1. Karen
NERD, they called me. GEEK. DORK. I consoled myself by tuning them out with the flip-flip sound of pages. By running home and watching movies. The Last Unicorn, Dune, Transformers. In books and in movies, I could ignore them all. I eventually found a friend in my Gifted class, someone like me. I went to her house for a sleepover one night, we watched Legend and read books in her room. (Thais P. I’ll never forget her name.) She moved to Arizona in the summer between 6th and 7th grade.

In junior high, even the kids in my Gifted class thought I was a dork. I stayed in the library during recess, and the librarian there started talking to me. He let me put books away. Eventually, he let me behind the counter and showed me how the library worked in the background. For an entire year, I “worked” in the library during every recess. I stamped books in, I stamped books out. I typed up the little cards to go in the pockets in the back. I glued the little pockets to the books. I organized and straightened the books based on the Dewey Decimal System. I loved every minute of it.

Read the entire passage here.

2. Suicidal Jane
I didn't realize I was a geek until I was an adult. Sure, I read more books in a year than my two brothers will read in their lives (combined). Sun block was completely unnecessary as my pale white skin would never see the sun long enough to burn. But I lived on an Air Force base overseas. Everyone shopped at the same stores, we had one channel on TV, it was a very surreal way to grow up. Us kids didn't follow the regular rules of the playground, because we didn't know what they were. We made up our own rules. One of those rules was that girls couldn't be geeks. It was imprinted into our brains as deeply as "don't hit a girl." So I went through my entire childhood thinking this. Even when my family moved back to the United States. I knew I was weird, and people would call me names, but "geek, nerd or dork" was never one of them. It just never occurred to me.

Until one day. I had gone to a birthday party of a friend of a friend. I was suppose to meet my friend there. I showed up late, purposely, since I didn't want to get there before her. Somehow, I still got there before her. I wandered around the party, trying to look like I was comfortable and belonged, yet still not wanting to make eye contact (because that's how they would know I was a fraud). To waste time, I looked for the bathroom. I couldn't find it. But in the process of looking, I found a room with someone doing their homework. He was trying to write an example of what a sestina is. Not only did I know what one was (The sestina has six stanzas, each comprising six unrhymed lines, in which the words at the end of the first stanza's lines reappear in a rolling pattern in the other stanzas. The poem then ends with a three-line stanza in which the words again appear, two on each line.) but I made one up off the top of my head about a dog playing in traffic. He thought it was funny and I spent the entire night helping him with the various subjects of his homework. When you have a better time helping someone with homework than out drinking at a party, you have to be a geek.

Posted in its entirety from the message board.

3. Reeky
Geek by traditional standards? Reading endless books? Having a little professor image by being short in statue and wearing black horn-rimmed glasses in grade school (hey the early 70's didn't give much choice in eyewear). No, my geekiness was apparent much earlier than that. I was 5. It was the summer my sister was born. My grandmother was watching my brother, older sister, and I while my parents were at the hospital getting the stork delivery. I had plotted and schemed all day on how to really impress grandma and my sibs at dinner. How better than pyrotechnics? At 5, I had only limited resources so had to settle for caps instead of C4. My plan was to explode caps in my mouth at the optimum moment, just as grandma was serving dinner.

Of course, I was wise enough to know that caps need varying surfaces to fire properly (one smooth and flat and another sharp, like a striking pin). What I did was to roll up a bunch of caps and then strategically place a marble on a back molar and the caps on top of the marble. Here comes grandma rounding the corner with casserole dish in hand. I yell, “Hey everyone, check THIS out!” and clamp down with all the force my jaws could muster. BAM! Flames shoot out of my mouth, smoke from my nose. My brother and sister scream, “Again, again!” and laugh with delight. That was THE last time my grandmother ever watched me. Every birthday until the day she died, she sent St. Jude prayer cards with my b-day card. Poor little geek.

Posted as a comment to the original blog entry.

4. Wolven
There was no "coming out," for me. I was so immersed in a culture of people for whom this was the Spice, which was the life, which MUST FLOW that it never occurred to me, that people would be any different, anywhere; that having these interests could ever be a bad thing.

Then I got to Georgia, seventh grade. Different values. Different people. Different groups. Completely different dynamics. Terrible. Detached. Scary things... I actually left, and went back to DC, because of it. I came back, though, and eighth-tenth grades were more of the same from seventh, though I coped, better. For the most part. Not really, at all, actually. They were pretty terrible years.

But then I got to my high school, the one I count as truly mine, and I knew that it was still okay. That there were more people who loved geeky and nerdy things, and that I was happiest, with them. What's more? They were cool. Cooler than any of the people in middle school, or the other HS. They knew things I didn't and listened to me when I knew what they didn't.

That school shaped the perspective lens through which I view every situation and everything I would encounter and become, over the next nine years.

So, really, it wasn't exactly a coming out. It was more like coming home.

Read the entire passage at his blog.

5. Discotrash
Fast forward to the first grade. I got put into a first/second combo class because they had already figured out I was a fast learnin' kid or something. When they tested us for reading groups, it turned out that the entire first grade reading program was too simple for me so they shoved me in with some of the second graders in my class. I was so excited when I got my first reading book that I took it home when i wasn't supposed to and read the whole thing. Whoops.

That year I also came down with some weird skin disorder and was out of class for about three weeks. I had my homework brought to me at home and without all the other kids to slow me down I finished it in about a week and spent the rest of the time I was off at Grandma's being sick watching cartoons and reading books. When I got back to class and was well, I found out that I had worked too far ahead and the class was just getting to some of the lessons I'd already done at home and I CRIED about it in class because this was the first time I'd ever felt different.

It obviously wouldn't be the last.

Read the entire passage here.

6. Caveman
It may surprise some of you (sarcasm), but I was geeked from birth. Straight from the get go “the Simpsons” were almost the entirety of my life, and my hero was either Herman Munster, Maxwell Smart, or Batman (it switched around a lot). I believe I can blame a good chunk of my geekiness on my father never censored what media I was exposed to. I mean, my father took me to see “Escape from L.A.” when it came out…I was seven.

Like most people I was not aware who I was right away (I’m actually still unsure), but I ran into a pretty large signpost in the fifth grade:

It was a day or two before Christmas and the teacher (who was noticeably hung over) declared the we were going have a trivia contest, and we had to split up in to groups. Me being the socially awkward child I was I wasn’t to happy to do the whole “group thing” so the teacher paired me with the “weird kid” (who interestingly enough burnt down two buildings six years later). The contest started and it was almost all popular culture.

An hour and 50 to 70 questions later my team had won by an overwhelming margin (I can’t remember, but I was at least 200 points past everyone). That moment of victory and the crushing alienation of my peers because of my victory cemented the fact that I was indeed a geek.

Read the entire passage at his blog.


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