Wee Little Nerd
Our basement is full of them. Boxes and boxes of comics, each slender book sitting contentedly in its own little plastic baggie. Our basement flooded once, but don't fret - the comics live on their own shelving system, out of harm's way. You can imagine my joy and relief when I learned that my Christmas decorations were ruined but that the comic books were juuuuuust fine.
But wait, it gets worse. He also reads D&D books. For the uninitiated, D&D stands for Dungeons & Dragons, a game that was in vogue in the late 70s and early 80s. My husband does not play D&D, but he does read the books. He also reads Sci-Fi novels with titles like "The Crystal Shard" (I wish I were making that up, but that is an actual title.) The characters in the books always have names like Mordara and Jalara. The women, as far as I can tell, have elven ears and heaving bosoms. Planets are in peril, evil must be fought. Yada yada yada.
So anyway, that's his thing and I've no doubt that there are worse hobbies out there. I should be grateful that his hobby is not, say, crack. Periodically I do make him move some of the piles of books to the basement - mostly so that visitors cannot see them.
Despite my husband's initial reluctance over swapping our cable box for a DVR, it only took about 24 hours before he started filling it with his geek shows. My lonely episode of "House" sits among countless airings of X-Men cartoons and some sort of Star Wars: Clone Wars thing (he also listens to podcasts that dissect these shows and freely admits that the podcasts are longer than the episodes themselves.) Again, I try to look the other way, but he is now watching these cartoons WITH MY DAUGHTER. He even gave her an X-Men book, which sits in her bookcase alongside "Goodnight Moon" and "Is Your Mama a Llama?"
The other day, she was "reading" her X-Men book and I asked her about the characters on the cover. She pointed to them and named them. "That's Storm. That's Rogue." I tapped the hulking figure in the middle and asked, "Who's that?" (I wasn't just testing her - I really didn't know.)
She looked at me as if my IQ had suddenly plummeted into the single digits. "That. Is. Wolverine!" She rolled her eyes.
I am not sure how long this father-daughter activity will last, to be honest. In just a few short years, she'll be asking her dad and me to drop her off six blocks from her destination because we're such a blight on her social life. I think every kid goes through that stage where your parents embarrass you just by inhaling oxygen in your presence. But for now, they are two nerds in a pod.
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