Suck It, Wonder Woman!: The Misadventures of a Hollywood Geek (3 page)

1391 B.C.:
Moses commands—He led the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt, crossed the Red Sea, and delivered the Ten Commandments from the top of Mount Horeb, all while looking like a tenure-track math professor.

575 B.C.:
Pythagoras theorizes—The first man to call himself a “philosopher.” He also founded a religion based on math and was deathly afraid of legumes.

December 14, 1503:
Nostradamus born—apothecary, seer, original know it all.

17th century:
Bow ties are donned—First dressed the necks of Croatian mercenaries. Later appropriated by crafty conservative television pundits to look more smarter.

July 10, 1856:
Nikola Tesla arrives—Invented radio and alternating current. He also kept a pigeon as a pet about which he said, “I love that pigeon as a man loves a woman.” He died alone in New York.

February 5, 1943:
Nolan Bushnell changes geekdom forever—Bushnell is born on this day and in 1972 creates Atari. Pixels will never be the same.

1954–55:
J. R. R. Tolkien writes geek mythology—Annoyed by England’s lack of native mythology Tolkien creates
The Lord of the Rings
. In the process he also invented Orcs. And dorks.

October 28, 1955:
Bill Gates hatches—The first person to make being a geek seem a little bit evil.

July 4, 1961:
Richard Garriott falls to Earth—He made his first video game as a teenager. Used his gaming fortune to fund a trip aboard a Russian Soyuz, where he made the first sci-fi movie filmed in space. Shortly after, he officiated the first wedding held in zero G. All hail The Pope of Geeks.

May 13, 1964:
Stephen Colbert born—Possibly speaks both Quenya and Sindarin.

1966:
The Society for Creative Anachronism begins—Cosplay for old people.

1972:
Hacky Sack is invented in the state of Oregon, of course—Geek stoners discovered pot and then a little knitted ball with beads in it. Not normally procrastinators, nerds while away precious hours they could’ve spent on early computers.

May 25, 1977:
Luke Skywalker says, “But I was going into Toshi Station to pick up some power converters.”

May 14, 1984:
Mark Zuckerberg is born—The twenty-five-year-old college dropout’s wealth fell half a billion dollars in 2009 to just under a billion. Goes to show, stay in school, kids.

July 20, 1984:
Revenge of the Nerds
hits theaters—Nerds get revenge.

August 2, 1985:
Weird Science
premieres—All computers should make hot women. Every single one.

November 24, 1988:
Mystery Science Theater 3000
premieres—Heckling science fiction B-movies with wise-ass cracks—once only the province of late-night geeks in their dens—given public voice by a man and his robot puppets.

May 10, 1994:
Weezer debuts—With songs about Buddy Holly, sweaters and girlfriends, and a video featuring the band playing Hacky Sack. Lyrics include: “I’ve got the Dungeon Master’s guide; I’ve got a twelve-sided die.”

February 5, 1999:
Rushmore
is released—Max Fischer: The greatest geek protagonist in cinema history? He did save Latin, after all.

2000:
A man named Miles Rohan founds The Corduroy Appreciation Club—The rest of the world gets wise to what geeks have known forever—corduroy rules. And it feels really good on the upper thigh.

December 2003:
Battlestar Galactica
(re-imagined)—A TV show for nerds that’s as good as
The Wire.
So say we all.

November 22, 2005:
Achievement Whores keep…whoring—Such people will one day understand the true meaning of the word “achievement,” set down the controller, step outside and discover what the rest of us call “sunlight.”

June 29, 2007:
iPhone touches down—It makes fingertips even more useful, has a built-in vibrator and access to the Internet. The best sex toy that can also sometimes make a call ever invented.

January 20, 2009:
Barack Obama is inaugurated as the forty-fourth President of the United States of America—The nerdiest country in the world, finally gets the egghead president it deserves. God bless this great and geeky nation of ours!

