I'm tall, blonde, shapely, and attractive. I'm a woman. In college and my early twenties, I was even considered "hot", and I've got a long list of handsome ex-boyfriends to prove it.
I'm also a geek. Big time.
I didn't necessarily choose to be a female geek, any more than someone can choose their family or ethnic background. Geekdom was thrust upon me, by both genetics and circumstance.
Most of the people in my immediate family are geeks. My father is a chemical engineer who had a Level 5 federal security clearance during the Cold War (he helped engineer tritium and plutonium for use in nuclear warheads; at the building where he worked, they had a buff Marine with an AK-47 instead of a doorman.) My older brother wasn't an intellectual geek as much as a socially challenged one - - his idea of fun was wrapping all of his toys in tinfoil to see if it would make them into good radio receptors; his 1991 high school senior picture is the spitting image of Napoleon Dynamite.
My mother was a domestic geek. She collected recipes from every publication ever put to paper, starched and ironed underwear, and organized seventeen-course kids' cookouts and birthday parties for our entire neighborhood, complete with themed placecards and custom party favors sculpted from nothing but pipe cleaners and salt clay.
With those kind of geek genes floating around the family pool, it was inevitable that I would follow suit in my family's geekdom, at least to some extent. But I surpassed even the high expectations of my genetic code by becoming the ultimate in girl-geeks, almost from the time I was a toddler. According to my mother, I taught myself to read by the age of two. Nobody in my family (including me) knows how I did it - -just that I did. I don't remember a time in my life when I couldn't read - - in fact, when I was in kindergarten, I was already reading novels. Teachers suggested that I be moved up a grade or two, but my parents refused, saying my dyslexic older brother's fragile ego would be bruised too much by moving me into the same grade as him, or even moving me ahead of him entirely. So I was doomed to boredom and frustration in my own grade, with my classmates doing work three and four grade levels below me. I of course became the class "know-it-all". And sadly, I soon learned that being smart often isn't considered a good thing among one's peers, or even among one's teachers. By way of example, I once got sent out into the hallway for answering every single one of my first-grade teacher's questions - - correctly. My teacher justified her brains-punishing actions by saying, "Jill, you're making the other children feel inadequate. Stop answering all of the questions yourself." Well, it wasn't my fault none of the other kids knew any of the answers. What was I supposed to do, pretend to be stupid?
What I did instead was to withdraw from schoolwork and immerse myself in books, games, and computers - -which were just beginning to be available to kids in the early-to-mid 1980s. One of my neighborhood playmates, "Jack", was also a geek - -his father was a molecular biologist at the local university - -and he received a Commodore VIC-20, our neighborhood's first personal computer, for his eighth birthday in 1982. After school, I would mosey down to "Jack's" house to play primitive computer games from the computer's cartridges (a pre-floppy disk kind of program hardware; my favorite was "SLOT"), or perhaps do a little programming in BASIC. The first program I learned was the infamous "GOTO 10" loop-to-infinity program every smart child of the 1980s learned - -a neat little piece of code which was capable of creating endless strings of profanity on all the crummy Tandy desktops on display at Radio Shack. Thanks to that tasty morsel, I had the pleasure of having scores of mall computers all across Southwestern Ohio tell passerby to "FUCK OFF." The beauty of "GOTO 10" was that the only way to stop it on those old machines was to unplug the CPU from the wall (there was no CTRL-ALT-DEL in those days).
The VIC-20 was a very primitive computer to say the least, and after a couple of months, "Jack" and I had already explored its limited functions to the hilt. We soon got bored and moved on to torturing Jack's dad's thousands of breeding guppies, but even that got tiresome pretty soon. I wasn't bored for long, though, because some big changes were about to happen down the block at my own house.
In the summer of 1984, my parents announced they were getting a divorce. My dad had been having a torrid affair with one of the undergraduate engineering students in a differential equations class he taught on an adjunct basis at the University of Dayton. His new girlfriend, twenty-two-year-old, overweight, pimply "Nancy," introduced me to new and expanded levels of geekdom.
To start out with, "Nancy" was a Dungeon Master.
"Nancy" and her collection of supergeeky misfit college friends were my first introduction into the world of professional geekdom. My dad - - a married father of two in his mid-thirties - -was living out his first midlife crisis by dating a nerdy woman fresh out of college. After his dull ten-year suburban marriage, I suppose Dad found "Nancy's" world of socially inept, ill-clad, jalopy-driving, hard-drinking college buddies and floating Dungeons & Dragons games somehow glamorous.
While we were still living with my mother (who would soon suffer a nervous breakdown that rendered her unable to take care of us) my brother and I got dragged to Nancy's two-day D&D bashes on our weekend visitations with my dad. Instead of having some quality father-daughter time with my wayward dad, I got shoved in the corner while he role-played his new D&D character, "Spartacus" (a Lawful Good Paladin with an intelligence score of 17) all around the grottoes and battlefields of Nancy's D&D universe. Every other weekend, I was made to play with twenty-sided dice by day, and listen to my father's wild sexual escapades with his lusty young girlfriend by night. And if that weren't bad enough, Nancy's D&D games were almost always sexually charged. I watched and listened while Nancy refereed her friends (who had nicknames like Radar and Gandalf) and their ever-changing D&D characters around her sprawling write-on/wipe-off Dungeon Board into scores of unlikely sexual situations - - i.e., this Chaotic Good lady fighter gets her breasts sliced off by a Shambling Mound Dragon, that Neutral Evil magic user is forced into sexual congress with a troll, and infinite combinations in between. It was far more than my innocent eleven-year-old ears could handle.
Everything I know about sex, I learned from playing Dungeons and Dragons.
