"We can say 'geek' because we are. You can't."

Nerd. Geek. Poindexter. All of these are monikers to which I aspire but seem to fall hopelessly short.

Why? I would like to say that it has something to do with my innate sense of style, or my legions of admirers who turn all of my interests and expressions into the next trucker cap, fedora, or way of wearing one's bangs; but seeing as I never quite got the "don't mix brown with black" memo, in addition to the fact that this blog has only two followers, I don't think really think that either is that likely.

No, what keeps me from truly obtaining and wielding with pride the heavyweight belt of 833k is laziness, impatience, and a decided lack of dedication.

To illustrate my point, I offer the following example:
I am an event planner by profession. Technically, an event manager, but seeing as there are some days where a considerable part of my job comprises answering the age-old question of "Chicken or Fish?" I try not to take titles too seriously. I recently found out that with some of the larger hotel chains, I earn points for planning meetings. By coincidence, we had planned several large-scale events with the same hotel chain. Without trying, I had earned enough of these "points" to set me up for a few night's stay at any hotel I wanted, any place in the country. Seeing as I had previously only experienced "perks" by way of free cheese and steno pad holders, this was a nice surprise.

I knew immediately what I wanted to do and who I wanted to go with: Comic-Con with my brother. At this point you may say that it is promising in terms of my lack-of-cool that this was my first thought when I heard "free trip". Where others would consider areas tropical or scenic and skillyfully choose for company the most impressive specimen with loose morals available, I immediately thought of an overcrowded location devoid of sunlight with the one person that I knew appreciated the "Tremors" ouevre as much as I. ::sigh:: If only it was that easy.

I made my hotel reservations and pulled my brother on my geek train. He planned to meet Stan Lee. I promised to kiss the hem of the robes of Joss Whedon. (Yeah, I am one of those.) I went to the Comic-Con website and saw that the registration was currently closed. Tickets for the three-day passes were quite affordable however, and I planned to check back at the website each day until they were on sale again. In the mean time, I went and priced out a t-shirt that read "There are 10 types of people that understand binary- those that do and those that don't."

Life though, she got in the way. I made this promise to myself that I would attempt to be cultured and watch all of the Academy Award for Best Picture noms, and within a week, I had plans to go out with friends and/or awkward computer-fixing members of the opposite sex a record-breaking FOUR times. A hermit by choice, this type of socialization had been heretofore unheard of since the days when it took me 20 minutes and all my concentration to send a text message ("You send a note with the PHONE????")

When next I logged on to my computer and pulled up Comic-Con's website, I saw that tickets for Wonder-Con in September were available online, but that Comic-Con had already SOLD OUT. Stunned, I sat like a deer in the LCD, Red Vine hanging from my open mouth, furiously clicking the mouse in an attempt to find any link that would explain why 127,000 tickets were no longer available for purchase.

I will not describe to you the fit that followed- only that I am happy that I do not have any roommates to have recorded my reaction with a hidden camera, as I suspect that it would have surely gone beyond Leroy Jenkins-viral and into Star Wars Kid-plague. Suffice it to say that the Biblically-rumored weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth made an appearance, and I had to make a very shamefaced trip to IKEA to replace a lamp.

There followed the phone calls to my brother, and to my best friend in California who had planned to join us. The stunned silence, followed by the catch in each of their throats as they promised sentiments like, "Hey, there's always next year," only added to my feelings of nerd-otence and sent me into a shame spiral of pop music, Panda Express, and favoring Andy Samberg over the amazing comedic genius that is Bill Hader.

My geexistential crisis forced me to examine how something like this could happen. Had I not been on 12,000 "Lost" forums over the last seven years- first to debate what the fuck a polar bear was doing in the jungle and later whether they actually expected us to believe that everyone was dead in the last season? Was I not infuriated at the choice of that kid from "Friday Night Lights" for Gambit in the Wolverine movie? I knew all the words to "Re: Your Brains", and loathed Apple for making Jonathon Hodgman into the PC as well as Bunsen Honeydew on the those stupid "I'm a Mac"/"I'm a PC" commercials. I had read Wil Wheaton's autobiography and forgiven him for Wesley Crusher. How was I still falling short?

What I came to was this: I love what the geeks give me. I love the graphic novels; I love the crazy classic TV series re-made into kickass action/adventure shows (Hawaii Five-O excluding); I love the celebrated careers of people like Bruce Campbell, David Cross, and Judd Apatow; and I love the zombies. My gosh, how I love the ZOMBIES. Here is what I don't love: the absolute devotion entailed in being a member of the fold.

Geeks are monk-like Zen masters who are born for queueing up and giving their entire mind and body to that which they love. They stand in line for midnight showings of event movies while I am at home enjoying actual sleep before work on Friday, completely oblivious to the fact that the new Star Wars movie sucks. They kill upwards of eight pedestrians reading while driving home from the Borders where they bought "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" and then do not eat, drink, poop, or allow others within their home to do the same until they have finished every last word. Most would rather see Felicia Day's wan smile than that of the Mona Lisa, and have tents in the trunk of their car to place on the sidewalk in front of that event's location within five minutes of its announcement.

