I never quite grew up…

Me, age 5.

That’s me at age 5, circa 1986.

When I was a lit­tle girl, if you had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have prob­a­bly said Jedi. If you had asked me to name my most prized pos­ses­sion, it would have been a tossup between my over­flow­ing box of X-Men comics or the well-worn Ninja Tur­tle plushies I slept with every night. And if you had asked me who I was going to marry, I would have said, with­out hes­i­ta­tion, Daniel Larusso from Karate Kid, or per­haps Atreyu from the Nev­erend­ing Story. (Or best case sce­nario, they could fight over me.)

But my first true love was the Nin­tendo Enter­tain­ment Sys­tem. Had I known that innocent-looking gray box would ignite a life­long pas­sion for video games, I might have tread more care­fully before plung­ing into the dark­est dun­geons of Hyrule or the secret warp zones of Mush­room King­dom. Over the years new loves have drifted in and out of my life, like the Sega Gen­e­sis, the Sony Playsta­tion, at least a dozen other con­soles, and hun­dreds of indi­vid­ual games all com­pet­ing for my affection.

Twenty-something years later, not much has changed.

Regret­tably I never did become a Jedi, and both Daniel and Atreyu had the audac­ity to grow old and not wait for me. But I am still very much the same geeky girl I’ve always been; the one that would rather stay home on a Fri­day night re-reading Lord of the Rings for the sev­enth time, the one that knows every line to The Princess Bride by heart. I still read comic books, only now I might call them graphic nov­els, and I shell out $12 at the box office every time one of them is made into a movie. I also still suf­fer from an incred­i­bly over­ac­tive imag­i­na­tion, which I try to chan­nel into being a sometimes-writer of young adult fan­tasy. And of course, I’m still play­ing those damn video games.

In short, I never quite grew up. These are the kinds of geeky things I will be blog­ging about.