You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) (6 page)

BOOK: You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)
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Moving on.

As I grew up, I was bothered more and more by the bigger picture of “Who am I?” Science didn’t seem to have much guidance except for one section about personality disorders in my dad’s college psychology
textbook. And those were a disappointment, because I didn’t seem psychotic enough to qualify for any of them. So around the wise old age of twelve, I decided that fortune-telling was the key to learning about who I was. The obsession started with a
Teen Beat
magazine personality quiz, “What perfume are you?” (fruity, BTW, no surprise) and rolled onward from there.

I studied graphology, the art of handwriting analysis, which confirmed that I was an introvert and inspired me to start slanting my words to the right instead of the left. (According to the book, left was the mark of a serial killer.) Numerology, where the letters in your name add up into a single number, told me that I was a “1,” which gave me the great excuse to go around saying, “I’m a number one!” I liked that subject a lot. And later, the lost art of phrenology told me that one of my skull bumps was linked to an excess of philobrutism (fondness for pets), which is totally true. My favorite movie is
Babe
, and if you even hum the theme song to it, I WILL start crying. One time I was introduced to James Cromwell, who played a gruff farmer in the movie, and I burst into tears when I touched his hand. Because it was so big and warm and he DANCED FOR HIS PIG.

But out of all the esoteric techniques I played around with, my favorite ended up being Western astrology. Because I loved space. At the time, my TV crush was Commander William T. Riker from
Star Trek: The Next Generation
. He traveled the stars, I was studying them, those things seemed to add up to, “FATE CALLING! DISCOVER WHO YOU ARE SO WE CAN TRAVEL THE GALAXIES TOGETHER, BELOVED ENSIGN!”

At first I was disappointed that I’m a Cancer, and my birthstone is the pearl. I mean, one’s a deadly disease, the other is a gem for grandmas. I wanted to be born in October, because opals are the prettiest,
but what could I do? My parents did the deed in September. Hello, unfashionable June baby. Aside from those problems, though, everything else was spot-on. My sign said I was a homebody. Check. I was sensitive. Sobbing double check. My Venus was in Taurus, so I would be a constant lover, which I already knew, because I’d read Hawthorne. I understood what happened to ladies with loose garters.

From start to finish, the astrology thing was so convincing that I went ahead and let the rules of Cancerdom become the rules of my life. I started doing all the chores for the cats and dogs because I was a “nurturer.” Whenever I got into a fight with my brother, I’d scream, “I can’t help it! You crossed into my COMFORT ZONE!” Of all the recommended Cancerian jobs, I settled on “antique dealer,” and started collecting books on pottery patterns from the 1920s in order to get a head start on my future career.

“Mom, for Christmas I want this Roseville calla lily vase. The pattern is just MARVELOUS.”

I yearned to spread my new cosmic knowledge to other people in my life. Which . . . weren’t many. My only option beyond my brother (who was SO Leo) were the girls I knew in ballet class. We’d exchanged words while waiting to do piqué turns across the floor a few times, so we were pretty much besties. I brought my astrology books with me to my next lesson and, in between tap class and pointe class, tried to transform a few fellow young lives.

“Heather, you’re a Libra, so your struggle will mostly be with vanity and validating yourself outside your looks.”

“Stop saying you’ll never be able to do three pirouettes, Jackie! You’re an air sign; it’s totally gonna happen!”

“Will you pass history class? Oooh, you’re a Pisces with the moon in . . . ugh. Give it up, Tina.”

Turns out the girls loved having their own private psychic in the changing room. I convinced my mom to drop me off at class a half hour early for “stretching” and started consulting with all the dancers on parental problems, summer school plans, you name it. A lot of them brought in birthdays of boys they liked in order to see how their charts aligned. I’m pretty sure my advice led to a few de-virginizations. It was an awesome change from no one wanting to talk to the weird homeschooled girl! I’d finally found a way to relate to other kids. It was fulfilling. And made me popular. And eventually I got shut down.

Miss Mary, my dance teacher, stopped me one day when I arrived. “Felicia, what are you carrying?”

“Um, just a few books.” There were fifteen stacked up to my chin. I’d just discovered Chinese astrology and I Ching and couldn’t wait to tell Jennifer about the guy she crushed on, Simon. Sadly, his stubborn Tiger traits would always keep them apart.

“Megan’s mom doesn’t like her learning about astrology. I’m going to have to ask you to stop talking about it with the girls.”

“But it’s the science of the stars!”

“She thinks it’s Satanic. You gave her daughter a pentagram.”

“It’s a
natal
chart, duh. You can’t let ignorance trump
science
here, Miss Mary!”

Nothing I said could persuade her. She was a Taurus. Once her mind was made up, it was over.

I was forced to hang up my crystal ball, and eventually the girls stopped talking to me again. (And they probably made terrible life choices they could have avoided if they hadn’t been deprived of my insight, thanks to Megan’s mom.) I was upset but soon bounced back and was able to move on to another, more accessible place for friendship and identity exploration: the online world.

