Kokoba: Five Fandom Friday on Sunday: 5 Nerdiest Things I've Ever Done

Sunday, May 24, 2015

Five Fandom Friday on Sunday: 5 Nerdiest Things I've Ever Done

I am one of those pedantic assholes who imposes very clear boundaries around "nerd," "geek," and "dork," even if I value all three. Liz Green nails it. I've fallen in the "nerd" circle of that Venn diagram more often than anything else, so my life has basically been one big nerd alert after another. Picking only five moments, then, might be tough, but I'll try to restrain myself. In chronological order:

1. I taught myself to read.

Courtesy Alejandro Escamilla

Sorry for this humble brag, but it is kind of a major nerdy accomplishment. I couldn't have done it without Lawyer Mom, either, who read to me and my brother every night when we were young. She also (very patiently) read all of the cards in the Uncle Wiggly game out loud to me every time we played, even though as an adult she admitted it was the most tedious thing ever. If that laser-like focus on words and letters isn't nerdy, I don't know what is.

That said, I wasn't a total super genius. I could read okay but I had problems with writing that persisted for a little while. I had a tough time spelling my own name until I was 5, mostly because I refused to go by "Kate" or "Katy" or any other nickname.

2. My 64-slide Power Point presentation about stars.

Courtesy Blair Fraser

I just feel bad for all of the other fifth-graders who had to sit through it.

3. My commitment to Reading Olympics.

Reading Olympics is very much a southeastern PA/Philly metro thing. It's too bad, because it's really fun and it's a great way to get students to read books they wouldn't normally read and to read outside of class.

Basically, at the beginning of the school year a list of 50 books comes out at the elementary, middle, and high school level. Teams are encouraged to read all of them and then, in the spring, attend a tournament and answer a bunch of trivia questions about said books. In other words, it was everything I loved, together at last: reading and trivia competitions.

Of course by high school, Reading Olympics was definitely not the cool, fun thing to do anymore; I was one of a handful of students that stuck with the game all the way through their school career.

4. The "power hour" bash script I wrote.

#!/bin/bash

for ((i=0;i<=59;i+=1)); do

for ((x=1;x<=60;x+=1)); do

sleep 1

echo $x "seconds"

done

xmms --fwd

done

Specifically, it would automatically advance to the next song in an XMMS playlist every 60 seconds, so that we could all relax and just enjoy the beers. Better partying through Linux.

5. The entire Kokoba jewelry line.