Oh, Peter Sagal. Has thou forsaken us?

I am thirty-five. And married with a daughter. I’m a grownup who thinks about car payments and deadlines and vacuuming and the horrible state of the economy. And I am also a card-carrying, proud, never-deny-it, geek.

Of course, as I have been writing this column for close to a year, this should not surprise you, dear reader. I just felt the need to say it.

I’ve been a geek for many, many years. I have always loved sci-fi and fantasy, but squashed it a bit in high school to fit in and be cool. (I failed.) I never became comfortable with myself till I accepted that yeah, I like robots and RPGs and Star Wars and Star Trek and zombies and Cthulhu and superheroes.

Notice. I say I “like.” Not I “liked.” Tense is important.

I grew up in the mountains of North Carolina. I read L’Engle, Hickman and Saberhagen (and even wrote some Lost Swords fanfic before I knew what fanfic was). I had an Atari and a Commodore 64, and access to a Ms Pac-Man machine at the local gas station where my dad would take me as a reward for good grades. Being geeky kept me sane and kept my imagination strong. Reading and experiencing these magical worlds encouraged me to steal my mom’s word processor and start banging out my first novels and short stories at age twelve.

I’m not alone. My social circle consists mostly of geeks, people who understand me and are passionate about the same things. I married a geek. We are all adults, taxpayers, parents. People who can debate politics with one breath and when exactly Heroes jumped the shark with the next.

We are not losers. We shower regularly. We are aware of current events. We are productive members of society. And, Peter Sagal, one of us is even the president.

I truly love finding out that famous people, the pop culture icons that we look up to, are geeks too. Vin Diesel role plays. Stephen Colbert can recite Tom Bombadil lyrics on the spot from memory. And, Peter, you yourself had a bona-fide geekgasm when Leonard Nimoy appeared on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!.

I love Wait, Wait for its snarky tone and Sagal’s charisma. Only in recent years did I discover he was a geek, which made me like it more. Although I admit it does make me raise my eyebrows when he mocks geeks, apparently going for the “smelly guy in his mom’s basement” cliche for a cheap laugh, which has happened on WWDTM more than once. If you’re going to mock us, mock us for the real stuff: obsessive comic book bagging, boarding and boxing instead of reading, or the incessant “let me tell you about my character” virus that spreads throughout RPG circles.

The blog post in question was in response to an essay about how he spent his geeky childhood reading Lord of the Rings and letting his Hobbit-inspired imagination run wild, and worries about how his daughters are spending their childhoods, looking at various flickering screens. It sounded like he is grumbling, “Kids these days… when I was a boy, we didn’t HAVE video games or the Internet, we read the books and we LIKED IT.”

Are you trying to be what you think an adult is supposed to be; are you squashing what you are in order to fit a mold? You claim to have "geek cred" but then you put down all you've learned. So what if Elvish or Klingon aren't "useful"? Did you learn about the dangers of over-surveilance in 1984? Did you learn about appreciating the simple things from life in the Shire in LoTR? And hell, what were Spider-Man and Buffy the Vampire Slayer but metaphors for how high school can really suck and be overwhelming -- and how the gift of magic bullet-like superpowers wouldn't just fix everything? Read sci-fi short stories from the 1940's and see if you can determine what the people in the real world were thinking about nuclear radiation. A lot of speculative fiction is just a slightly tilted mirror of our own world, commenting on it.

And by the way, I look at what our heroes faced in The Two Towers and think, gee, maybe my bad afternoon with a burned dinner and cranky kiddo isn't so hard to deal with. So yeah, Tolkien did teach me a thing about parenting.

Upon hearing Zach Ricks' latest Geek Survival Guide podcast (fabulously funny advice that you’ll probably never need -- although this episode was dealing with how non-geeks treat geeks, so it had some more solid advice alongside the usual topics such as army ants, vampires, and gremlins), my six-year-old daughter piped up that she was definitely a Pokemon geek, also a Star Wars geek. Yeah, she plays the games on her DS, but only for a limited time every day. When her time is up, she leaves the little flickering screen, runs upstairs, puts on a costume, and plays Darth Vader. Or another costume lets her be a karate master. Or she goes to the kitchen table to draw up her own Pokemon, complete with name and special powers and evolutions. She has an unwavering ambition to be an inventor and has promised me a set of Boba Fett armor, complete with jetpack. We are raising a little geek, and I am absolutely thrilled.

And you know, since my husband and I are geeks too, we can understand her Pokemon comments, and play Lego Star Wars with her, and discuss how Darth Vader eats if he has his helmet on all the time. Another way being geeky has helped our parenting.

By all the gods of mythology, Peter, why do they "have to"? Where is that rule? Why say farewell? So they can make room for baseball and soap operas and needlepoint, obsessions and interests that are oh so much more relevant to adults than our brand of geek? You can still understand the real world and enjoy speculative fiction.

And what if one of your daughters grows up to create the next D&D? Or to write the next Sandman? Or to direct the next Dark Knight? Will you then wish she had left the “childish things” behind?

It was your geekiness that made your Leonard Nimoy interview so damn good, and I’m willing to bet it’s the geek in your personality that’s made me such a fan for ten years. But I have to admit, your talk of wishing you had been less geeky in the past breaks my heart just a little bit, Peter. Geeks have enough trouble defending ourselves, it actively hurts us to have someone act like their once geeky life was a waste of time.

Really, all I can say to you is, "SoH DIchDaq jatlh SoH 'oH QoS!" (Or, if you prefer, in Elvish, "O shor mae O eisi mysia.")


Mur Lafferty is an author and podcaster who recently released her first novel, Playing For Keeps. She Speaks Geek every month on SuicideGirls.com. Click HERE for more of Mur's musings.