Oh It's A Geek Life For Me!

I feel like I need to talk about more things in my life because I have not clearly labeled what's important in my life.

Let's start out simple.
I am a geek.
You can make fun of me no matter how much you want, it was how I was raised. It has run in my family ever since the dawn of comic books.

Back in the day, when my grandpa was just a kid, he discovered comic books. He discovered the fantastical journeys Superman would bring him, or the mysteries Batman could solve. My grandpa had discovered his calling. Comics. But, there was one thing that had been bred into my family long before geekmanship. That was labor. Martins have never had it easy; we have always had to work for a living, and my grandpa who had grown up on a farm in a military family knew that better than anyone. Soon Vietnam came calling, and my grandfather had fought in that war. He came back a more serious man, loosing his geek roots. When he had my Dad in the 60's he had first told him of comic books. It didn't take long for the geek world to come calling out to my dad when Star Trek was on the verge of creating and Empire, and Star Wars was just becoming a cultural phenomenon. The first famous game console to go to a home, the Atari 2600 was my dad's birthday present. Oh how many nights he had spent with Pitfall I shall never know. Yet, hard labor was calling and as always, work came before being a nerd. My dad had went to a really bad public high school and was picked on from what I heard. He had dropped being geeky, and buffed up to defend him self. My dad got big. He may have gotten out of shape since then, but he certainly could whoop anyone's ass if need be. Soon my Dad met my Mom and they had me. I was an early riser for being a geek because my dad had engulfed me in what he grew around. Star Wars. The first movie I had ever saw, and it was amazing. It was just then during the 90's when George Lucas had made the Expanded Universe for Star Wars happen, which means he made books about Star Wars and Comics. My dad read these and later explained them to me.

I always thought if your family was really into something before you were born, it would make you love it even more. Like, if your Dad grew up as a huge Sports fan and talked to you about it, you would be an even bigger one as you got older. The same thing was for being a geek in my family. I am the biggest geek yet. It was in the early 90's when home computers became a thing every house needed. The average computer had at least 10 GB's of storage. That's horrible when I realize my computer has 250. But, since I lived in a low income household in Arizona, we got a computer with just 2 GB's. We had that computer for ever, and I will never forget my first video game. Star Wars: Rebel Alliance 3D. It was the first 3D Star Wars game, and it was on PC. It was the end of that PC's life, and my mom bought it for my dad. Not knowing truly what video games were, I tryed it for a bit. What started out as a hobby became a full fledged addiction. I had become a gamer. Eventually it was 2000 and we had previously moved into our house in Massachusetts when I had just begun Kindergarten. For Christmas that year my mom had bought me my own PlayStation. Considering this was the end of the PS1's life span, we only had 3 games. Some snowboarding game I mastered, A Bug's Life, and The Grinch Game. Soon it became 2002 and Christmas came abound and the Nintendo Gamecube entered my life. My first games were Super Mario Sunshine and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Now, even though I loved video games, my parents knew education came first. I was always the smartest one in my class, and I had studied everyday. The Legend of Zelda games are known for being at least 30 hours long on average for a teen player, but, I was smart, and those puzzles weren't that hard for me and I got really far into the game before I lost it. Soon I had discovered Halo. Halo came out in 2001 and was the best First Person Shooter to ever be released. The Xbox station at Wal-Mart had a demo and I spent hours at that store trying to beat it until I did after 45 trips to the Wal-Mart. Soon I had entered middle school and games were wearing thin for me because I had beat all of the ones we owned. After many years of playing the same games over and over again, the Wii had come out. It was amazing. I had asked for it for months just for Christmas, and when Christmas morning came, it wasn't in any of the presents. Disappointed, I played new PC games I had until later that night, my mom brought me and my brother downstairs to open one last package. It was the Wii. I was Amazed. My mom sold technology for computers, so I always was good with electronics so I had set it up in at least 5 minutes. I remember playing Twilight Princess for hours and thinking it would never end. Until my birthday came. Yet, video games were getting expensive. Next gen games were 50-60 bucks. We only had 5 games for our Wii for nearly 6 months. This was the year my friends had been a big part of my life.

