Not Growing Up Geek

I was not born a geek. Does that make me a poser? Or am I just a "johnny-come-lately" (oh, how I hate that phrase) to the land that is Geek? Turning 31 very soon, I am of ripe geek age, on the tail-end of Gen X. My geekstory may shed a little light on my geek vs. wannabe status.

I was not born into a geek family. My dad is a carpenter. My mom spent years in Human Resources and is now the operations director of a local non-profit. I was, however, born into a sibling relationship with a geek. My brother's geekosity was firmly solidifed when he first saw Star Wars at the age of 3. An intimidating encounter with Darth Vader at the mall sealed his fate. My brother is not the biggest geek I know, but he is the coolest.

As the little sister, I couldn't escape geekness in some form. It was all around me. Comic books, Star Wars movies, the pink and red hoodies we wore to pretend we were the kids from E.T.* (just to clarify, mine was the pink one), that C3P0 action figure of legend--glimpsed only so many times before it disappeared. I think most little sisters can attest to being heavily influenced by (for some, only in rebellion against) the tastes of the older sibling. It's around you all the time, but you're too young to really know if you like something for real or just because your brother does.

Did I really like Star Wars when I was a kid? I dug Princess Leia's hair (not just the cinnamon buns). Yoda was funny. Darth Vader was scary. We had a children's record** of The Empire Strikes Back that my brother would play ad nauseum (before we got our own copies of the movies). When the movies were re-released into theaters years ago, I remember being surprised that they weren't like that record I listened to so much. Alec Guiness didn't start the moving by intoning "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a great adventure took place." Instead, the lines appeared on the screen, soundless, in a simple blue font, and the great adventure part wasn't there at all.

I wasn't a book geek. To be honest, I wasn't even interested in science fiction until about five years ago, and even now, I am extremely picky about it. When I was a kid, I didn't read Lord of the Rings or even The Chronicles of Narnia. When I went to the library, stories about unicorns or space travel or wizards were not on my radar. When I went to the library, my tastes ran in two very narrow directions: Beverly Cleary's Ramona books, and the now out of print Ghost in the Swing. That ghost story was as close as I got to geekdom.

Fast forward a few years. The books in my bedroom tell the tale. Most of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, a few books by Neil Gaiman, Stephen Lawhead, Ursula K. Le Guin. Sharon Shinn's Angel quintet will never get packed away. I have all the Twilight books (but my cousin still has my copy of Breaking Dawn, cough cough), Harry Potter, Madeleine L'Engle's fiction . . . The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia now reside in my permanent collection.

I have Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs and the Firefly series and all three X-Men movies, of which I can't get enough. When my brother allowed me to baby-sit his entire DVD collection while he was out of the country for a year, I was ecstatic. I'm in Season 5 of Smallville. I read geek blogs, I watch all the news coming out of Comic-Con. When we got Dish Network, I made sure the plan included the SyFy Channel (shut up--that's how they're spelling it now--every geek knows that).

There are some geek things I don't participate in. I don't dress up as anything. I don't own a lightsaber. I'm not on any forums. I go help lead a teen writers conference every summer instead of trying to do Comic-Con myself. I have yet to see the new Star Trek movie. But I feel confident that I've obtained some kind of geek status independent of my big brother. Would I have turned out as a geek if my brother had not been one? Maybe. He's not the kind of brother that would ridicule the interests out of his little sister. The only thing he ever put his foot down about was my brief obsession with The Phantom of the Opera, because my squeaky singing would keep him awake.

My geekness has enriched my life. Some of the most amazing literature I've ever read is geek-associated. (The Sparrow! Are you over 18? Read it! Now!) My geekness informs my writing. The narrator in the novel I am rushing to finish this summer is a supergeek, an amalgam of me and my brother. I have geekness splashed all over my walls, literally--a wizard, a fairy woodland, and a bunch of unicorns in front of a castle.

I'm proud to be a geek.

*My childhood trauma about E.T. is a story for another post.
**For the younger generations: record=big black CD.
***The picture is mine, taken on a Halloween night. My brother in the fabulous Anakin Skywalker costume I made. Geek squared!