Saturday, November 20, 2010

It's all Geek to me

Anyone who’s spent more than two seconds in my company will tell you two things about me right off the bat:

1. I am (or so it would appear to the untrained eye) one very, very self-confident person

and

2. I’m weird.

The same two facts stood as far as my memory extends, even if the order in which they are perceived changed over the years. Apart from a few incidents back in high school – carefully calculated flights into the perfectly made-up face of the middle class elite, one and all – my fashion sense, hairstyle or physical appearance never made the headlines of the (admittedly, somewhat restricted) society levels I circumnavigated. My interests, however…

Let’s just say I was lucky my parents never kept up with the contemporary lingo.

Why am I telling you all this?

As it happens, I'm a parent myself now. And while my four-year-old could give Gizmo & The Gremlins a run for their money in terms of… err… vivacity, my nine-year-old is more of a Bastian B. Bux type; that my nine-year-old is, in fact, a “she” doesn't help her case much, either.

“Girls are supposed to like Disney princesses and play with dolls, right?”

And I’m “supposed to” hold a nine-to-five job and wear skirts, I know. Your point?

As a matter of fact, my daughter does like Disney's lady MCs (Mu Lan and Pochahontas come to mind) and she also plays with her dolls, still; the fact that she renamed them all after Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings characters – Mommy, the sole provider or all things entertaining, not being big on action figures – is completely beside the point.

This is probably where I should mention that neither franchise has ever been as popular here as overseas... Shocking, I know.

Pop music? She's into Beatles.
Disney Channel? She watches House.
Princess Boutique? She prefers Warcraft.
Fashion outfits? You tell me; she's waiting for this to restock.

At this age, it’s probably mostly our doing: her father and I first met in a gaggle of F1-fans and immediately proceeded to tear into each other's throats over the correct pronunciation of Keith Richard’s name. Our courtship took place in a drinking establishment called 'Easy Rider' and included screaming matches on modern-day perception of sexuality Vs the Greco-Roman one, immature pouting over instant messengers and their relative merits to society at large, and an all-out war between Slavic (lead by one L.Tolstoy) and Anglo-Saxon (commandeered by W.Shakespeare, Esq.) tribes.

The first piece of furniture we bought as a married couple? A computer desk; the second one was a matching chair.

Yep, nostra culpa.

However…

For someone as 'unpopular' and 'ungirly' as she might seem, my daughter is – and thank the Valar for it! – rather taunt-proof for her age. We had our fair share of foul weather back in kindergarten and first grade, but as soon as she was old enough to hit the ‘Connect’ button all on her own (even if Mommy kept breathing down her neck to ensure there were no nasty surprises content-wise, and still does) she realized one thing that set everything right in her pre-teen world:

It's not that's she's really different. She’s just a part of a different group.

In a society – hell, a world! – full of little girls hell-bent on emulating Hannah Montana, I’m raising a nine-year-old who ‘wants to be like Spock when she grows up’.

And let me tell you… I couldn’t be more proud of it.


LLAP, geekettes. You are the Force.

1 comment:

  1. *Great* blogpost. And good for your daughter, whatever makes her happy.

    Princesses and dolls? ...given a genuinely free choice without polarised cultural pressures, surely these are minority interests, even for young girls?

    The more a person grows up as an individual thinker, the more they'll seem 'weird' to most?

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