Geek-Wakening?

When I was a kid, I think I was always a geek to some degree, but I never really realized it. I played a ton of video games, dabbled in arcane stuff like VHS Boardgames, and often wrote stories about stuff like Knights and Dragons. That said, I was also involved in sports nearly year round, I had plenty of friends, and so the geek stereotype never really connected with me. I do have a distinct memory of when it did dawn on me that, perhaps, I was a little more involved with such things than the average kid.

I was in 7th grade. Final Fantasy VIII had just been released and everyone was playing it. Unless you werethe super-jock, then you were playing this game at least because of how hype it was. Day in and day out for the first two weeks or so all the guys would go home, play for an indeterminate amount of time, then come back and talk about how far they had gone in the game. I was always ahead of the guys I talked to, and took some sense of pride in that. For me, I was the most skilled of the normal kids.

One day though, one of the guys brought up Obviously Nerdy Kid A, lets call him Winston. From what I had heard, Winston went home precisely at three o clock, shut himself into his mother's basement, picked up his Cheeto infested controller, and played until he fell asleep. Winston, it was told that day by my friend, was already on Disc Two. Final Fantasy VIII was such an epic tale that it spanned the entirety of four CD-Roms. It was a masterpiece. Winston, that clod, had already plowed his way past Disc One without a care in the world. I scoffed at him. How could he have so few other activities in his life as to already be that far in the game? What a philistine. I went home puffed up on my self righteousness and sat down and played.

And I reached Disc Two within five minutes.

I had to put down the controller for a moment. Should I be proud of this? Ashamed? Did I care? The answer, as you may have guessed by now, was no. I didn't care. I was a little embarrassed that I had made fun of Winston so much, but I was having too much fun to care. I just kept playing the game. Isn't that the defining characteristic of geekdom? When one actively chooses to forsake some cognizance of political correctness and/or public recognition for the sake of personal satisfaction in an activity, they are a geek. I had certainly done that, and the biggest sign of that was how little I cared. I stopped talking about how far I had progressed at school; mostly because we had reached the point when everyone else had stopped playing out of boredom. Clearly, though, that aspect only invigorated my passion for talking, as I sit here writing about geekiness on my blog. Oh, the irony?