I simply don't have it in me. I am not saying that I am better than geeks, or even that I have a life that is so much more interesting than theirs that I cannot give my time to the pursuit of that which I love. I just hate lines. I hate waiting. I didn't watch "Battlestar Galactica" until the final season, and even then, I was annoyed at having to wait a week between each episode, the expression of which compromised my personal safety in the presence of those who had endured the wait between Season 3 and the first half of Season 4. I would love to be included in these nerdvents, but would only really be happy if I could go and be allowed to cut the line, and since I do not look like Princess Leia in a gold bikini or Alice from "Resident Evil" in a torn red dress and combat boots, I am pretty much S.O.L. on that desire.

In the weeks since my disappointment, I have come to accept my place as the sucker fish on the skin of the shark that is n34dc0r3. I will never truly be one of the pasty legions, and I am fine with that. I am instead somewhere between Jane Goodall and Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes, going through the motions of assimilation but eventually being called out as a fraud and lead around on a leash by those that have declared themselves my superiors.

So nerds, I thank you for a re-writing history to depict Lady Catherine de Bourgh as a ninja assassin and giving me hope for a future populated with both cowboys AND aliens. Just do me a favor and text me when the line lets up, will ya?

Tell me about the rabbits, George . . .

The hazard in regularly posting to a blog is that if you are not careful, you will let yourself start every blog post like . . . well, a blog post. As I write this introduction to what will eventually be a thesis on my own personal literary evolution and addiction; trite statements are scratching at my screen door, mewling and causing that "thump, thump, thump" vibration against baseboard as they try to get my attention enough to let them slip in. First sentences like, "I have not always been a reader . . . " and "As a child, reading was not easy because of my learning disability . . . " have to be chased off my porch with a straw-bristled broom and yelled epithets so that I can get the peace I need to be able to write my awkward cat metaphor.

To begin, I reference a statement made to a couple of dear friends one night and has since gone on to become legendary in our circle of three: "I am one of the children for whom Hooked on Phonics worked." That's right, I learned how to read using the reading REVOLUTION. For the low, low price of $48.95, my parents bought me a cheesy, 80's music-based reading system guaranteed to get their dyslexic learner cracking Voltaire before she started her first period.

The culturally prolific and widely scorned system that drilled "A-aah-APPLE!! [doo-doo-doo-doo] B! Buh-BALL!" into my head so deep that even today I will sometimes sit and hum the tune at my weekly staff meeting, was effective at getting me to recognize the difference between apples and balls without referring to a diagram. Damn it, it worked. I am still about six Christmases away from forgiving my parents for making me a part of that gigantic national laughing point and not just allowing me to live out my illiteracy in my belltower waxing my humpback, feeding my pigeons, and nursing my dreams of becoming a chorus girl in Atlantic City. (That is the plot to "Hunchback of Notre Dame", right?)

Dyslexia had effects past learning to read though, and they were nothing if not a challenge. I could not read as fast as other kids without the words pretending they were playing Red Rover, and my reading comprehension did not permit me to skim at all. Guess how excited this made me for reading assignments in school? College? More appropriately, guess how many books I actually read when I got to grad school? Give you a hint- we are just barely in the double digits for two full years. (Suck on that, UO College of Ed!)

Remaining effects of my learning disability can still be found in my handwriting where I am constantly transposing letters in anything put down without the intervention of a keyboard. Each day I bless the digital age in which I live and give a mental middle finger to Mrs. Hill who told me that I would never make it anywhere in life if I did not learn to write my letters correctly. I would write her a note and tell her off for real, but I have the feeling it would come back with red ink all over it.

Not being able to read very fast and having to read EVERY WORD of everything I was tasked with reading made reading a chore- and not a fun one, like testing the structural integrity of your older sister's leaf piles. In addition, my sugar-fueled tendency to alight from project/topic/errand to project/topic/errand like a moth in the lamp section of Home Depot would ultimately prove useful to my chosen career of meeting planner aka One Who Keeps the Batons Aloft, but was crap for establishing good reading habits in childhood and adolescence.

This is not to say that I was illiterate- if it was a subject in which I had interest, or if the movie had been good, I would actually take the time to enjoy a book. Of course, by "take the time", I mean that it would take me six months to get through it. There was that glimmer of hope in the late 90's, when a precocious boy-wizard entered my life and made me care about dragons and ghosties and cellulite-hiding robes, but like much of America, most of my good intentions never made it past multiple repetitions of the book about the boy-wizard and the dragons and ghosties and cellulite-hiding robes. By the mid-aughts, it appeared as though I was doomed to a life of illiterate ramblings about the band Coldplay and whether or not Adam Sandler had staying power.

In 2008 though, three things happened that turned me around.

