A Letter to Quell the Terror of the Nerds

I forgot to apologize last time for not posting for many moons. Mostly for me because I don't have an accurate idea of how many people actually read my nonsense. 501 people have seen the page though, so that's cool. I haven't been doing a whole bunch in the interim. I'm still single (guys) and I'm okay with that (ladies) but I'm feeling a tad lonely (guys). So I got that going on. I've also been feeling kinda low. Like life is poop kind of but with more actual feelings. I was trying to think about what I did last time I felt this way and I think what I did was start watching Doctor Who. Mostly because I ran out of things to watch on Netflix, and also because my giant nerdy friend Sarah (she's a literal giant) kept harping on it. So I said fuck it and watched the first episode of the new series. I didn't expect much, mostly because of my low opinion of British television. Not that it's bad, it just looks crap. Plus we had watched an episode in my theater class in high school but my teacher kept fast forwarding so all I saw were bad CGI aliens and Chris Eccleston's nose. Not necessarily a bad thing, but the first and only time I had seen that nose, it was being a terrifying asshole to pre-butt-of-every-joke Nicholas Cage in Gone in Sixty Seconds, so that kind of turned me off. It is also why I can't love him most as the Doctor because I was introduced to him at a young age as a scary, murderous villain.

Dude also had a weird thing for coffins and I had, what you might call, a phobia of death and dying.

Anyhoo, Doctor Who. Daleks, Cybermen, TARDIS, Sonic Screwdrivers. Fantastic. All of it. Like nothing you have known. I love the shit out of this show. And yes, I understand it is only a show, but here is the thing about Doctor Who: there is wisdom and grace and beauty and danger and excitement and tears and joy and love and compassion and a ridiculous amount of true and real humanity in the whole made-up world that is the Whovian universe. I was almost embarrassed for myself that I had put it down for so long. No, I take that back. I was embarrassed. And I still am. I am fairly new to a lot of the nerd culture. And with that, I have felt a bit of a stigma from people who have been immersed in the culture for a bit longer than me. This is probably an imagined stigma, but I wanted to write about things that are inherently geeky and how I feel like I have to apologize for coming in late to the game. Also, I figured this could help with some writer's block I have been battling. To begin...

I didn't have a childhood of Tolkein and comic books. I didn't watch a whole bunch of anime shows, although I did watch the shows that looked like the product of a perpetual acid-trip. I was a nerd in the sense that I read obsessively whenever I could. I was the kid in class that read between doing assignments and then was shocked when we were doing stuff again. I was in the outer circle of classmates with loose ties at best to the inner circles. And there was one friend whose house I would go to and we would play Age Of Empires for hours on end. I preferred being the Vikings, f.y.i. Oh, and a smattering of Pokemon, Crash Bandicoot, Mario, Donkey Kong, and Star Fox. And I waited for my acceptance letter to Hogwarts. The point is that I was a nerd or I was nerd-ish or nerdy or whatever is least offensive and I am recent to the inner circle of nerd-dom. That said, I feel guilty from time to time when I say that I adore the shit out of Firefly and I am angry that Fox cancelled it, but mostly because the story ended and there isn't anymore to it not because they took away what I loved. I get ridiculously excited about Doctor Who, but because it is a big ol' mindfuck of a puzzle and I like puzzles. I played AC Brotherhood because the idea of jumping off of the Coliseum in Renaissance Rome after having a chat with Da Vinci and Machiavelli was the greatest thing I had ever heard of and I didn't know about it before Brotherhood because I don't have any gaming platforms. Of course I'm not going to know about it if I have nothing to do with it. I like Minecraft because it's Legos without destroying your feet, and I play to create not fight the Creepers (don't hate me). I also have a lifelong fascination with digging.

 I was a weird kid, I cannot stress that enough. 

I did not read the Song of Ice and Fire series, mostly because I knew of George R.R. Martin's tendency to pull a Joss and kill beloved characters. I knew the books were long and I did not want to spend a whole bunch of time loving a character only to have them torn from me. I decided an hour of viewing time would suffice. Although now, I am going to be reading the books because I love the show. I never read any Tolkein as a child and knew that it would be lots of running, so I avoided that for fear of boredom. But I did read The Hobbit before seeing the movie, so you can't get me on that one. I read Watchmen after the movie and Scott Pilgrim before the movie. I shout at Andrea and worry about Daryl when I watch Walking Dead, but I have only read one of the books. I have seen all of the Batmen, X-Men, Iron Man, Marvel, DC movies there are, but have read none of the comics (this is also the same line of reasoning as not reading GoT by the way).  I half know a lot of these universes but know the sum total of only a few. It is because I am a recent nerd. Mea Culpa.  I try not to be grouped in with the other recent nerds that are hipster-y twats who saw something on the near fringes and thought it was mainstream enough to say it wasn't mainstream. I was just never exposed to a lot of that stuff and when I learn about it, I want to know as much as I can. I want to obsess over that universe and know every little nook and cranny there is to know so that I may know what it is the fans before me felt that make them want to protect it.