It probably won’t shock
you to learn that I like the original
Star Wars
quite a bit. I’d probably say I like it as much as the next guy or girl. Well, not if the next guy is the kind who dances around his apartment to DJ Chris’s “Fette’s Vett” while wearing only his banana-hammock and a Wookie mask. But you know what I mean. The film is an iconic pop-culture creation and touches a bazillion filmgoers to their very core.

It can also be very useful. Useful? What the hell am I talking about? Glad you asked. What I mean is the way that George Lucas’s masterpiece contains lessons that can and should be applied to real life. The one that jumps out at me is the message of The Force and how if you stay pure and good and mentally sharp you can, in fact, conquer the Dark Side.

For me, the Dark Side is all the people who have tried to hold me back or undermine me or have stood in the way of my dreams. (Sorry, just lapsed into my own personal
Behind the Music
episode.) When that happens, I metaphorically lift my hand up and use Jedi powers to restrict their breathing and then pick up a drinking glass and smash it in their face. Okay, yes, it was Darth Vader who likes to restrict breathing and he
is
part of the Dark Side, so this metaphor is faulty—but I can’t help it if Yoda is too much of a pussy to restrict breathing and then smash a glass in someone’s face. Seriously—Yoda, sweetie, baby, love ya, but you’re not exactly considered a badass.

Yoda is too much of a pussy to restrict breathing.

Here’s a quick story illustrating what I’m talking about. I studied journalism in college, and one of my first jobs after graduating was on the assignment desk of a local TV affiliate in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That is quite possibly the worst job in all of journalism. You have to sit there listening to a million (yes, one million) police scanners going great guns all at once and pay attention to catch something—anything—newsworthy on the scanner, like a four-car pileup or a bank heist. I never really cared that much and so I was never that good at it. But it was a job, and it was fine. So, end of story, right? Not quite. See, there was a group of people there who were mean to me—like, vicious. I found out once that some of them were e-mailing each other about cutting my brake lines and carving letters into my skin. Sick shit, you know? I took to working twenty-hour-days on Saturday and Sunday so I wouldn’t have to come in during the week and deal with them.

I worked there for a year, because I promised my mom I would give it an honest try. As soon as that year was up, I bolted. And as soon as I gave notice, wouldn’t you know: all the psychopathic haters were suddenly so nice to me and wanted desperately to know where I was going. I smiled, gave them nothing and didn’t let their negative creepiness slow me down. And never looked back. I just got all Jedi on their asses and was like: “Who is more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?” Ya know? Wait, does that make sense in this context? I think so. Wait. Read it back…Yeah, it totally does.

In any case, let me just say that even if I am not a
Star Wars
obsessive who camps out for weeks to be first in line for the next installment (not that there’s anything wrong with not having anywhere to go to the bathroom), I absolutely appreciate the great film’s place not only in geek canon, but in the real world. Lessons can be learned from each and every movie in the series. Like take this lasting and most important lesson from
Return of the Jedi
: If you ever have the option, always, always wear a gold bikini. Trust me, I know, I’ve done it once or twice.

I had this boyfriend
once and after we had sex one night we were lying in bed watching TV and cuddling. Suddenly he turned to me and confessed he wanted to tell me something about himself that he’d never told anyone. I was excited—girls love sharing and learning about the man they’re with. I perked up and cuddled closer to hear the mysteries of the guy I had become so fond of. Was it about how he hopes to have kids someday? His dream job? How hot he thinks Alyssa Milano is and I remind him of her?

And then he said it:

“Sometimes I fantasize about sucking a dick.”

My eyes became as big as saucers. I answered with a surprisingly simple question: “Sucking your dick, or someone else’s?”

He responded: “No one’s dick. It’s just a big, black dick and it’s just sort of floating out there. And I suck it.”

Me: “Do you
want
to suck a dick?”

Him: “….…I don’t know.”

There was a long silence. Then I asked, “Do you want me to find you a guy so you can suck
his
dick?”

He sat there for another long stretch of silence.

Then he said, “No. But, thank you.”

We broke up the next day.

He was a nice guy.

I hope he finally got to suck a dick.