That’s me at age 5, circa 1986.
When I was a little girl, if you had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have probably said Jedi. If you had asked me to name my most prized possession, it would have been a tossup between my overflowing box of X-Men comics or the well-worn Ninja Turtle plushies I slept with every night. And if you had asked me who I was going to marry, I would have said, without hesitation, Daniel Larusso from Karate Kid, or perhaps Atreyu from the Neverending Story. (Or best case scenario, they could fight over me.)
But my first true love was the Nintendo Entertainment System. Had I known that innocent-looking gray box would ignite a lifelong passion for video games, I might have tread more carefully before plunging into the darkest dungeons of Hyrule or the secret warp zones of Mushroom Kingdom. Over the years new loves have drifted in and out of my life, like the Sega Genesis, the Sony Playstation, at least a dozen other consoles, and hundreds of individual games all competing for my affection.
Twenty-something years later, not much has changed.
Regrettably I never did become a Jedi, and both Daniel and Atreyu had the audacity to grow old and not wait for me. But I am still very much the same geeky girl I’ve always been; the one that would rather stay home on a Friday night re-reading Lord of the Rings for the seventh time, the one that knows every line to The Princess Bride by heart. I still read comic books, only now I might call them graphic novels, and I shell out $12 at the box office every time one of them is made into a movie. I also still suffer from an incredibly overactive imagination, which I try to channel into being a sometimes-writer of young adult fantasy. And of course, I’m still playing those damn video games.
In short, I never quite grew up. These are the kinds of geeky things I will be blogging about.