I had always had friends, just I only had 2 I would hang out with. When I moved to Massachusetts, I was a little kid with a southern accent that no one wanted to talk to. Soon I met a kid named John Edwards in Kindergarten. He became my first real best friend. He introduced me to my old best friend Connor. John moved away in 1st grade, so the only real friend I had was Connor. We became inseparable. I had spent all of my time with him, and we were basically brothers. Soon our teen years came, and out friendship started to get strained. In the long run, things didn't work out, and after nearly 10 years of being friends, I had to end it. I'd rather not get into details, but we were both wrong about the situation, and I was too much of a baby to admit I was wrong. But, in 2nd grade I met my third best friend, John P. He didn't live far from me suprisingly, just 1/5 of a mile and we saw each other a lot at school. We weren't best friends until 4th grade when he started to come over to my house. At the end of that year, we knew we were going to different schools, and vowed to stay in touch. Well, we did, and we have been best friends since. No fights at all and even though he denies it, he's a little bit of geek too. In April of 2007, we had been awaiting the release of Halo 3 so we could at one point play it some how. It was then when we were walking back to his house that we would make a plan that we could some how buy an Xbox 360 and play Halo. It took 6 months, but soon, we saved enough money, and on Sept. 30, we spent $450 dollars together and bought or Xbox 360 Elite and Halo 3. It was the best moment for gaming in my life. It was at that point when I did realize I was a gamer.

After nearly a year, with a new found purpose in life that had been staring me in the face for 10 years and a subscription to GamePro magazine, I had started to keep in contact with the gaming industry with new game releases and news, so on and so forth. My new dream is to become the host of X-Play or Attack of the Show! on G4TV. X-Play is a show for video game entirely and has received numerous awards. Attack of the Show! is a news show for the geek world for geek pop culture and geek news or products. I am going to get the inside scoop for games, and I will do it.

Ever since I was 6 years old, I have wanted to go to E3. E3 is the biggest convention for video games in the world. It is held once a year to the public, except starting last year, it is now for invites only. This means the only way I can get to E3 is by working in the gaming industry. I will achieve this by all means, and will do anything to do it.

Now as I have said, hard labor is something that runs in my family. I have a much better house since I was born, and live in a better neighborhood than my Dad, I still have to help. My Dad needed to help his Dad, so I have to help mine. It's not very bad, but still, I do more labor than any of my friends. Minus John, he does more than me, and when I ask for help with some, he does it a lot better that I would. It's not hard to work for my dad, but trying to get paid is. I will be the first to admit that my dad is a cheap bastard. I'm not offending him in any means, he just is. I grew around it, and the first time I realized he was cheap was when my grandpa called him cheap for refusing to buy us soda at the grocery store. I have to give it to my dad though, he works as a mechanic at UPS, so he knows hard work very well, and I don't need money to get by in my life. I just need Star Wars.

Now, my friends are a big part of my life, but some of them don't really understand me. I trust all of them, but some of them think I am being a self fish prick by not going to the mall with them, and to stay at home to watch Indiana Jones with my brother. Even if I could go to the mall, I would just go to GameStop and CVS for candy. I don't have any money to spend on clothes, and I would look ridiculous in nice clothes anyway. I live on Wal-Mart. I get clothes there and I always have. My family doesn't have the money so I can get clothes at Hollister or American Eagle or some stuff like that. We go shopping for clothes 2 times a year. My friends understand that though. I hang out with them when I can, and I always try to make time for them. They make fun of me for being really nice to adults, because I am really polite when around some, and really lazy when around me friends. My Dad would actually yell at me if I didn't answer in "Yes Sir" or "Yes Mam" to my parents. I lived with this, and it just grew on me.

It's gonna be weird next year because I am going to a boarding school 300 miles from my home, and chances are, when I leave, I won't see my friends nearly as much as I used to. It's cool though because I get a new slate to start on. No one will know me, so I could change my personality just for there and fit in, and go home and stay the same as I am now, and still be OK. Except, next year I have to wear nice clothes, and I hate those clothes. I'm talking about Khakis and collared shirts.

My brother is always some one who needs special attention. He doesn't have a learning disability or nothing like that. He just is over emotional and doesn't have a great attention span. He never had friends until this year, so he always relied on me to help him. I have an anger issue, so I tend to blow up at him, but he can't help it. I realize now what he has to go through, and I will help him as much as I can. This summer, I spend most of my time with him, so I watch movies or play video games with him, and he get along fine.

Camp is always the biggest excitement every year for me. I started going when I was 8 and this year will be my 7th year. I'm a camp veteran, and I am very proud of it. Soon, I will work as a counselor to get threw life there, until I get out of college and beginning my career in gaming media. I go to camp for 2 weeks each summer, and always have a blast. This year, my friend Alex is coming to camp with me, so it will be cool showing someone who I know at school what I do at camp.

My music is basically Indie Rock. It keeps me concentrated, and if you happen to want to listen to some, check my playlist at the bottom of this blog.




Alrighty, I just wanted to get some facts out there. (Like anyone is listening.)

--Neb