You Can Disco Dance If You Want To

This will be a short blog, though much detail is being emitted as a result. I have a shit load of specimens at work to process so I will have to be quick. But don't worry, when this blog gets transformed into a chapter of my book all of the extra, important details will be included. So, I found myself playing a racing game ALL the time with friends for Sega CD. It was called Jaguar Racing, or something very close to that title. One day, for some unknown reason, I decided to take the CD and put it in my stereo's CD player, instead of the Sega CD. To my surprise, and to the enjoyment of disco-dancing wannabes, the CD played in the stereo. It played about 11 tracks, all techno music. Me and two of my closest friends, whose names I will leave out for obvious reasons once this blog has been read, started a disco dancing contest to the music on the CD. We would invent dance moves and give them names. My favorite disco dance move, and a move repeated very often for extra flare by all dancers competing, was called "the flee-flicka". We would dress up for certain songs for extra points with the judges (the judges were just the two who were not dancing between the three of us). We had one person who wasn't dancing at that time hold a flash light and shake it all over the place for a disco feel to the room, which had all of the lights turned off. We did this for about a year until we were too embarrassed to continue making such fools of ourselves. I imagine most people reading this will say that this situation is not geeky, that it is gay, but we don't care what anyone calls it, we just wanted to disco dance until our legs gave out!

I'm Just A Teenage Nerdbag, Baby

Into my teen years I started to become less awkward and geeky, it seemed. Though I believe I was still as geeky, it was the time starting to change toward the "geek chic" era that led to me seeming less geeky. I can say I wasn't as awkward as I used to be. I had "found" myself more and was much more comfortable with who I was by the age of sixteen. Part of that is most likely due to my losing my virginity very shortly before I turned sixteen. That is a HUGE help toward ridding yourself of awkwardness, and helping toward some cool points with high school peers. I still had phases that I look back at as embarrassing, as many people do, but fucking hell do my high school yearbook pictures send chills down my spine. One year I looked like a Mexican prostitute, with an asshair looking mustache and greasy hair; gold Mercedes charm dangling from my gold chain necklace. Another fashion I punished myself with was wearing gold rimmed Oakley sunglasses (fake ones bought from a Jamaican man with a briefcase in Manhattan on a school trip), Timberland boots, and baggy, saggy jeans. As for personality, I was starting to really love certain types of comedy, mostly British humour, and due to my endearing passion for science I became an atheist at about sixteen years old. I had a very loyal group of friends and loved all of them very much. I believe they were the most important factors allowing my geekiness to remain a major part of who I was, while never causing me to be ashamed of it. That in turn, once geek became all out chic, directly caused me to be pretty highly ranked in the geek chic world. I only had one girlfriend during my entire high school experience so that was another important factor toward allowing my geekiness to stay within myself without having to feel I couldn't express it if I had to. She was kind of a geek too so it all worked very well indeed.

Sing Us A Song, You're A Poindexter Man

There was a time in my life when music didn't matter much to me. I have always liked it, but I didn't have the burning passion for it that I have now until preteen years when my tympanic membranes were graced with the prodigious tones of Eddie Vedder's voice and the harmonious musical instruments composed by the exquisite members of the legends of alternative rock, Pearl Jam. ::receives a spine chill at the self conscious echoing of the lyrics of the song "Black":: Anyway, before that point in time, I was just a casual listener and had no musical talents whatsoever. The first talent I started to try and develop through painstaking practice was singing. Painstaking is probably an understatement. I remember a lady in church saying I had a great voice when I was about nine years old and by saying that, she must have planted the seed of self esteem in me that I needed in order to think I could one day have what it takes to sing for people. Though I am thankful for her motivating push in the right direction, I have to say that for her to have believed what she said at that place and time, she would have to be so unscrewed that she would have probably believed in anything; I mean ANYTHING, even something as ridiculous as an invisible man in the sky who looks down on everyone as a fatherly, voyeur and is so magical that he can write the history of the world before it even happens, and he has a zombie ghost son that he put into a lady's womb before her hymen was even burst, and he had some guy build a boat large enough to fit two of every species of animal existing in the world on the boat (about 200 million animals total...that's a big boat!), and he.....oh wait ::cough cough:: forget it, now I know why she thought I had a great voice. So to the point now...I will take you to a week before Mother's Day 1998. I decided the first person I would sing to would be my mother. Who better, right? And that I would sing "A Song For Mama" by Boyz II Men. Here's me once again caught up in my wishing I were cool and black phase. Well, after practicing for a week straight I had to give up because it was embarrassing to hear myself sound like that. So my mom didn't get the sincere Mother's Day gift I had planned for her and my singing days had to be put on hold a short while longer until one Edwin McCain came out with "I'll Be" and my first "real" girlfriend was given the opportunity of hearing a poindexter man sing her a song.