New or not, we can all agree this bitch is stupid.

It was the fierce loyalty that attracted me to those shows and books and movies, but it is the feeling of love and acceptance that keeps me there. Be it Rowling's or Whedon's or Moffat's (MOFFAT!!), those are universes made with love and care and come from the heart and someone felt a desire to share that love they felt with their characters with the rest of us. I am a recent nerd, but I am a nerd nonetheless. I understand all of the feelings that went into these creations and I understand the love that is given back. And if you understand that, it doesn't matter how long you've been a fan.

By the by, any comments are appreciated. I post a thing on Facebook about making a new blog entry and people just like it. I don't know if they are liking the post or the entry. I would also like that small bit of validation.

I can't say that word without thinking of this short, so this picture is really for the hell of it.

In Response To The Influx of Red-Striped Quadrilaterals

So there's this debate thingy happening up in D.C. right now. You may have heard of Prop 8 and DOMA. If not, you are a hermit or illiterate. Someone will come by shortly to beat you soundly with the information stick. For the rest of you, pro or against, I have a story to tell. It's mine. I should start off with saying that I am straight, I think that helps with understanding my perspective on things. I have mentioned before that I was raised Catholic. I went to a small, tight-knit Catholic school in Houston with a heavy Hispanic influence. So, if you ask how Catholic I was raised, I can answer without hesitation I was raised all-Catholic. I remember as a child being surprised that there were other religions. Knowing that I am straight and from a heavy Catholic background, you would assume that I am in the "gays are an abomination camp". That is assuming you haven't read any of my previous posts, which are, for lack of a better word, blasphemous. Also, I'm pretty sure they have some grammatical issues.

oooooo a gif!! How fancy!

Anyhoo, the story. So, I'm in this school my whole life with people I know about as well as my family and we grow and become friends and get in fights and all that jazz. Part of the problem with growing up in a familiar group of people is that you can become comfortable doing things a certain way and then not realize that it's time to change. In this instance, I am speaking of my tendency to behave more like a boy than a girl. See, the thing about me is that I am the first girl in my family. In my generation at least. On my mother's side, there are three cousins, all boys, then my older brother, and then miraculously I was born. I was doted on and fawned over, at least that's what I'm told, because I am an oasis in the midst of gross, stinky boys. What I don't understand is why no one figured that I'd prefer to play with Hot Wheels and Legos rather than Barbies what with my influences clearly laid out. I tried to emulate my big brother and I preferred to play in the dirt outside than play with make-up. I did do these things when I was younger, but for the most part pink was yucky and Barbies were evil. All of my friends knew that at school. I chose shorts over skirts and liked to run around with boys and dig for bugs. This isn't a bad thing, it's just a set up for the self-esteem issues later.

WARNING: We are about to get personal up in here!

See, I was more comfortable being like a little boy for the longest time and it had become, I assume, something that was understood. Then that evil bitch puberty came around and all of a sudden all of my friends were talking about which boys they liked and the number of people I played with in the dirt got smaller. People are all of a sudden talking about who they like and then pairing off. I didn't get it, and I especially didn't understand what was so damned attractive about having a boyfriend. Everything was perfectly fine the way it was, but hormones had to go and muck it all up. Thanks a bunch, hormones.

Anything with a diagram should be mistrusted.

