This is a shade late for Valentine's Day, but that's only because my husband and I spent the day going about town and doing the sorts of things we love to do, topped off with a nice dinner. And before you start leaving comments about how I'm going back on my word and writing a post about personal stuff instead of pop culture nonsense, you're wrong. This is sort of a continuation of my "secret origin", so if you want more dirt on me, keep reading.
Back in 1992, I was a senior in high school, and frankly, I was miserable. Back then, if you were a girl who was into comics and sci-fi/horror and cartoons and toys and had little-to-no interest in what was considered "normal" girly things, you were a freak of nature, just asking to be mocked. Wearing glasses, carrying a few extra pounds, and having a preference for shorter hair didn't help much either. I won't go into details as to what they did -- it was mostly verbal and emotional abuse, with the occasional physical fight tossed in to break up the monotony, along with one incident that bordered on indecent exposure -- but I will say that I put up with various levels of it for nearly a decade in four different school systems. Anyhow, I would go to school every day and endure whatever torture du jour my peers thought up, then go back home and hide in my room and bury myself in the same fantasies that got me ostracized in the first place (I never skipped class: despite how much my sanity was crumbling, I had no desire to be held back and make this Hell last any longer than it had to). I had two good friends in high school, both of whom were a bit odd like me, but they managed it better, and if not for them, my life would have turned out much differently. For one thing, I would have never met my husband.
It was an afternoon in early March, right after school let out for the day. My friend Jennifer had to pick up something she'd left back in the Drafting classroom, so I accompanied her. After we got there, she started talking with a guy she knew about whatever project the Drafting students were working on, and while I waited for them to wrap it up, I heard the guy's brother -- who was also playing tag-along that day -- make a Star Wars joke. Don't ask me what it was, I no longer remember, but I got the reference and I laughed. This caught his attention, we talked ever so briefly, and then Jennifer and I left. That was it. No big hullabaloo, no fireworks, no crossing a crowded room and staring soulfully into each other's eyes. But I did apparently make an impression on this guy, because he started following me around school...which made me nervous, because the only people who normally paid attention to me were the ones who seemed intent on driving me insane. He learned my class schedule and would show up outside the door seconds after the bell rang (seeing as how he was two grades behind me and we shared no classes together, this was a pretty neat trick) usually with a new joke or other obscure reference at the ready, probably as a test to see if the first time was only a fluke. It wasn't, of course, and as I slowly let my guard down, I learned that he got hassled just as much as I did. His name was Jamin -- which took me a good long while to get correct -- and within a few weeks, I had a third friend.
Then the fallout began. The kids who preyed upon me set their sights upon Jamin too -- I recall one of them calling out as we walked down the hall, "Hey, which one of you is the guy and which one's the girl?" -- and this scared me so bad that I told him at one point to stay away from me. But he wouldn't let me go. By the time Easter break came around, one girl I was on decent terms with convinced us that we should be an actual couple, and we agreed to it just to shut her up. Not much changed for us at first -- it took until May for the awkward kissing sessions to begin -- but the most important thing to come out of our meeting was that we helped each other survive. Neither of us was the lonely weirdo anymore, we each had someone to talk to and vent with. Falling in love was the bonus.
There was a brief break-up (during which time we were still great friends), but we soon realized after trying to see other people how stupid we were and got back together again, finally getting married in 1998. It's been a wonderful, worry-free marriage, full of goofy adventures and memories that "normal" people would shake their heads at in disbelief, because we haven't changed a bit. We're still dorky lil' nerdlings that can lean on each other when the real world mocks us for what we enjoy.
Oh, as for what we did on Valentine's Day? We stopped at some of our favorite collectibles stores and blew nearly 100 bucks on comics and DVDs. Yes, we got got each other the usual flowers and cards and candy, but we wanted to do something fun too!
Showing posts with label Star Wars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Star Wars. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Monday, June 20, 2011
Secret Origin Time!
Okay, not really all that secret. Lots of people know this stuff, I just needed a dang title.
