(Note: there is a poll at the bottom of this post. Humor me and vote in the thing even if you can’t get through my ”prose”)
There I was, hunkered down over a laptop in a trendy cafe, working on My Novel, reading Mariners-related blogs and refreshing twitter every 5 minutes. Anything to delay the task looming in the back of my head. I had an awkward question that needed asking. I had a FAWQ.
I have these friends, see. They are Individually and collectively known as Paul and Storm, and they are Geeks. Or maybe they are Nerds. YOU SEE? THAT’S IT. I don’t know what to call these guys. I know that when they are discussing their goings-on-about-town, either amongst themselves or in “tweets” to their adoring online throngs, they refer to themselves as both. But, I say to myself….what if it’s one of those things where it’s ok to call oneself these things if one is in this area, but oh so wrong to call someone these things from ‘the outside’. In short, what if ‘Nerd’ is an ‘N’ word?
Clearly the thing to do here is to build a convincing case that I too, am a Geek. Or a Nerd, of course. After giving it some thought, I’ve decided I have what it takes. Here are some Geek (or Nerd)-like things from my past. Please take a moment to vote in the poll at the bottom, and then we will really know for sure.
*My family owned Apple computers in the early ‘80s. I remember the second one we got was an Apple II Plus, and it was supposed to be better than the previous Apple II (which in retrospect clearly should have been called an Apple II Prime) because it was a muscly 64K. 64K. I can still hear the ‘doot….doot….doot…’ as photon torpedoes (that looked suspiciously like asterisks) slowly ‘dooted’ across a 12×12 grid representing ‘space’ in my Star Trek game. I of course had my own plastic carrying case (ingeniously labelled “Jason’s Discs”) for the ‘floppy discs’ containing my games, and of course homework assignments typed up with our mesozoic-era word-processor.
*Glad we mentioned Star Trek, because I owned and memorized every page of the original Star Fleet Technical Manual, which I would literally spill blood for another copy of now. Name an area of the of the Enterprise, and I could spit out what deck it was on before you could say ‘Type II phaser’.
*First record bought with my own money: Shaun Cassidy. Wow, I can’t believe I just typed that.
*times watched 1st Star Wars movie: Unknown, but probably over 30 (this is not actually my fault; I spent some time in a reform school in Utah, and since this was 1982, the only 2 tapes they had for the vcr were Star Wars and Cannonball Run. So, they were shown alternately on Friday nights. Since I was there for a year, 52 Fridays divided by 2 movie = 26 reps right there, plus the MANY other times I saw it, including twice on the big screen).
*Average math grade before regular pot-smoking began in 7th grade: A
*Movie seen (twice) on day of first pot-smoking experience: Star Wars(see above)…
*Slogan on t-shirt in age 10 yearbook picture: “May the force be with you” (why do I not have a way to post this picture, and DAMMIT FACEBOOK why is there not one online already)
OK LETS VOTE!
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This entry was posted on Monday, April 26th, 2010 at 1:23 am and is filed under Uncategorized.