Ideal Geek Day

Summer break during late high school and early college was consistently the best time for me to be a geek. I was at a point in my dork development where I had been exposed to a good many fandoms, and I was eager to absorb as many more as possible during the time available. I had a few obligations such as getting out of bed before 2 PM, but nothing that would keep me from devoting a massive chunk of time to absolutely anything.

Summers were when my creative side let loose. I would routinely write Dungeons & Dragons quests up until lunchtime, or I'd disappear into the Jedi Knight II level editor for hours and not surface until 3 or 4 in the afternoon, at which point I'd realize my stomach was eating itself because I'd forgotten to have lunch.

Lunch was truly the focal point of my vacation, as everything led up to lunch, happened during lunch, or faded away with increased proximity from lunch. Any time between waking up and eating lunch was reserved for writing or possibly Animal Crossing.

Truly "free" time began to diminish the closer I got to dinner, where I'd routinely spend most or all of the rest of the day with friends or family--not a bad thing by any means, but not the "world is your oyster" feeling at 2:00 in the afternoon. Lunch was reserved almost exclusively for Star Trek or the movie du jour ("du jour" being the French expression for "soup").

I started a project one summer in which I went through the local library's movie catalogue, starting at "A" and working my way through the alphabet. I went down the line, picking out any movie I'd never seen all the way through that was (a) culturally significant, such as The Godfather; (b) something my friends kept talking about, such as Fight Club; or (c) something I just felt like watching, such as *batteries not included.

The result was the emergence of a budding film buff, well-versed in silent film and modern cinema alike, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to whatever movie came just before Hotel Rwanda on the shelf. A typical week had me watching Blade Runner, Borat, Bonnie & Clyde, and Battleship Potemkin, followed by that episode of Star Trek where Kirk loses his shirt in a fistfight.

After gaining an appreciation for Japanese anime at college, I expanded my self-education to include some foreign films as well. Not too long after, my neatly organized routine of picking up 4-5 movies per week and watching them all began to fall apart as more obligations arose. It's not that I didn't have the time for movies; rather, it was that the conditions were seldom right.

I get antsy if I try to watch a movie on my own, and it usually wasn't until the weekend that I'd have at least one cohort to join me. I also get antsy if I'm not simultaneously doing something productive with my hands such as eating or folding clothes, so having something to do other than watching movies over lunch or dinner destabilized my zest for cinema.

I bring this all up because, effective at the end of work today, I'm on vacation until the New Year(TM). There will be time spent with friends and family, but if I have any say in the matter, there will be several days where I sleep in a little and still have enough time to put up a blog post, write a GameCola article, watch a movie over lunch, record another YouTube video, make more progress in one of my GameFAQs walkthroughs, put in a little time on my years-overdue Super Mario World ROM hack, watch a few YouTube videos over dinner, play video games until my eyes go googly on me, then squeeze in some comics and round things off with a beefy journal entry before hitting the hay and doing it all over again the next day.

Some people celebrate Christmas in July. I'm celebrating July at Christmas.