When I was a wee fangirl growing up in Michigan, my dad worked for a toy company that later became part of Fundimensions, which was an umbrella name for MPC, Lionel Trains, and Craft Master in the mid-80s. So, unlike most kids whose only exposure to the toy industry was TV commercials and the aisles of Toys R Us, I got pretty familiar right off the bat with the concept of licensed products. That's not to say that I wasn't duped into liking dumb things just because a pitchman told me to, but I also knew that, when my dad went to New York not long after my birthday every year, he was going to Toy Fair to check out what was new and hot before it even hit the shelf. I recall begging him to take me a few times, but it never worked, and in my head, New York soon became this mythical land that revolved around FAO Schwartz. However, my dad would sometimes bring his work home with him: I still remember the night we played with a remote control R2-D2 that one of his buddies at Kenner loaned to him. I have an RC Dalek these days that could probably run circles around it, but when I was three, this was the end-all-be-all pinnacle of coolness. I treasured toys of all shapes and sizes, and would love to just look at the darn things in catalogs.
So that's the first link in the fangirl chain. The second goes back to that R2-D2 toy: the mass-merchandise phenomenon that is Star Wars. Again, I was three when this came out, and I shall be perfectly honest when I say that I screamed like the little girl I was when we saw it the theatre. DARTH VADER SCARED ME TO DEATH! Every time I peeked out from behind my fingers, there he was, glaring at me from the screen. I actually refused to see The Empire Strikes Back when it came out because I knew Darth freakin' Vader was waiting to get me. Mind you, this didn't stop me from playing with the action figures or reading the storybooks, but to go sit in that darkened auditorium? No way no how! Thank God I mellowed out by the time I got to elementary school, because some parent had managed to get a hold of the first reel of Star Wars, and that became a special treat over the years: going down to the lunchroom/gym, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and watching Luke and Han and Princess Leia get projected onto the cement wall (note to all you young'uns: this occurred in the days before home video, so this was the ONLY way to see the movie once it was out of the theatre!).
The third link comes from my mom, who taught me how to draw Snoopy when I was little. Like most kids, I gravitated towards cartoons (both animated and in the newspaper), and by the age of 5, I had a goal of becoming a cartoonist (I figured I'd squeeze it in when I wasn't being an astronaut). Because of this, I studied linework and tried to copy my favorites until I got a style down that fit me good (I also made a brief living one summer by selling my drawings to neighborhood kids...the venture collapsed within a week). I've become a pretty fair artist since then, and I really did consider making a career out of it when I entered college, but I couldn't stand being told what to draw day after day by my teachers. I still love looking at vintage newspaper strips and checking out what new 'toons are on TV, though the plotlines of some are just a tad too out there for my tastes.
The fourth and strongest link in my fangirliness is what sent me right over the edge. One of the licenses that my dad's company had the rights to was DC Comics: they'd make models and magic-marker posters and rubber-stamp kits of Superman and Batman and all their Spandex buddies, and due to this, DC would occasionally send the company free comics. These were totally random issues of whatever DC was printing the month they made the package, and one day in 1984, my dad decided to bring one of these comp packages home for us kids. Now, keep in mind that the only comic book I'd seen before this was an Uncle Scrooge that I swiped from a friend of mine. So here I am, a 10-year-old wannabe cartoonist with a love of overblown adventure stories, looking at this foot-high pile of reading material. I don't know how they managed to pry the things outta my hands so I could eat dinner! I READ EVERYTHING. Even the stuff I probably shouldn't have been reading at age 10 like Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run and the Mature Readers-labeled Vigilante. I didn't understand half of what was going on, but dangit, I was going to learn!
And learn I did. Any hopes my mom had of getting me to act like a normal little girl were irrevocably shattered (not that things were looking so hot before that: I supposedly announced to her around the age of 6 that I would never put on a dress again or wear my hair in pigtails). My already-healthy reading appetite kicked into high gear when we moved to a town that had both a public library and a comic book store within walking distance...and this was in 1989, the Year of the Batman, so I went absolutely bonkers and never looked back. I still own about 80% of what I've termed "the original stack", and many of my current favorite comics were introduced to me there. I'll give you a breakdown of the particulars in later posts.
So that's my secret origin. A bunch of random events that blended together to create the craziest fangirl known to the Interwebs. Maybe not the most unique origin, but it's the only one I've got.
