Embarrassing Story #3

Several weeks ago there were four or five of us talking at Youth Group and it came out that a few of those present had never seen "Star Wars".

I almost had a heart attack.

Never......seen......Star Wars? Is such a thing possible? How does one get so far through life without knowing about such an important cultural influence? It's like not knowing who won World War II! (We did, by the way)

I, having seen Star Wars many (many, many, many) times, was appalled by this ignorance. I made my surprise quite known, telling everyone how important Star Wars was and how you really needed to see it because it had such a great societal impact, and then someone let it slip: "Wow, I never realized you were such a geek!"

::sigh:: .....yes, I am a geek. I admit it. I may have not seemed like it too much when I first arrived, but you were bound to find out sooner or later. I can be quite geeky, in fact, and have been for a long time. Let the record show:

Geeky Childhood Event #1:

When I was in first and second grades, my brother and I were babysat after school by this woman who had three children of her own. All of them took karate, and they were good. There were a bunch of us that got babysat at her house, and the babysitter's kids would teach us all some of the karate moves they had learned. Then we'd spend the rest of the afternoon beating on each other for a while until our parents picked us up. It was pretty fun. Filled with confidence over my new-found, sweet moves, I made a poster for my non-existent room (I shared a room with my brother). It had a pixelated picture of a yin-yang and said in all its Apple II glory: "NINJA MASTER: DO NOT ENTER".

Geeky Childhood Event #2:

In third grade, I became almost obsessed with taking things apart and making other things out of them (I think I wanted to be an inventor). Pens, rubber-bands, thumb-tacks, the little swively-feet-things that are on the bottom of chairs to make the chair sit flat if the legs aren't straight: it didn't matter what it was, my friends and I would find something to do with them. We tried to form a club around making such devices, but then the teacher told us that we had to let anyone be in our club if they wanted to join. So we kind of disbanded; what's the point of a club if you can't exclude people? My crowning invention was the Thirst-No-More Pen. It was a regular pen with the ink tube cut off where the ink stopped. Then I inserted a straw which was plugged at the bottom, filled with water from the drinking fountain, and plugged up again on the end. This way, if you were in the middle of class and got thirsty, you didn't have to get up and go to the back of the classroom to the drinking fountain- you just drank from your pen! I was brilliant! ....that is, until the bottom plug leaked and water spilled all over your desk and the teacher came over to see what was wrong and you had to explain that you were wasting time working on this stupid invention instead of doing your spelling assignment. Oh well.

It was also during this year that I wrote a short instruction manual (two pages, single-spaced) about how to make a laser gun and how to "be cool." (All attempts on my behalf to actually become cool have subsequently failed.)

Geeky Childhood Event #3:

In fourth grade, I thought I would make a security system for my desk at school. After all, somebody might want to steal my $.75 or something that I had stashed in it. So I put this coil of wire around my desk and connected it to a series of batteries; a mild current could shock any intruder! Ha ha ha! I rule! ......until I came in one Monday and my teacher had thrown all of it away and yelled at me for keeping a lot of junk in my desk. ::sigh:: She just didn't understand being a kid.


....and those are just a few stories of my geekiness at a young age. There are probably more, and they certainly increase in frequency as I've gotten older. So yes, I am a geek. But seriously, you've gotta rent Star Wars.




Keep checking back here for the next embarrassing story: "Walking To Sheetz Will Never Be The Same Again"