Dungeons and Dragons wasn't Nancy's only geeky pastime. She was also a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). The SCA is a group that professes to recreate the lifestyle of the Middle Ages, except without all the nasty parts - - like the Black Death, the feudal system, or extremely low life expectancies. What the SCA really was, at least in the mid-1980s, was one big fraternity party - - except with costumes and armor. Less than a month after my brother and I were introduced to "Nancy" and her bawdy D&D parties, we were introduced to an even bigger, bawdier party for geeks - - the SCA's biggest annual event, the Pennsic War.
The Pennsic War is held annually in Central Pennsylvania as sort of the WorldCon of SCA folk. It's supposedly much better managed and supervised now - - probably because all the college-aged debauchers of yesteryear have since grown up and had children of their own - - but in 1984, it had to be the last place for any eleven-year-old kid like me to be turned loose. Imagine every socially inept, poorly dressed, taped-glasses, twentysomething sci-fi-and-fantasy geek ever born gathered in one place at one time, then clothe them in tunics, leather wench bodices, gowns, and armor, and liberally sprinkle alcohol and thousands of pup tents - - -well, you get the idea. Let's just say that what little about sex Dungeons and Dragons hadn't already taught me by then, I learned by watching drunken young adults at the Pennsic War. When I wasn't being grossed out by public nudity, drunken orgies, or buckets of mud left over from torrential downpours, I did manage to learn a few other things. Since I was surrounded by geeks and had plenty of free time to kill while the adults had sex and fought a pretend war, I got introduced to Elfquest graphic novels (a couple in a neighboring campsite had a set of them that they loaned me) and Frank Herbert's Dune, which I'd stolen from my soon-to-be stepmother's bookshelf (she'd already taken up residence in my dad's bachelor pad by then). Magic-wielding elves and the many evils of the Harkkonen Empire make for pretty good reading when you're stuck on a camping trip with 10,000 weirdoes. And immersing myself in these classic fantasy worlds only helped solidify my growing geek-hood.
In addition to her geeky hobbies, Nancy (who, shortly after taking my dad, brother, and me to the Pennsic War, became my first of two stepmothers) had some supergeek relatives of her own. Her brother, "Bill", was a teenage computer whiz and ham radio operator with $25,000 worth of electronics in his bedroom. He owned a Commodore 64, a 128, and an Amiga all in rapid succession, and kept them all running and networked on a (very) primitive server. Bob pirated C-64 games onto floppies pilfered from my stepmother's office. He even rigged up a three-story high antenna onto the side of Nancy's mother's house (where my dad, brother and I moved in with Nancy, her mom, and her supergeek brother after dad and Nancy married). The mega-antenna enabled Bill to talk with other ham radio operators all over the world, and even pick up shortwave Communist propaganda broadcasts from the Eastern Bloc and China. It was Bill's influence that led me to get my first ham radio license (my call letters were "KB8DEA"), spend nearly two years trying to win all three Zork text adventure games, and ask my dad for light pen software instead of a Cabbage Patch doll for Christmas 1985. I even became one of the earliest devotees of the classic C-64 game M.U.L.E. - - "Bill" got us a pirated copy of a demo version of the game before it became available in stores. In case you're wondering where Bill and Nancy's super-geekdom came from, their mother, "Helga," was a former elementary school teacher who went back to school in her fifties for a master's degree in computer science. After finishing the degree, she embarked on a second career as a programmer with a Dayton, Ohio defense contractor. "Helga" taught me all about factorial numbers and closed electrical circuits. She had thousands upon thousands of old mainframe computer punchcards that she'd used to write her master's thesis; the obsolete things were used around our house for writing grocery lists and taking phone messages.
Another geek-inducing result of Dad's divorce and subsequent remarriage was the fact I was attending a new school in a new town. Unlike my previous school district's dismissal of my brains as being detrimental to other, needier kids, my new school dropped me smack-dab into its "Gifted and Talented" program. Boys outnumbered girls in the program three to one, and just as I was budding into a preteen, I found myself surrounded by geeky male admirers who were all thrilled to finally meet a girl who knew the difference between a pair of dodecahedron dice and a gigabyte.
I was a "hot" geek for the first time.
Being a "hot" geek was a role I played well into my twenties. I received a full scholarship to college, majoring not in computer science or electronics, as you might expect, but English literature. (All the summer reading I did at the Pennsic War must have rubbed off.) My past exploits in geekdom continued to follow me throughout my college and graduate school days, and even into my professional career. I fondly recall many late-night bull sessions during my graduate school tenure at the University of Chicago (quite possibly the geekiest school in the entire world; its campus has more Nobel laureates per square mile than anywhere else on the planet). The topics of these U of C bull sessions included: whether Season Two or Season Three of The Simpsons was one of the twentieth-century's highest cultural achievements, and why; where to find all the special-effects-editing errors in the original Star Wars; and endless discussions of why Doctor Who was such a successful series despite the fact it had three different actors playing the title role, not to mention terrible production values. In addition to our bull sessions, my nerdy classmates and I especially enjoyed hacking into the university's old UNIX server to play UNIX's best buried "easter egg" game - - a fully text-based version of Monopoly that you played one-on-one against the computer (it always won).
My geekdom also influenced my dating preferences. During my single years, my many boyfriends included a particle physicist, a neonatologist, an economist, and a Japanese linguist. (I finally settled on marrying a financial analyst from Hong Kong.) My present career involves doing policy and legislative analysis for physicians and surgeons - - who make up a delightfully geeky subculture all their own.
I'm proud of my geekiness. I wouldn't trade it for the world. Above all, my experiences have taught me one thing - -the world needs a lot more tall, blonde, shapely, female geeks. Apparently, there's just not enough of me to go around.
Jill Elaine Hughes is a Chicago-based freelance writer, novelist, and playwright. Visit her website at www.jillelainehughes.com.
