Happy Birthday to Me. Thanks For Asking.

by Ah Kiat on Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 9:24am

 'The Big Bang Theory' is about four genius geeks and celebrates social awkwardness and the ultimate nerdage. At twenty seven and held Masters and PHDs; they worshiped Star Trek and invented Klingon Boogle, they swore their weekends on Wii Bowling Nite, Halo Nite and War Of Warcraft Nite, they debated furiously on superheroes and supervillians and they had gotten rejections from every single ladies they met.

Their story speaks to me.

I'm twenty seven. Though I did nothing paramount like driving a Mars Rover 65 million miles away, discovering a planetary body and named it 'Planet Bollywood' or solved subatomic particle equations and string theory and dark matter. I'm still a geek in so many ways.

Top of the head I can fight you to the death on why Superman is wussy, deconstruction the science and magic of Marvel and DC and how The Matrix is the most important movie in Nineties. I'm a huge fan of Doremon in which I can prove it with my double library of all it's running series and long stories collections. The most expensive and useless stuff I bought was Vertigo tarot cards. (I don't even believe in tarot reading, yet the pack is so bloody cool to miss) I've squandered at least four of my best years in LAN gaming (and they were the best years). My secret dream house accessory is to build a bat signal at my balcony, my secret to-do-list is to learn hadoken and my secret identity when I'm drunk is 'I am the Batman!'

As meek is conventionally inheriting the world or in other words, the market is increasingly targeting nerds as a dynamic spender with results from Comic-Con, Superhero Films and gadgets, it is their social awkwardness that very much still appeal to me.

I'm squarish, loop sided, myopic and look like something you would sweep out at spring cleaning. It's so much worse in secondary school. Raging hormones and unmanageable curly hair is not a good mix. Girls became a large part of my life and the saddest part was they don't even bother to look at me. I remembered telling my first crush I like her and her first instinctive response to girlfriends was 'eew'. Things go pretty much downhill from there. Girls orbit around me so that they can know my better looking friends or they will tell me in the end that 'Oh, but I see you only as a brother'...

But like all lucky nerds, I have some fond memories of 'The Goddess', 'The Fling' and 'The Sun'. Then again, that's tale for another time perhaps.

The bone of this entry in reference to the future is not about girls (I'm married), or how much I could mind-wrestle you with comic book details and trivial, it's about embracing geek personality whole-heartedly. Because no matter how much you shake down a geek, lecture him about severity of reality and dress him up as a jock wannabe or even married him, you cannot take the geekiness out of him. The ultimate geekiness is about losing interest in reality, friendship and embrace solitude with a bitter but self-assuredness.

You can condemn me about my deprivation of the matter and I'm simply returning to my roots. This birthday onwards I resolve to stop pretending to be the person I am not, or want to go to places I don't belong, or submit to the lifestyles I should be having. Most importantly, I will not longer take a interest in what you like, in who breaks your heart, in what lame excuse when you blow me off or bother to conceal the fact that your taste in music, movies and books are so shitty that you might as well wear a toilet as a hat.