a House of Geek.
Some of my earliest memories involve watching Star Trek with my dad. I knew how to make the Vulcan Salute before I knew how to ride a bike. When they first introduced me to Garbanzo beans, he told me they were little Ferengi heads.
My mom is a geek in her own right. Sure, she thinks Star Trek isn’t very exciting and really doesn’t know anything about Star Wars; and okay, she can barely work her email some days, but she’s as geek as they come. This woman could kick your ass at Rummy, Scrabble, or almost any board game before you even score your first points. At the dinner table, she was the one who got in trouble for playing with her food and pushing it into shapes. Plus, she’s left handed.
My siblings were way older than me, so most of my memories as a kid involved playing by myself. I used to have an old Gargoyles board game that came with a movie you played while you played the game. Without anyone to play with, I figured out how to do it by myself. It was new and exciting every time.
In elementary school, I traded and sold Beanie Babies and Beanie Baby trading cards on the internet. Most kids my age were out learning to surf or skim. I was surfing the internet.
I remember one time my brother brought over his Nintendo. I was fascinated. Duck Hunt was the best game ever. Video games were cool.
Being a Geek is something that I never really thought twice about. Kind of like the eleventh doctor picks up an un-loved article of clothing and declares it instantly cool, I always thought being a Geek was cool. Star Trek was cool. The internet was cool.
Geeks get a lot of flack. Despite the fact that some of the coolest, most successful people recognized by our society are geeks – we’re still the bullied. The less popular. The ones who get invited last when someone’s parents insist they send everyone in the class an invitation.
This week – we’re taking it back. Geek isn’t something you should be afraid of, or bulled for, or unsure of. Geek is about being awesome. As one of my favorite (very nerdy) authors once said:
”Saying ‘I notice you’re a nerd’ is like saying, ‘Hey, I notice that you’d rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you’d rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan.”
Some pretty smart – and pretty geeky – people decided that this week should be dubbed Speak Out With Your Geek Out. A week where we all get together and get proud of our geek. So step right up, and wave that geek flag high.
I’ll be posting several times this week to share about my geeky hobbies and why I’m proud to be a geek. If you have a blog, I encourage you to do the same. Announce your geekdom on Twitter proudly. Wear that Lord of the Rings t-shirt out in public.
Go on. Get Geeky. You’re in good company.
I first learned to program in BASIC when I was in the 8th grade, I think. Now, computer access when I was in the 8th grade was far different than when YOU were in the 8th grade! We went to our high school, about a mile away, once a week after school. The computer room held 4 Teletype Model 33s. The first 3 were for punching your program onto paper tape. The 4th machine had a modem to connect to a timesharing service the school subscribed to in downtown Cleveland. The school paid for service by the minute so you had to optimize your time on the live service. We’d login, read in the program off tape, save and run. We could test and edit for errors, but, at the end of your session you had to list your edited program back out to paper tape. Storage was very expensive and we could not store anything online overnight!
Can’t wait til we get to geek out with some more Gamma World. The adventures of Steam Bolt, Gobi, and Jerry from Texaport are endlessly entertaining… I can’t wait to see who their new friends will be.
As for being a geek, I’ve always been one too. You can check out my post about D&D and Art for a bit more in-depth look at my early days of geekdom, but there’s so much more than that… like trying to program a TRS-80 with artificial intelligence (didn’t work out so well), playing Hoth on the school playground during the brutal Wisconsin winters (for some reason, I always ended up being the taun-taun), and more.
The geeks shall inherit the earth.
I had that Gargoyles game!
I’m a lifelong geek, too – my parents were huge Star Trek and Star Wars fans, and encouraged all of my obsessive interests.
Looking forward to seeing more of your posts!