- I'm hungry, we'll deal with that later.
- A good friend of mine might be dying.........
When I left school I would have called myself a geek or a nerd or any of those often yelled vernaculars used to insult the often intelligent outcasts.I would have been proud of this. I knew they meant to hurt my feelings but I was not hurt. I went to a boarding school for the challenged. A place where kids were sent because they had trouble adjusting in regular schools for various reasons.
So I spent a lot of time on school grounds! I spent a lot of my free time, when I could reading. I often found myself reading dictionaries, encyclopaedias and educational texts! The way schools love to label, analyse and assess their charges, and by this process it was deemed that I was at least three years ahead of my game. I played chess with others and by myself. I churned my way through new tech and old. Devoured science and maths with greed. Learned electronics and pushed my teachers into getting PICs. The weekly escape to the local shopping centre I could be found in the Library instead of madly trying to buy sweets or toys or jokes. The library was safe and quiet and huge. The scale of it hide the numbers of people it could hold and I felt alone. It had a free art gallery which changed on a fortnightly basis. When I did brave the shopping centre it was usually for parts or components or stuff for projects. Or for books. In school one night I remember breaking into the school computer room to turn the four old slow PCs we had into one big faster PC. I even overclocked it before I even knew of the lingo or its consequences!
I was socially awkward and quite shy. Didn't like to communicate with others much either. But when I left school I found a job. It wasn't a bad job and it was in a sector of the employment market I wanted. I made friends and I adpated to the changes. But I spent most of my first wages on electronics and robotics, and built my own little friends. Learned about muscle wires! I also fell heavily into roleplay. The sort that allowed the imagination to run riot. I bought Warhammer and DnD books. I bought the little models too. I even started buying my computer consoles and games around this point. I played until I mastered them. I bought more books and I studied them. I learned more slowly but I was intrigued by science and technology. I learnt how to become a computer engineer for the fun of it, spending a fortune. Got my degree but got nowhere with it! Highest in my class too!
But these are all memories now. Stuff I have done. I don't feel I have broadened that side of me for quite sometime now. I still have the DnD books and the character sheets but my last solid game was a good 12-18 months ago! Shamefully I can't even remember where my dice are!
Gaming has changed too. Become so mainstream that now I feel out of the loop. In fact my last console purchase was a Dreamcast!! Sure I have two MMORPG accounts but I hardly feel inclined to play them any more. Of all the horrors I seem content with Farmville and the library of other Facebook apps.
The regular computer upgrades have died a death and my computers last personal touch was at least three or four years ago. I could no longer tell you the going rate for components like I use too either.
Maybe books are where I was destined to lie. There are book geeks after all and I am still a happily confessing bibliophile! It's seems like my last sanctuary.
As technology rapidly changes everything that use to be so special or unique has become a little bit mainstream. I fall sharply behind the times when sharing the lastest funny webcomic or a brand new video. Everybody seems to have seen it already! I have become a sheep following the flock with using overused movie quotes and not so funny one liners.
I am also no longer the shy socialy awkward boy that I was when I left school. I have evolved into the person who I feel more comfortable calling me! But am I happy with what I have left behind, what I have sacrificed in doing so! I'm not sure. I still want to build that little do-hickey. I still want to summon forth the wrath of the gods with the roll of a dice. I want to know what is wrong with my computer, diagnosis it and go get the parts like I once did! But I seem unable to.
Like many secondary school personae we choose to weild, we seem to cast them aside into adulthood and strangely this saddens me greatly. I shed the mantle of my geek with reluctance. Not because I choose too but because I have lost the quest details. I am missing the pieces. Don't have the full set of dice! Or maybe I have found my path and no longer need solace in the activities that sheltered me. Maybe they were only coping mechanisms or a way to escape reality.
All I know is I no longer recognize the person I once was. For all its good and all the bad!
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