Beating the blues by finding my inner geek

If you always spend your weekend in bed, watching "Road House" for the 114th time -- get a life.

Okay, I don't really spend my weekend in bed watching "Road House" over and over again. It's "Van Helsing."

Last winter, a group of us had a game night on Saturdays, playing Apples to Apples, Pictionary, Trivial Pursuit and other games, while eating way too many pretzels and peanuts. Laughter ruled.

This year, for the various and sundry reasons that cause attendance to decline, interest to wane and empires to crumble, we haven't been able to get our game night back in gear. I found myself playing Scrabble against computer robots instead, and being sucked into the hopelessness of a hard-core Sudoku addiction. It was, well, depressing. So when my 16-year-old casually mentioned a Scrabble tournament -- with real people! -- at a nearby gaming store, I was actually tempted enough to leave hibernation and Hugh Jackman.

"I want to warn you, Mom," he said as we drove to the store. "These are geeks."

"Well of course," I said. "That's the name of the store."

"No, Mom, these are real geeks. I'm talking Sheldon and Leonard, here. To the nth degree."

I wondered if he realized that by saying "to the nth degree" he secured himself a spot forever in those selfsame geek ranks.

We're huge fans of the Big Bang Theory sitcom, with the annoying but lovable Sheldon and Leonard, but what Ben doesn't realize is that we love them because we are them. I was one of those geeks in high school (when I wasn't hanging out with the bad boys on the smoking porch. Remember when schools had smoking porches?) We read the "Lord of the Rings" in algebra class after whizzing through the quizzes. I collected comic books and in Home Ec class, when we had to create a wedding planning notebook, I chose Peter Parker as my bridegroom. The invitation list was interesting, to say the least. The Incredible Hulk vs. my grandmother. She would have won.

My friends and I enjoyed our life on the fringe, as long as we were left alone. We spoke Klingon, we read fantasy novels, we knew the difference between wormholes and wyverns and we were proud to be geeks.

That's not to say we still didn't get harassed by the jocks and disdained by the brains, but we were in our own little fantasy world (or worlds, if you include Middle Earth, D&D, Pern, Vulcan and Tatooine) so we really didn't much care. No one took the jocks seriously and when the "brains" got snotty, we'd offer to compare SAT scores.

Then came the computers.

And then came the revolution. For the first time since Socrates slugged down his hemlock martini with the hubris chaser, being a geek was cool. Brains were now a viable commodity and knowing how to run BASIC was more important than knowing how to run a wishbone formation.

Of course, not every geek was granted instant cool status. There are still some with socialization issues, still those who don't realize some people don't care if you can say the Lord's Prayer in Klingon; and far too many brilliant young people are settling for virtual life, interacting with other through the internet and games only.

That's one reason I was tickled when we got to the store and found out 16 people had signed up for the tournament -- one of their best turnouts yet, and it was the first tourney they had that wasn't a video game. We were interacting in real time, with real people, and having a lot of fun. I'm sure I felt more comfortable with these young geeks -- incarnations of my high school friends -- than they were with the middle-aged mom in the baggy sweats; but by the end of the evening, they were all calling me "Mom" and laughing.

It was a great change in my routine and good way to beat the winter blues and blahs.

Of course, winning the tourney didn't hurt, either.

-- Mary Reeves is a staff writer for the Times-Gazette. She can be reached at (931) 684-1200, ext. 215, or by e-mail at mreeves@t-g.com. This column is published each Wednesday.