So I stayed how I was. If a term must be applied to my situation, I guess you could use the god-awful phrase  "tom-boy" that makes bile rise in my throat, but I suppose it simplifies things. What usually accompanies this time of raging hormones is this need to be incredibly nasty to your peers. Gossip and jealousy and rumors and peer-pressure and all of these viscious behaviors start flying around and the only way out is high school, and not even that can save you. Around fourth or fifth grade, we were introduced to a couple of new students. We would occasionally welcome an alien or two into our class, but it was a rare thing. Anyhoo, these new kids came in around the time we were all really ramping up for the Big Change. And then there was me, changing along with everybody, but confusedly so because just yesterday boys were icky and cooties were real. These new kids didn't grow up with me, they didn't know me, and my boy-ish behavior was taboo; out of the ordinary. I became a target. In the midst of all this shit came the idea that boys had to like girls and vice versa. But I didn't show an interest in boys and I liked to play Army, so what did I like. I couldn't have told ya, but the decision was made for me so I didn't have to worry about it. The concept of gay and lesbian came about. One of my friends, someone I admire a whole bunch today, was incredibly effeminate so I wasn't alone in my victimization, but it was to a lesser extent I think. Especially since in fifth grade I had my first boyfriend. I was so happy to have a buffer against the attacks, so it certainly helped me out. They didn't stop though. One day in gym, my friend I mentioned earlier came up and told me that one of the boys (that I still considered new, but had been there for awhile) had called me "faggot". I laugh about this now because you and I both know he was using the word wrong, but at the time I knew what he was saying and it hurt. It had put what I assume everyone else was thinking out in the open. And it started me out on this really hard path.

I had a boyfriend, fine, but I was still stuck because the attraction to the opposite gender was a mystery to me. In seventh grade, I had moved to a completely new state to be in a school with completely new people, and there I was really taboo. So I continued to struggle, internally, because these new ideas were being flung around, and I seemed stuck. I was told I didn't like boys, which was true, so that meant I liked girls, which might have been true because that was the conclusion a lot of people had made. It just didn't make sense to me, so I thought it was wrong. So, what? I don't like either, so then I like both? There was this constant, cyclical tug-of-war pushing and pulling at me for years and it was killing me. I eventually found that boys are pretty dang cute, it just took me longer than usual. But I learned something:

After years of having "lesbian" and "gay" thrown at me as slurs, I found that, even though those words don't apply to me, I understand the hurt that comes with being derided that way. When I still considered myself Catholic, I learned that we believed that gays couldn't be married because God said no. And that made no sense to me.

If you are religious in any manner and find yourself on the anti-gay marriage side of the debate, I ask you read this next part with an open mind: in all my years of school and church, one lesson stood out among all the others and even though I am not religious today, I still apply it to everyday life because it is a great lesson. Jesus taught that we must love our neighbor as our self and treat others the way we want to be treated. I was derided as someone who was actually homosexual, and for me to tell them they couldn't marry who they wanted or live how they wanted would be the same as telling me that I couldn't. Jesus was talking about everyone, not everybody except people who happened to like someone of the same sex. To tell the truth, I think if Jesus could see how wonderful the people I know who are gay, he could give a crap who they have sex with. They live their lives in a much more Christian manner than some Christians I know.

They are also more fabulous than some Christians I know.

I was raised Catholic and I am straight and I am an Ally to the Gay Marriage movement. It isn't an abomination to love someone, it is an abomination to tell someone that they are loving the wrong person. I could never find it in my heart that it was right to tell anyone, straight, gay, or otherwise, that the person they loved with every fiber of their being is a sin and they will go to hell for loving them. I was made fun of for not liking boys when I was growing up and as an adult I am watching friends being told to stop liking boys. I learned that it is not anyone else's right to decide who you love. All you have to do is treat them with respect, because you want to be treated with respect, right?

The Queen commands it!

Before I leave, I have to address the Leviticus passage. If you don't know it, it is this little number "You shall not be with a man as one does with a woman. It is an abomination." That would be Leviticus Chapter 18 verse 22. Delightful no? In Chapter 20, we learn that such behavior is punishable by death.

Here is the thing about Leviticus. By the way, this is information I learned in my college World Religions class. Granted, it was an intro class, but I'm not just picking it up from Wikipedia. Leviticus is where the majority of Jewish law comes from. It's where you get rules like no meat and dairy together, no pork, no shellfish, among others. I once saw a picture of the above passage tattooed on someone's arm. Ironically, Leviticus also says no tattoos, so that guy messed up big.

This guy knows what I'm talking about!

 In the Jewish faith, at its basic, it is a religion of laws and rules. Follow the rules, and you are golden. On the opposite side, though based off those rules, Christianity is more a religion of faith and seeking salvation. One is literal, the other is metaphorical is a simple way to look at it. Make no mistake, I am not demeaning either religion, it is just a basic analysis. Christians kind of diverged from those rules in Leviticus a long time ago. They wear mixed fibers and eat bacon and say the savior has come already, a big no-no if you are Jewish. If you are going to preach Leviticus, fine, by all means. But don't shout about it and then go home to a cheeseburger. That argument is already kind of null and void simply by you being a Christian.

So that's what I got on this whole thing. Hope you don't hate me. If you do, then you should try to be a little more understanding of the concept of "everyone has a right to their own opinion". Toodles.