Hit or Miss

Social ineptness is not, contrary to popular opinion, a requirement of the Card Carrying Geek's Club. Me, I'm just lucky, I guess. I grew up a geek and a social moron. The point of that unhappy state of affairs is that I have no stories to tell regarding how I was hit on. I was an ugly kid. No. Really. Vastly underweight. Dreadful bucked teeth - which naturally meant that braces followed. In fact, until I hit eighteen or so, I looked far more like a boy than a girl. Yeah, yeah. Grew out of it, caught up, marginally, on the social IQ thing - though I do still reequest reality checks from trusted friends from time to time. But really. It's the long way around for me to tell you that I was so clueless, I never knew if someone hit on me. Until. Oh yes, until I turned nineteen and went to college. I finally looked like a female - the underweight condition was treated and I had shape. I bought clothes that let me show off the hard won curves. Then I went to comic book conventions. I was hanging out with a pair of friends who collected the same books I did - one of them Kirk Van Wormer - now a comic book artist. Kirk would get a table, draw for commission, and send me out to buy books. It was a time when girl geeks who knew their comics and who bathed regularly were few and far between. The prices I managed to buy books for were probably illegal...and, in hindsight, qualified as being hit on...I was just too entrenched in my social awkwardness to know it. Much less did I know what to *do* with someone hitting on me.

Then, in my late twenties, a guy I worked with stopped by my cubical between phone calls, pointed at my Star Wars photos and said, "You like Star Wars, huh?" Geek pick up line, to be sure, but it must have worked out, though. I married that one.