Look at me writing a #ThemeThursday post on Thursday! Some
of you will be aware that my
last theme Thursday post, in which I shamed myself for 500 words, was late.
This week’s theme is Geek Culture. (Last week’s theme was Rivalries. I’m sorry,
I was supposed to have mentioned that in the actual post. I’m so bad at this.)
As you might expect, everyone else is blogging about what
big geeks they are. If the title didn’t tip you off, I’m not entirely sure I’m a
geek at all.
This is not an issue that comes up for most people. I mean,
you either are or you aren’t. Most people wouldn’t waste a single second
wondering if they’re really a geek or not. But most people’s grandmothers weren’t
honorary crew members of the USS Enterprise.
I’m not kidding, Grandma was an honorary redshirt. She had a
certificate and everything. It hung in her sewing room, where she worked and
did the majority of her Star Trek
watching. At one point my grandfather, who was a carpenter, built her a little
model of the Enterprise, which hung
in the living room for years and still hangs there to this day.
When I was a little girl, my favorite Star Trek movie was the one with the whales, because whales.
Things began to go…well, for lack of a better word, wrong
right about the time the first Star Wars
prequel came out. One of my aunts, the one who never managed to move out of my
grandparents’ house, discovered that I had never seen Star Wars. I suppose everyone was so busy watching Star Trek that nobody had any time for Star Wars. I’d like to think somebody
had noticed what
happened with E.T. the Extraterrestrial
and was concerned for the effect more aliens might have on my developing
psyche, but if that were the case then they would have stopped coercing me to
watch E.T. over and over again in an
effort to prove that he really was a friendly alien, really.
Anyway, my aunt found out that I hadn’t seen Star Wars yet and made me watch all
three movies in a row before dragging me to the theater to watch The Phantom Menace. To this day, I have
not watched the other two prequels, unless maybe I watched them when I was with
my ex, I don’t know, I’ve blocked out a lot of that relationship.
It should be noted that when I say “she made me watch them,”
I mean she sat there next to me and delivered a running monologue explaining
how all the tropes fit into the overall story archetype. I was not allowed to
leave the room. I was 17 and did my best to fall asleep. In retrospect, I
probably should’ve just tackled her; it would’ve saved me a lot of life
problems later on.
But, I digress. There was a time when I would have
identified as a geek, but that was before I spent my entire adult life
discovering that I am not who I was taught to be. It’s not that I don’t like
geeky things; it’s that I don’t like them enough to quote from them or collect
their memorabilia or remember when they’re coming on TV. I like other things
more, like athletics and not being pushed around. Those two things work well
together, by the way. If I had known I liked those things when I was 17, some
tackling would have gone down.
So, I don’t think I’m a geek at all. Unless we’re talking
about books, of course, then I’m a total geek. Or maybe I’m actually a nerd, I’m
not sure. I’m pretty sure you have to do math to be a nerd.
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| I'm a writer. You do the math. |
