Geek and Proud of It

I've come to accept and love all my personality quarks, the biggest of which, I think, is my basic status as a Geek. I was a smart kid. My parents have a photo of me trying to read when I was two. Never mind that the book was upside down, I wanted to read. I went to school a year early, I was only 4 when I started Kindergarten, and drove the teacher nuts because she would hand out an activity and I would read the directions and start. She would say, "Heather, don't start yet, you don't know what to do." and I would reply, "It says right here, 'Color #1 blue and #2 red."
I was a smart kid with a nice personality but I never quite fit in at school. My style never quite matched, I was never the cool one, never with the "in" crowd. Don't get me wrong, I had friends, but I was never in that really popular click. Come to think of it, that popular click really irritated me in high school.
I read and still read voraciously, finishing the Chronicles of Narnia very young and Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time series right after. Reading was a great escape where I could be anyone and go anywhere.
In middle school I cemented the Geek status by joining the band and playing a decent flute, even making it to honors band 2 years in a row for the Catholic Diocese (did I mention 5 years of Catholic school?).
High school brought an academic track of study, volleyball, newspaper, yearbook, health careers club, VIP peer group, oh and a little dabble in chorus and a musical.
It wasn't until college that I truly fit in or rather became comfortable with who I was and found others of a similar mind set. I was still a geek there getting a BS in Science while running the college newspaper, joining the AIDS action team as a certified HIV/AIDS educator and being a very happy member of Alpha Phi Omega coed international service fraternity where I learned to play pinochle and learned the call backs to Rocky Horror Picture show and all the lines to Monty Python's Holy Grail.
Now I revel in my geekdom. I love computers, writing, bad scifi movies, good scifi books and I'm even an admitted Trekker.
I'm the person full of useless bits of knowledge who likes to consume books and play on the Internet. I love to tell a good story and make people laugh. I've learned that I am way too geeky to ever properly speak some of the slang I hear in my training classes and unless I've got a significant amount of alcohol in me, dancing is not an option.
I am who I am and happy about it. I mentioned in the last post that I'm a proud Pittsburgh native. Believe me I am (Go Steelers!) but I'm also just a proud to be a geek.