I'm A Board, Let's Game!

Video gaming was a huge part of my life since I was able to hold a paddle and though life has made gaming more difficult for me to sit down and enjoy, I still consider myself a hardcore gamer at heart. But no longer do I consider myself just a hardcore video-gamer. I am both a hardcore video-gamer and tabletop-gamer. I learned about tabletop gaming as a young kid, as is custom for young American kids. But I didn't learn about tabletop games other than Monopoly, Trouble, and Trivial Pursuit until about ten years old. When I discovered Stratego and Risk, they opened up a whole new world for me. I never wanted to stop challenging people to Stratego and just like baseball; I kept statistics in my head of my winning percentage for years. Gladly, it was very easy to keep track of my winning percentage for my first couple of years because it was 100%. I never once lost at Stratego until one day my friend Rick and I played and we were both down to just a couple bombs, a few movable guys, and our flags. I knew where his was and he knew where my flag was. It was a matter of getting your few remaining, weak troops across to capture the flag. I tried to distract him at one point when I saw he was definitely going to get to my flag first, I planned to switch my flag, but he would not fall for the trick and that goddamn sonovabitch took my flag and my proud 100% winning percentage with it! I was so mad and I still am today that I lost to someone who didn't really even care for the game. As for my skill at Risk, I didn't bother keeping those statistics long because I rarely ever won. For years I played these games and games similar and they made me develop a disturbing passion for RPG games in my video game world and even eventually led to my becoming very much obsessed with playing Dungeons and Dragons. But that is a story for another time. For now, I am bored, and I'm gonna go game!

Wet Dreams

Nooooooo, it's not what you are thinking! I was inspired today by a dream I had that was so amazing I will have to base another book on that dream by itself. But it made me decide to do tonight's blog about dreams I had. Not the dreams I had in my sleep as a kid but dreams, as in what I dreamed of becoming as an adult when I was young. Of course I shared a common dream of becoming a professional baseball player with a lot of kids in the world, but that wasn't the main dream I had. I had the dream of being a man who bought an island and used the island to create a real life video game simulation. I wanted there to be several levels all ranging in difficulty and all having very serious dangers to them. The players would have to pay me a large sum of money to try my game and if they didn't quit, or die, and if they reached the end of the game, they would win a million dollars. I didn't think out too many details of the game, the island, the cost for each person to play, the insurances I would have to have to cover my ass with all of the people dying on my island, or how much it would suck if people actually won a million dollars from me, but I still dreamt that dream often and vividly. I remember the best level (Pretty much impossible to survive and ridiculous to even think someone could live through) was a water level, like Mario Bros water level, but without fire balls shooting from your fists. The person would have to travel the entire distance from the beach of my island, across the Pacific Ocean, and then back across the Pacific to my island completely under water for every second of their trip with only one oxygen tank and a backpack of air filled balloons in case they ran out of oxygen in their tank. As if this wasn't already insane to expect of someone to accomplish, they would also have people to fight on their travels under water and I'd have some of my fighters smear fish guts on the competitor's wetsuit so sharks could come try to get them. At this age I thought a human could fight a shark off by punching it in the nose and the shark would never return so that obstacle shouldn't cause them too much trouble, HA! I think a billion dollars would be more worth the person's troubles if I ever did find a way to make this dream come true. Though I could never send so many idiots off to die, no matter how over populated our world may be. I think I'll stick to trying to achieve my current wet dreams instead. OOOOOOO SNAP!

Bullied By The Bullied

It wasn't too often that I was actually bullied. Geeky as I may have been, I managed to only deal with a small amount of bullying. The odd thing about when I was bullied at all was that I wound up being bullied by the bullied. Let me explain...The very first bully I ever encountered was a kid who, after a couple of years of bullying me, wound up being the brunt of almost every Warren Snyder Elementary School bully's attacks. He was relentlessly bullied by kids all through grade school, middle school, and high school. If I am successfully making myself out to be geeky and awkward in your eyes from reading these posts, I assure you this kid could be so much more easily made to look that way. He was and still is the definition of geeky! And he fucking bullied ME!!! The next bully I encountered was, ::hangs head in shame::, a girl. Sure people say that in grade school when a girl tries to bully a boy it is because she likes him. Well whatever, that shit is bunk. She just bullied me is all, no affection involved in that sad story. From fifth grade on I never really had anymore bullies to speak of. Of course the occasional brush in with a known bully would happen and end quickly in a surrender, but no repeated offenses would occur. Though I know what it is like to be bullied, I can not relate to the unfortunate kids who deal with relentless bullying nearly every day of their lives. I feel terrible for every single one of them and wish for them to all realize that it WILL stop one day, even without them taking violent reprisal against their attackers. They will one day have a much better life, and very likely a more successful life than their attackers could wish for. Though I cannot fully relate to them, I can say at least I was a temporary source of relief of their frustrations during the years I was bullied by the bullied.

