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Selling our Geekhood
POV: Lo

Hi my name's Menlo and I'm a geek.
It's been about 7 years since I've been cool.
It use to bug me, I'd try to fit in but there was just something about being book smart that made me less of a cool person and so much more of a geek. I remember joining the AV club and being excited about all the opportunities that were possible because I was a part of the sole controller of the projectors and other media equipment at Junior High.

It was so much easier back then, I didn't care about being cool, all I wanted was to stay current in my Dungeons and Dragons game, play some computer games, read books and watch the occasional Star Trek episode. Then one day in High School I became cool.

I don't remember what happened but for one fleeting moment I was cool and everyone wanted to know me... then it was gone. Something happened that ousted me from my cool new place and made me the same old boring person. That was my freshman year but by the time I was a Senior it happened again, perhaps it was the fact I didn't look my old geeky self, something had happened and somehow what I wore and what I did made me cool. No longer did I spend the long hours playing computer games or reading inane science fiction. Instead it was deeper works and writing... but I still had the D and D game to attend but not everything can change.

I still hold that all that was a trend and under it all I was the same geeky kid that was picked last for everything and made the fool of over and over again then it happened.

The Wreck.

It was like this, I was watching a movie and during the previews it happened. Not the usual person yelling things or mocking the screen but instead it held more substance then that. It was a trailer for Lord of the Rings. I had told myself since first reading that book it would be great if that was a movie and hoped and prayed and thought of perfect people in perfect roles and imagined the slender that would occur when the masses were introduced to that novel. In my mind all the things that were going wrong would be righted and everything would work its self out. Things would be perfect.
Instead I am greeted with an overhyped version, something that wouldn't work out no matter what happened. This would not be the movie to change the world instead it would just be another books murdered in the name of film. Then the cheers erupted from people who had probably heard of the books but never opened the covers to see what was inside, tarnishing what was pure and good by not knowing what was what... it was so the end of an era for me.

It seemed as though it was cool to be a geek now. You could do the things I did but with a new cool twist to things making them all right. Nothing was the same even the game that held my few friends now was meant for people who had never known the thrill of rolling just well enough to avoid certain death and making it out with better stuff then you could dream. Of that beep as your computer loads up and the promises that were within or even the dreams that were held between the covers of a book.

Such days now seem over, at least for me perhaps GA will move on without me but for the time being I feel like I am not even welcome here.

Good bye my friends for you have been my lifeline and I will always remember you.

© Sal Ponce 2001