When I was a wee fangirl growing up in Michigan, my dad worked for a toy company that later became part of Fundimensions, which was an umbrella name for MPC, Lionel Trains, and Craft Master in the mid-80s. So, unlike most kids whose only exposure to the toy industry was TV commercials and the aisles of Toys R Us, I got pretty familiar right off the bat with the concept of licensed products. That's not to say that I wasn't duped into liking dumb things just because a pitchman told me to, but I also knew that, when my dad went to New York not long after my birthday every year, he was going to Toy Fair to check out what was new and hot before it even hit the shelf. I recall begging him to take me a few times, but it never worked, and in my head, New York soon became this mythical land that revolved around FAO Schwartz. However, my dad would sometimes bring his work home with him: I still remember the night we played with a remote control R2-D2 that one of his buddies at Kenner loaned to him. I have an RC Dalek these days that could probably run circles around it, but when I was three, this was the end-all-be-all pinnacle of coolness. I treasured toys of all shapes and sizes, and would love to just look at the darn things in catalogs.
So that's the first link in the fangirl chain. The second goes back to that R2-D2 toy: the mass-merchandise phenomenon that is Star Wars. Again, I was three when this came out, and I shall be perfectly honest when I say that I screamed like the little girl I was when we saw it the theatre. DARTH VADER SCARED ME TO DEATH! Every time I peeked out from behind my fingers, there he was, glaring at me from the screen. I actually refused to see The Empire Strikes Back when it came out because I knew Darth freakin' Vader was waiting to get me. Mind you, this didn't stop me from playing with the action figures or reading the storybooks, but to go sit in that darkened auditorium? No way no how! Thank God I mellowed out by the time I got to elementary school, because some parent had managed to get a hold of the first reel of Star Wars, and that became a special treat over the years: going down to the lunchroom/gym, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and watching Luke and Han and Princess Leia get projected onto the cement wall (note to all you young'uns: this occurred in the days before home video, so this was the ONLY way to see the movie once it was out of the theatre!).
The third link comes from my mom, who taught me how to draw Snoopy when I was little. Like most kids, I gravitated towards cartoons (both animated and in the newspaper), and by the age of 5, I had a goal of becoming a cartoonist (I figured I'd squeeze it in when I wasn't being an astronaut). Because of this, I studied linework and tried to copy my favorites until I got a style down that fit me good (I also made a brief living one summer by selling my drawings to neighborhood kids...the venture collapsed within a week). I've become a pretty fair artist since then, and I really did consider making a career out of it when I entered college, but I couldn't stand being told what to draw day after day by my teachers. I still love looking at vintage newspaper strips and checking out what new 'toons are on TV, though the plotlines of some are just a tad too out there for my tastes.
The fourth and strongest link in my fangirliness is what sent me right over the edge. One of the licenses that my dad's company had the rights to was DC Comics: they'd make models and magic-marker posters and rubber-stamp kits of Superman and Batman and all their Spandex buddies, and due to this, DC would occasionally send the company free comics. These were totally random issues of whatever DC was printing the month they made the package, and one day in 1984, my dad decided to bring one of these comp packages home for us kids. Now, keep in mind that the only comic book I'd seen before this was an Uncle Scrooge that I swiped from a friend of mine. So here I am, a 10-year-old wannabe cartoonist with a love of overblown adventure stories, looking at this foot-high pile of reading material. I don't know how they managed to pry the things outta my hands so I could eat dinner! I READ EVERYTHING. Even the stuff I probably shouldn't have been reading at age 10 like Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run and the Mature Readers-labeled Vigilante. I didn't understand half of what was going on, but dangit, I was going to learn!
And learn I did. Any hopes my mom had of getting me to act like a normal little girl were irrevocably shattered (not that things were looking so hot before that: I supposedly announced to her around the age of 6 that I would never put on a dress again or wear my hair in pigtails). My already-healthy reading appetite kicked into high gear when we moved to a town that had both a public library and a comic book store within walking distance...and this was in 1989, the Year of the Batman, so I went absolutely bonkers and never looked back. I still own about 80% of what I've termed "the original stack", and many of my current favorite comics were introduced to me there. I'll give you a breakdown of the particulars in later posts.
So that's my secret origin. A bunch of random events that blended together to create the craziest fangirl known to the Interwebs. Maybe not the most unique origin, but it's the only one I've got.
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