How I Became A Geek
From Wikistar
I was doomed to be a geek from the start.
I was born to a couple of very intelligent people. When my father, a ship's captain in the Army, was transferred to Pearl Harbor when I was a year and a half old, my mother—who got left behind when my father went out on temporary duty—found herself in a bit of a dilemma. There wasn't much children's programming in English on the island of Oahu. The only real children's program that was in English was Sesame Street, and the other one I remember being mentioned was a Japanese version of Romper Room.
Seeing as my mother is from small-town America, she had no opportunity (or desire, really) to learn an Oriental language. So, we watched the next-best thing on daytime TV: Game shows.
My mother tells me that I learned my alphabet from Vanna White, and that I liked her so much I wanted to be her for Halloween one year. She made me be a teenybopper instead, but that's beside the point.
Anyway, because of that satin-clad guidance, I could identify letters pretty well by the age of two and a half. I supposedly taught myself to read at three, which I don't remember (and I'm honestly not trying to sound conceited here).
I had quite a collection of Golden Books back then, and I would take a stack of them to bed with me every night, with my mother's blessing. If I didn't have them, I'd get out of bed and play. So, eventually, Mom figured out that I'd stay in bed if I had something quiet and interesting to do. Oftentimes, I'd fall asleep with a book covering my face. I actually think there's a picture of it, somewhere—my nose literally buried in a book spine, and my hair spread over the pillow. If I can find it, I'll scan it.
My parents put me through preschool twice; apparently the kindergarten I was supposed to go to wasn't in the nicest of neighborhoods, and let's face it. Kindergarten is just glorified preschool.
Somewhere during all of the excitement of living in Hawaii, my older half-brother, Aaron, came to live with us or six months or so, before we moved back to the continental US. He is eleven years my senior, and since I was just a tiny thing, I thought my brother was the coolest person on the planet. (Okay, maybe second to Vanna White.) He was in his junior year of high school, I believe, and doing the usual “slacker” high school thing—reading comic books and playing video games. They were both so colorful and so interesting to my child's eye that I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
Granted, compared to a lot of geeks, I'm not at all well-versed in video games and comics. However, I know who Stephen Strange is, and I knew who Gwen Stacy was years ago. I've played Star Ocean II and Sword of Vermilion. I don't think I'm too bad off with geek cred, and I will happily thank (blame?) my brother. Without him, I'd think that the Silver Surfer is just a really shiny guy surfing through the sky with no purpose at all.
My brother has that rare capability of being a cool geek, no matter what. He manages to hang out with anyone and be able to hold a conversation with them. You'd never know by looking at him that he was a role player, a video game fanatic, or a comic book nerd. So, as one can imagine, when circumstances allowed him to move in with my mother and I after my parents split, I was thrilled.
Aaron moved in with us when I was ten. By this time, I'd already read a good many books most kids that age won't touch—Little Women had be a favorite for years, at that point—and I was tackling monstrosities like The Sword of Shannara a year or so later.
I wasn't really into video games on my own, but when he moved in, we acquired a Sega Saturn and a Super Nintendo, and I discovered pixellated heaven. My first video RPG was Earthbound. Sadly, I didn't get to finish it; my brother traded the system and games for a Sega Genesis. I fell in love with the Shadowrun game.
My brother has always been an avid pencil-and-paper role player. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was his first poison of choice, but he also has played other games, all of which he left laying around where I could find them. I remember flipping through Cyberpunk 2020, admiring the artwork, and wondering what it was like to utilize these sources to create worlds.
On my brother's 21st birthday, he ran a pre-written Paranoia campaign—CTV, for those who are familiar—for some friends, and I recall them trooping around our shitty little trailer, waving Sesame Street knock-off finger puppets and singing some children's song, probably London Bridge. I think that's what made me pester him more about wanting to play. He told me to wait until I was sixteen, and that felt like an eternity.
During all this, we lived out in the middle of nowhere between two small farming towns. It was too far to walk to either village, and most of my friends either lived in town or closer to one of the other nearby villages. Novels were my best friends, back then.
One day, my mother came home with a crappy PC—back before Compaq was a decent company—and signed us up for Prodigy's internet service. Sadly, we couldn't afford it very long—something to do with billing—but the children's section of their service made me realize that there was a whole world inside the computer. I was hooked.
I kept reading, writing crappy poetry, swimming during the summer, and being every teacher's intellectual wet dream. I was closer to the adults in my life than my peers, and a lot of them resented my intelligence.
About a year later, we got the internet again, I ended up in Yahoo!'s chats, free form role playing a pretty bad Mary Sue. I learned a lot, though. I also developed a severe MUD addiction, on a game populated with many of my friends from the chat.
Despite all of this, and spending upwards of sixteen hours a day on the computer, I must have proved to my mother and brother that I was mature, and able to separate fantasy from reality. I received Vampire: the Masquerade when I turned thirteen. My first character was a Gangrel.
I still had a lot to learn, but Aaron was patient. He taught me a lot about making characters believable. My favorite dice are still the twelve-millimeter dark blue, shiny dice with white letters he gave me for Christmas that year.
I also had an interest in Magic: the Gathering and the game Spellfire. That, however, was more of a phase than an abiding interest like everything else I've listed so far.
Being a geek has been a real adventure, but I'm really happy with who I am. I'm intelligent, I'm relatively well-adjusted, and I've got the creativity so many non-geeks seem to lack. I think I turned out pretty well.