Event #1: I went to my first annual conference for work. The last hired before the event, my status as an office peon was firmly solidified by the staff page of our agenda book which showed my picture in the exact opposite corner as our executive director, who at that point pretty much lived in a cloud with a megaphone at the top of Mt. Vesuvius for as much as he intimidated me.

While tending to the merch table with a girl in my department, we started to talk about books. I referenced my old standbys- "Catcher in the Rye", Sherman Alexie, and the four books I actually DID read while getting an art degree (she seemed to have limited interest in "Elements of Design in Impressionist Brushwork"). When she talked about the books she loved, she described a bedside table overburdened with a scizophrenically arrayed variety of fiction, non-fiction, young adult tragedy, fantasy, sci-fi, and bike repair. Listening to her talk with such passion about the things that she loved to read and the things that she hoped to read made me feel initially literarily impotent, but eventually determined to become more well-rounded and interesting in ways that were actually important.

Event #2: I moved in with some new roommates who were best friends with each other. This turned out to be not. smart. I was not the type to fan the magazines before company came over so I did not fit in with them; and they were not the types to actually HAVE company come over, so they did not fit in with me. I was desperate for a place to live though, and they were desperate not to pay $800 for January, so a devil's bargain was struck. I marked the lightning flashes and rolling thunder that accompanied my signing the lease to a late winter storm.

In an effort to "bond" (note to self: do not live life within quotation marks- it only ends badly), I began reading those teenage girl vampire books that everyone had raved about and for which both of them seemed to be pretty crazy. I read the first and thought, "That vampire is controlling . . . and not in the sexy Dracula way that tells you that you are probably getting laid." I made the mistake of giving the second and third book chances to pull me back in, but I just couldn't get over how DUMB the story was, and MY GOSH, could the woman come up with another type of stone to describe a lover's smooth skin than "marble"? Seriously woman, go to the bathroom section of Lowe's and TAKE NOTES!

By the time I finished the third book, I was determined that I would never again read something this bad unless I had read five or six good books to counteract it. So, to tell the truth, I am not especially sure of whether it has been my love of the good literature or the bad that has compelled me to read so much, but either way, this policy has proven effective volumetrically.

Event #3: I read "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay". If you have read that book, you didn't need to read past that sentence to determine why this comprised a whole event. If you have not read that book, I will say this- the language, the plot, the characters, the bloody, fucking WORDS, were everything that I wanted at that period in time to re-ignite a belief in miracles taking place in 600+ pieces of paper. That book made me weep and weep and smile and gasp out loud. I hugged that book and let it take the right side of the bed. It was writing-you-bad-poems and smiling-about-you-on-the-bus love, and for the first time the object of my affection did not play in a garage band.

These events set in motion subsequent literary feats of which I am somewhat proud- In 2009, I decided that I would read 52 books in a year. Despite a rocky July, I made my count and even read about half of "The Stand" as well. I started a library of texts both familiar and obscure, and have continued to take in lonely paperbacks despite my collection far outstripping my reading speed. Like a matchmaker, I have done reasonably well at pairing friends and family with their best match depending on their current literary needs- my only wild card being my recommendation of "The Road" to everyone, and having two of my best friend accuse me of trying to make them kill themselves from depression caused by post-apocalyptic lack of hope.

I own all of the books that I read, and at the end of each, I write my own review saying when I finished it, what was significant about that day, and what I thought. This is especially fun with things that are truly terrible, as is evidenced by my review of "Why We Suck" by Denis Leary:

"I finished this book on August 3, 2010 on a day that I got 3.5 hours of sleep and yet could somehow manage NOT to pass out. This book sucks. I like Denis Leary, but less so after reading this badly written, meandering, stale piece of inconsequence. I am keeping this book on my shelf in the hopes that it goes forgotten and is eventually urinated upon by a passing animal. His mom was cute though."

Whenever I move, I pull my books down from the shelves and get excited about reading the new and re-visiting old favorites. I re-commit myself to absorbing all of the beauty, silliness, fighting, sex, heroes, villains, talking animals, mothers, fathers, pomegranates, and juniper as I can before I shuffle off into the Great Library Beyond- which is exactly like Belle's library from "Beauty and the Beast" but with more Pablo Neruda and Chuck Pahlaniuk.

And because no blog post on reading is complete without a book list:

• Reservation Blues; The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian; and Flight- All by Sherman Alexie
• Fahrenheit 451- Ray Bradburry
• The Mysteries of Pittsburgh- Michael Chabon
• The House on Mango Street- Sandra Cisneros
• One Hundred Years of Solitude- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest- Ken Kesey
• The Stand- Stephen King
• Born Standing Up- Steve Martin
• The Road- Cormac McCarthy
• The Bluest Eye- Toni Morrison
• A Man Without a Country- Kurt Vonnegut
• Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim- David Sedaris
• Yes Man- Danny Wallace
• The Hatchet- Gary Paulsen
• Tiger Eyes- Judy Blume
• Matilda- Roald Dahl