Who's The Boss?

A lot of my childhood awkwardness could be attributed to my height and weight. As I mentioned in previous posts, I was short and skinny for my age and that has never changed. I have learned not only how to deal with that now as an adult, but actually I have learned to be very proud of it. There are many advantages to my size. However, as a fifth grade kid those advantages are not very apparent. Though I was really, really good at baseball, I was always picked last or just ahead of the kid who obviously had parents who were brother and sister. And every time I came up to bat, everyone in the outfield would move up almost to the infield. This is where my mind as a child, and my mind now, differ. Now, I think of it as a huge advantage that my peers thought of me as the puny, little scrawn who obviously can't play ball; because every time at bat I would smash a hit WAY past all of the players, even if they didn't underestimate me and would have played at normal outfield depth, and I would get a homerun because I was so fast that before the outfielders could even pick the ball up I was already at home. If I could have thought of it that way as a kid than I would have wished that those kids would never learn their stereotyping lesson, and would always play close up for my at bats giving me a 100% homerun rate. But instead, I would get really depressed and down on myself because, in their eyes, I was basically just a slight edge above the mongoloid kid who didn't even know that dirt wasn't a lunch food. See people, stereotyping does have its advantages....it allows those who are looked at as pathetic the ability to over and over again rise above, gain an upper hand against the ones committing the stereotype, and show them who is boss. Because one day in the future, it is very likely that we will be their boss! (I hope my stereotype doesn't lead to good ol' mongoloid becoming my boss!) ;) <--that's a wink

You Can Judge A Book By Its Cover

It was very easy to see, from appearance alone, that I was a nerdy or geeky kid. Most of it before the age of 12 was not solely my fault as mothers have a lot to do with how their children dress up until that age. My mother was a very cool mother in my eyes and still is to this day. She loves bands like Metallica and Tool and Pearl Jam. Its so amazing to have a mom who loves Tool! When it came to the clothes she picked out for me in my younger years however, she was not exactly deft at choosing them for me. Sometimes she allowed me to choose for myself but that opportunity was usually squandered when I would do things like pick out purple Hammer Pants instead of a nice comfortable pair of jeans. I was usually dressed in pants that were too tight and a little too short in length, since we were fairly poor my black pants were generally faded to grey, and my socks had a lot of holes in them. When I see my old school pictures I can not believe my mother sent me to school with the hair styles she gave me either! My first grade photo looks like I was stood in front of the world's strongest fan for hours and never attempted to re-mat my hair down to my head. It is a disgrace that I was sent to school looking like that! But I forgive my mother completely as she was a very young mother who was doing it completely on her own due to the original owner of the sperm cell that created me leaving when my mom became 16 and pregnant. HA, she's like an MTV show! So with my mother giving me ridiculous hair styles and choosing geeky clothing or letting me choose horrifying clothing and being about four inches under average in height and about twenty pounds under average in weight; it was plain as day that the cover of this book read: "William Paul Vandegrift, the Geek". Oh and mom....I forgive you for any mistakes you made raising me by yourself, and their were not many at all, but that day I went to school with just a winter bomber jacket and no shirt on under it is NOT BEING FORGIVEN!!!!