[
 Vidya Gamez! 
]

I don’t need a psychologist to tell me that my love of role-playing games is linked to my childhood quest for self. Link number two: I like killing virtual monsters.

We were always big on technology in my family. My dad studied to be an engineer before becoming a doctor, and he’s the kind of dude who always had a PalmPilot in a large holster attached to his belt. (Now he has his Android phone in a large holster attached to his belt, but that’s his life choice, and I will not mock it. To his face.)

When I was about seven or eight, my grandfather gave us his secondhand “laptop,” which was as big as a dining room table.

I think it was meant to help my parents with their college courses, but generally my mom set the standard for us kids by playing video games on it. They were text-only, because the monitor didn’t support graphics, so it was more like reading an interactive novel than anything. The gaming equivalent of liking weird foreign films with subtitles.

My favorite one to watch her play was called Leather Goddesses of Phobos. It came with a scratch-and-sniff sheet tied to various parts of the game, and I sniffed the pizza area until it disappeared, even though it smelled more like dog food than pepperoni. (If I did drugs, I would totally be a sniffer. Gasoline and Magic Markers, I gotta fight against getting my nose all up in there.) After watching my mom type “attack Tiffany with pipe” and having the game tell her back, “Tiffany yells, ‘ow!’,” I knew I was hooked on video games for life.

As my brother and I grew up, we played any PC computer game we could trick our parents into buying us. It was the primary hobby we used to fill our many, MANY free hours between geisha lessons.

“We need this program called Math Blaster to help us learn better, Mom. Oh, and those four other games under it, too. Don’t look too close!”

In an amazing stroke of Cancerian fate, right after the ballet class Satan-worshiping situation, I stumbled upon a video game series called Ultima. Besides pretty much being one of the seminal Role-Playing Game series of ALL TIME (don’t argue with me about this, you’re wrong), this is a video game that literally changed my life.

What set this series apart from other indecipherably pixilated games of the early ’90s was the way you created your character. At the beginning of the game, a fortune-teller asks you several multiple-choice questions like:

“A girl is to be killed for stealing bread from a dying woman. What do you do?”

A) Let them kill her; she deserved it.
B) Demand that she be freed; her crime is understandable.
C) Offer to take the punishment instead. She’s hot.
(Okay, that wasn’t one of the real questions.)

Depending on the way you answered, your avatar (the character you played; don’t worry: I’ll hold your hand through the nerd lingo) started the game differently. Your decisions influenced who you were in the world; your morals shaped what Virtues (like Honesty and Courage) you were aligned with. Let me simplify: As a kid, this video game SAW INTO MY SOUL. It defined me, then projected me into a world where I could be a virtual hero version of myself. I could walk around alone, without my mom warning me there were molesters waiting to kidnap me on every corner. I could go shopping and steal things and kill monsters! Oh, and I could name my avatar AFTER MYSELF! Screw astrology, I was in love!!!!!

I played the games in the Ultima series for HOURS and HOURS a day, month after month. I decided it checked the box for many subjects in my homeschooled curriculum, like computer science, literature, and PE (for the eye-hand coordination). The only thing my mom ever said about it was, “I’m glad you’re concentrating on something, kids!”

I became completely immersed in the world, channeling my avatar’s ruling Virtue of “Compassion” everywhere in the 16-bit realm. And deep down, all I wanted IN THE WORLD was to talk to other people about it. Discuss how bitchin’ the graphics were. How awesome the lore was. And
Holy crap, this game allows you to BAKE VIRTUAL BREAD!
I NEEDED to share this joy with other humans! But the girls at ballet had no clue what a computer was (Megan’s stupid mom probably thought that technology was the work of Satan), and my brother was . . . my brother. I mean, brothers are practically subhuman, right? No, I needed real live people who loved this Ultima game who were not living in my house with me! Where could I find them?!

Hmmmm . . .

[
 Technology-ships 
]

BONG-BOOP-BOOP-BEEP-BEEP-BOOP-BOOP-BEEP
PLAP PLEEP PLWAAAAAAANG SCREEEEWAAAAAA
KLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESHWAAAANG GLAW CEGLAW
SSCHHEHEHHEHEHHHHHHHHHHWHHHHHHHHH

Just approximating that sound in type makes me recall joy, like other kids getting excited over the creepy tinkle of an ice cream truck. In my childhood world, the sound of a modem dialing up to connect with another computer was the sound of freedom.

I’m probably a member of the oldest generation that grew up with the idea that you can connect with other people using a computer. My grandfather worked for the military, where he headed the nuclear physics laboratory at the US Missile Command for twenty years, so he was probably sending groovy selfies back and forth with colleagues in the ’70s. When the commercial internet started to emerge in the ’80s, he encouraged my parents to get on the computers-talking-to-other-people train earlier than 99 percent of the rest of the population. And we thought we were soooo cool.

BOOK: You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)
5.32Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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