Tonight is one of those hot, hot nights where even the heat of a solitary light bulb feels like it might as well be a heat lamp beating down on you and the thought of how standing beneath a cold waterfall or even in a cold shower doesn't sound like it would be shockingly cold to the point of painful but instead like heavenly bliss. I don't do well in heat. Never have. I'm half Norwegian and most likely Saami at that so my genes just aren't built for such a thing. Give me arctic cold and I'd probably be content (as long as I had a mountain of fur on me). So here I am, woken by the dog from my escapist sleep, too hot to game and the idea of turning on the wall lamp to read is wholly unappetizing. Brilliant me seems to think that running a computer in a hot room is better but I don't feel the heat its generate like that cursed light bulb aka heat lamp.
Got teased this evening by toxic little jealous kids about my age. It's ironic because I'm actually very content with the subject. At no other point in my life have I ever felt quite so confident with who I am. Who I am is no longer a crisis to me and I have zero urge to pretend to be any different. I am a nerd and I have always been one regardless of how I chose to portray myself. A while ago I caught myself going to the local convenience store on a Saturday night at around midnight wearing a vivid orange tshirt that said "If this tshirt doesn't smell, I'm not gaming hard enough", no make up and hair tucked up in a sloppy bun. I didn't care one bit that there were women around me in tight jeans and shirts with 10 lbs of make up on. I like who I am and I am long past pretending to be otherwise. That only comes with age.
The first tip off that I was a nerd should have been my obsessive little habit of memorizing all the facts about whatever happened to be my favorite subject. I was a veritable encyclopedia when it came to talking about my pet subject. When I was three, I had memorized all the different types of dinosaurs just like my little daughter did (but, admittedly, they knew of less dinosaurs when I was little than when she was). By the 4th grade, I became fascinated with the human body due to a school writing assignment and wrote out a 10 page paper describing in great deal the entire circulatory system and how blood moved through the body. It was such an epic little work for a 4th grader that I was accused of plagiarism. The "charges" were dropped after they grilled me on my sources and found that I really could recite to them the pathways of the blood throughout the body and how blood moved through capillary action. I was definitely a nerd. We just didn't have personal computers yet to fulfill that present day definition of one.
I remember when I came across my first video games at Sunshine Pizza. I immediately fell in love. I wasn't very good at sports though I could run fast and had quick reaction speeds. My parents wasted money on golf lessons, which I was an abysmal failure at. But video games--even the earliest arcade games were a test of reaction speed and that was always my physical forte. I can paint my life with the different video games that I mastered to easy perfection from Ms. PacMan and Pole Position (Prepare to qualify!) to TNMT and Mortal Kombat. My mother even used to joke that I originally majored in Road Blasters. Once I discovered arcades, I was hopping on my bike to ride it 5 miles to the video arcade and wheedle away my allowance all afternoon playing Centipede or Dig Dug. When I was 11, my parents decided to get my sister and I an Atari, which would end up having some of the bloodiest knock down fights over who would get to play on it on any given afternoon. It was so bad that my parents finally moved it into their room as if their room somehow would deter us from fighting. It's funny to imagine two young girls who were given classical educations in art, music, and literature peppered with constant lessons in manners becoming street brawlers just to play the likes of Pong. I could play the piano, clarinet, dance ballet and tap, sing beautiful and paint a lovely picture in oils but I also learned a good right hook thanks to Pong and my sister. So hooked on games I was that when I went on a road trip to California with my grandmother when I was 12 that my parents found a neon yellow monstrosity that allowed me to play PacMan wherever we were. Handhelds back then took two hands and a lap. That thing was so huge compared to a PSP or DS these days.
The irrefutable truth that I was a nerd definitely came out when I chose to take a computers class in high school though. I was such a wiz at Basic that my coding was impeccable and I'd finish my homework within 15 minutes of it being assigned. My parents' response to my computing skill was to buy us a Franklin Ace. Back then, computers were nothing like they were today. There was no such thing as Windows but only a black screen with a prompt when you booted up. By then, my mother was working for Floating Point and the code monkeys there sent her home with copies of early games for me to play. That's how I first played Zork and the jaw dropping Dig Dug on a computer. Even without meeting me, those Floating Point guys and my mother knew I was a nerd despite all my efforts, when I was at least aware of it, to hide it.
No matter how "cool" I became, there was always some little homage to my nerdiness. Even when I was a club kid, if the club should have an arcade game stashed away in the corner, that's where you'd find me until some amazing song came on. I coolly and irreparably crushed egos by rejecting offers of "good times" after the clubs closed because I was set to play D&D with my friends until the crack of dawn. I always felt split in the middle with that kind of dichotomy though--like I was trying to be two completely different people in one shell. The pretty little fashion maven who was a VIP at all the nightclubs and the nerd who'd rather devour 80 books a summer and stand in a mile long line just to watch Star Wars--an incompatible yin and yang. I was cool enough to transfix Madonna in a night club and nerdy enough to drink red wine from earthen jugs with guys dressed up as Klingons.
When online gaming began, a friend had opened a LAN center called the Lords of the Game. It was kind of like an early internet cafe just without the cafe. I was already enjoying playing computer games so off I went to check out my friend's new place of business. When I walked in, I was immediately scolded by one of the guys there because "the wires in my bra were going to disrupt the computer's hardware". It was a humorous jab at my gender but it also kind of pissed me off. I had to prove that I had as much of a right to be there as they did so I sat down and began to play Quake. It was an awful start until someone made the observation that I might need to play with an inverted mouse. Once I switched, I was destroying my fellow lan players vociferously. God I loved the rail gun and by the end of the afternoon, every guy in the place conceded that I was their better at Quake. Over the next year, they also learned I was their better at Counter Strike and Team Fortress, too, and they adored me for it. They became like brothers to me. I think it was about then that I stopped pretending to be all that I wasn't and began accepting who I had been all along--a nerd no longer in disguise.
It's still pretty funny, though, to see people's reactions when they find out how much of a nerd I am. Most people don't think "gamer" when they look at me. Finding out that I'm a gamer champion generally makes their eyes bulge and jaws drop in utter disbelief. I think the biggest difference about growing older is that you stop trying to hide who you are and being embarrassed about it. The confidence once gains with age is intoxicating if one just truly accepts themselves for who they are instead of trying to force themselves into a mold that just doesn't fit. I'm a nerd and a gamer and I'll always be both of those things. I will slip up and call someone a noob in an "irl" conversation. I'll get in a huge debate about whether a weapon in a game is OP and put a great deal of thought into my arguments. That's just me and I love being me.
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