Please Hammer, Stop Hurtin' Me

I have decided to take a break from solving integrals and area about the x-axis equations to tell another short story. Skip ahead a couple of years from my last story of lip biting failure to a now much smarter young geek. By this point I had learned trying to act as a sexy lady from a soap opera is very rarely, if ever, going to earn you the chick you swoon for. I decided to focus more time on what to wear in order to try and "win the girl". Sadly for me, once again I was lead astray by who I thought I should take advice from. I had an obsession with MC Hammer's music and knew every song off of "Please Hammer, Don't Hurt Em'". I knew a lot of other people loved him too and he was easily the coolest dude I have ever witnessed on television. So who better to try and dress like? Well it seems that a very short and very skinny white kid in a very ethnically, diverse community wearing baggy ass Hammer pants and sporting a Nike "Swoosh" symbol shaved in the back of his head does not get the same amount of cool points as a tall, fine dancing black man gets dressing that way. I did not hold onto this style for long however as I was a very fast learner of things that should not be clung to in my life. Yes I made the terrible decisions again and again, but I almost always recognized my mistake fast enough to avoid gaining the label of "that scrawny wigger" or "that gay lip biter" or any nickname for that matter that didn't have something to do with my first or last name. I think along with the negative reception I earned from my peers with my Hammer style, coupled with a skit done by Mad TV, my Hammer days were over and done with quickly. The skit I am referring to was so devastating to my heart strings that I never again could listen to a Hammer song without reliving the sad moment. In the skit, they had one of their comedians pretend to be MC Hammer and with the extremely baggy pants; he started to dance on an elevated stage with a series of other dancers. They did this while butchering one of his songs with terrible singing. After a few seconds of the dancing, the baggy pants caused the MC Hammer impersonator to trip over his self and go down off of the stage taking all of his dancers with him. I was so enraged! I remember wanting to change the channel but couldn't because I was so shocked that anyone would make fun of such an amazing and cool dude. After about thirty seconds of anger, it subsided and I just sat and cried for a while. I didn't watch Mad TV for a couple of months and I never again listed to "Please Hammer Don't Hurt Em'". It only took a short time for me to look back and realize how hilarious it was that I was so upset over comedians doing what they do to everyone they impersonate, and I was able to forgive what happened and move on in life. As for today, the fact that I could ever shed a tear in the first place over MC Fucking Hammer is about the most pathetic thing I have ever done. And the list of pathetic moments in my life is exponential!

Girls Girls Girls

Girls, girls, girls, and did I mention girls? I am not exactly sure of how fixated most normal 8-10 year old boys are on girls but I think I was ahead of the class. I didn't have many girlfriends of course, zero to be exact. This, because I was NOT ahead of the class at being able to compose thoughts or sentences around the human female species. I recall having a little girl-like crush on a girl who was a grade above me. And the graceful lords of Kobol allowed me to gain the knowledge of what classroom she was in without creepy, childhood stalking methods. Everyday my class would move from one classroom to another allowing me to pass by her classroom, which advantageously, always had its door wide open. Every time I passed the open doorway I would do this ridiculous attempt at being suave, or sexy, or who-the-hell-knows-what, because I was 8 years old! What I did was, I would slightly bite my lower lip on the side, causing it to bend inward and show the teeth doing the biting and I would do this while keeping a stern gaze straight ahead, never looking in the doorway. I think I saw sexy people on my mother's soap operas doing this when they were trying to convey to another person that they were attracted to them. The problem was, THEY WERE ALWAYS FUCKING WOMEN DOING THE SEXY LIP BITING MANEUVER!!!! My tiny, child mind did not recognize that very important fact. If it is any consolation, and I know it is not (I just wish it were), at least that same child mind could calculate the statistical chances that the lip biting had against its prey at achieving its goal on those soap operas: 100% success rate! My success rate however: 0%

The Beginning

As I progressed through kindergarten onto first grade, I knew I had an extreme love for two things in life. One was mathematics, the other: VIDEO GAMES! I knew almost every times table up to 10 multiplied by 10 and I was only 6 going on 7 years old! But more important than that, I was kicking Mega Mania's ass! I was able to get to double digit levels and I never struggled with the silly, broken dice looking guys, even with them moving at FTL speed while shooting their laser bombs all over the frakkin' screen. Mega Mania was Atari at its finest. There was almost no day that I didn't flip that on-switch and give it a go at breaking my high score. The only time I wasn't playing Atari when I had free time, was when I was playing baseball. Now, I know a lot of you will say baseball isn't geeky! But I assure you, I made it so. I always knew everyone's batting average and kept all of the important stats in my head, such as homeruns and RBI. I even calculated our pitcher's ERA during games. If there was a statistic, I kept track of it. Another fact that might knock me down a few geek notches, I was fucking good at the game. I could hit, catch, run, anything the game entailed, I could do. Well, except for pitch ::cough cough:: I said I "COULD" do anything, because not long after my second grade year, though I still played baseball, I had a much more important fascination to fixate on...GIRLS! And boy did I fixate.

Intro

Hello everyone! I have been thinking of a book idea for a while now and because of the severely booked schedule I constantly have, I thought I would never have an actual opportunity to get this book written. So, I decided that I would keep a blog that would allow me to gather written ideas that I would have used in my book and later compile them into aforementioned book. This blog is a metaphorical Game Genie in a way, cheating my way out of the hard work involved in writing a book. So, with that said I will be writing things I went through in my life as a "geek" in past years and how difficult life was then because of my geek-ness. And I will write how amazing it later became to be a geek and all the t&a that somehow came along with the sudden chic nature of geek-dom. (If you do not know what t&a stands for you are either too young to read this series of blogs, or you are a geek who never could quite make it into the category of chic and for that I am sorry.)