I remember my first bout of geekness came when I got hooked on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and spent countless Fridays sleeping over at my best friend's house watching that show. Then the real geekiness came when my best friend and I re-enacted each episode of Star Trek in her bedroom. We'd built cardboard boxes to stimulate the computer panels on the bridge, and stacked them on her bed. I was always either Captain Picard or Lieutenant Worf, and my best friend never let me be Beverly Crusher or Wesley Crusher. I still grumble about this day, because I wanted to be Wesley Crusher.
We'd put on makeup to play these re-enactments. I had some dark make-up on hand to play Lieutenant Worf, and Claudia, my best friend, had some silver makeup so she could play Data. I cringe thinking about these memories now, but we were two little girls, fully in the thrall that was Trekdom, imagining a better future in which there were no limits other than the warp speed limit 9.
We read lots of books, and by the time we were ten years old, we had over 600 books total between the two of us. I had 300 books in my room, all lined up on my bookshelves. My best friend and I had the bright idea to make a library out of these books. We made library cards, and had a list of which books we'd taken out for that week. My mother indulged our dream of having a library by giving us an ink stamp and one of those date stamps, so we could mark down the date on the list with an ink stamp just like a regular library did.
The word got out to my other deaf classmates about the massive libraries that my best friend and I had in our houses. They wanted to take out books, and we made them comply with the rules of the "library" and fined them a dollar a day for late fees. It was awesome, and my best friend realized what a money-maker that those late fees could be. With each "late" fee that we'd get from our deaf classmates, we would rollerblade down to the used bookstore to get more books with that money.
We were so nerdy as kids. We still kept our nerdiness as we grew up, talking about computer programs, chat rooms, atheism, the cool Star Trek movies that would come out periodically, and we watched Star Trek: DS9 avidly throughout middle and high school.
I still kept my geekiness as I went off to college, and got sucked into the tv show, Lost, and Firefly. Now, after college, and almost two years of marriage---I still am a geek.
That'll never go away. What makes YOU a geek? What do you like about it, and what don't you like about it?