Roll to determine nerd

I think I've known this on some level ever since I was playing Super Mario Bros. 3 as early as I had coherent thought, but I'm a bit of a nerd.

I have seriously been playing video games for as long as I can remember. When I was four years old, I had already beaten Bowser (of course, back then he was still King Koopa), and I knew the ins and outs of Frogger about as well as my parents did five months after it was released. I had quite a bit of trouble with Tetris, an affliction that would later manifest itself as a general inability to reason spatially, but on a lot of other games, I was solid.

And I didn't get any less nerdy as the years went by. When I was in fourth grade, I remember always being the first one to raise my hand when my teacher asked us a problem, and I hated showing it work because I could do the numbers so much more quickly in my head. This kind of learning was, of course, frowned upon, and I was never picked to answer a question, nor was I told that I could do numbers in my head. I have no idea if my fourth grade teacher thought that I was brilliant or if I was the dumbest of dumb. All I know is that for whatever reason, she would fight tooth and nail so that she didn't have to call on me.

I did go to enrichment, though. And there I was allowed to remain my nerdy self. We had projects that we were required to do, though. And they weren't fun projects. I remember that I had to so a report on the imports and exports of Yemen (I selected that country based on little more than having heard its name on an episode of Friends, but there I was, making a Powerpoint about it).

When I wasn't doing Powerpointson Yemen or raising my hand and not getting called on, I was playing video games. My fascination with them would later become an idea for a career, around the time I realized that somebody somewhere was making these things. So from around sixth grade to tenth, I wanted to make video games.

The somewhat strong desire to make video games almost immediately left the forefront of my mind when I did my first show onstage, ever. In keeping with the spirit of things, it was "The Hobbit." I didn't have a big part by any means, but it still fueled the flame of my affection for being in front of people, saying a bunch of crap.

When I was a junior, I decided that I wanted to give forensics (speech for those of you who weren't in forensics) a shot. It was basically the same thing as theatre, only in front of people whose eyes you could see, and comprised of speeches that you wrote yourself, and in most cases, delivered by yourself. I very much liked it, but I did not like the format which I would be held to if I intended to continue with it into college.

The tail end of my junior year saw me writing for my high school's newspaper. This was mostly because the newspaper's adviser was abundantly impressed with a letter to the editor I wrote about pep rallies, and she was equally upset that I wasn't on staff any of the other years I had been in high school. This resulted in me taking up journalism for the last year and a half of my high school career.

Going into college, I was sure that I wanted to be in the theatre, and I was equally sure that I would major in theatre and then use my talents to become a voice actor. Then last April, I had the epiphany that I wasn't very likely to make a lot of money in a job with such a heavy emphasis on the use of spatial reasoning. So, I made the decision to take a different road altogether in my career.

Which brings us up to speed on why I am going into journalism now, with hopes of being a reviewer for video games. I still like voicing my opinions on... well, everything. And I am still a teriffic nerd, and I don't see any reason to change that.

But this blog really isn't about jobs. No, it's about things much more important to me than that.

It's about my passions.

I am a nerd, with a love for video games, the Matrix movies, Star Wars, Star Trek, stargazing, writing, theorizing about parallel universes, making poetry, singing songs as loud as I can as often as I can, watching movies on rainy weekends, and dreaming of flying like Superman.

If you don't like it, screw all y'all.