Embrace Your Geekness Day will be on July 13th this year. Who knew there was such a holiday? Not me! It was brought to my attention by Lisa Margetis of SingleHop (a provider of private cloud services, on-demand servers, and managed hosting*), who asked me if I would write something about how I embrace my geekness. This makes some sense, since I am the TechComm GEEK Mom!
First, I have to clarify that I think there are a lot of different kinds of geeks. My interests sample several genres, but I’m only naming a few here in this post. If you are a regular reader of my blog, you see geeky stuff dropped in posts quite often. Yet, it wasn’t until I was an adult that I was able to fully embrace my labelling as a geek.
As a kid, unlike most of my female peers, I thought watching superhero shows on TV were the best entertainment. The old 1965-era Batman reruns was just awesome–I wanted to be BatGirl so much! I also loved watching “ElectraWoman and DynaGirl” and “The Secrets of Isis” on Saturday morning. But ultimately, it was Wonder Woman who I loved the most! I think I loved all these female superheroes because, well, there weren’t that many being promoted, and I felt I could be just like them!
After a while, my little bit of comic book joy was being suppressed–it was “childish” and “not cool”. But secretly, I continued to enjoy my female comic book heroines.
I suppose it was at the same age that I discovered computers, or rather I was introduced to them by my dad. He initially started with the Apple II, and we had a few others including the first IBM PCs. I remember my dad teaching me VisiCalc and teaching myself the basics of BASIC language, as well as figuring out how to do simple graphics. I was on a roll! But somewhere along the line, while I showed great early aptitude, I was discouraged being the only girl in computer club, and being told only math people (which I was not one) could be computer programmers. Well, gee, thanks for the encouragement.
Fast forward to thirty years later…my computer aptitude, despite the lack of a computer science degree, is what gets me ahead in my career. I discovered that while I missed out on getting deep into computer science, I still understood enough that I could link the creative, humanities side of me with the technical side of me through technical communications. At the same time that I discovered technical communications and was completing my Master’s degree, I reconnected with an undergraduate friend on Facebook who was a writer and editor of a website called “Geekmom.com“. A geek…mom? Being glorified? Geeks are cool…even if they are moms? It was reading this website that let me know that my quirky interests were perfectly acceptable and embraced! So with this realization, I found that I could embrace my geekness with pride. TechCommGeekMom was born, and now I express my geeky ways in my blog, and in my life.
Geeks rule!
* PS–If you want more info about SingleHop, check out their new private cloud hosting page.
TechCommGeekMom 