To be (geek) or not to be?

I made a post yesterday and deleted it in response to the household censor board. But apparently it still appeared in some readers.. so if you do see it, just ignore it will you?
Meanwhile as promised I am moving on with my life.. and starting to turn my worries in the directions of Geek-dom!
I keep claiming about what a handful I was in school and hence non-geek. That is not true.. I was a geek alright, trying very hard at being cool. I tried to be the jock and tried my hand at sports.. but this is how the story went.

I enjoyed badminton quite a bit and even toyed with volley ball for a while. However around the time when it looked like I would get chosen in the school team, my hand started swelling up every time I played. For some unknown reason my fracture in both elbows years back decided to come back to haunt me! So that was the end to my claim to fame.

But I was unfettered. Every PT (Physical Training) hour would find me trying to learn a new sport! Oh yes I was trying to find the one I had real passion for.. So I tried my hand at table tennis (ping pong), football, hockey (no not the ice one thank goodness, imagine me fumbling around on thin ice!), basket ball (I have never made the basket in life), baseball and so on. My friends used me as a distraction but I turned out to be quite the opposite... and caused them a lot of stress as my coaches!

I decided to try athletics and started running - if you picture some one bouncing and flailing hands and gasping hard while trying to move, that is what I called running. We had sports teams/ houses as they were called. My team lived to rue the day they put me on their relay running team. Despite the fact that I was always placed conveniently in the middle (2nd or 3rd position) so that the other runners could make up for my fumbles and tortoise pace! Not one to be undone, I tried javelin throw, discuss throw, shot put, high jump , long jump ... you name it!

I keep listing this off to M every once in a while much to his amusement. Like all guys he has played cricket all his life.. from gully to college team to office team to US league matches. He is a weight lifting, ab crunching jock who makes my life hell by showing off his perfect muscles! However as I keep running off the mouth with my athletic proficiency, I have figured one thing to be proud off. I never feared failure. I took the center stage regardless of how well or badly I faired and my only promise was to have fun doing it or a good laugh.. whatever! Not anymore though, I keep looking around to see reactions when I walk even.. do you think those people are laughing at the way I swing my arm?

And this was not all.. there is more to the list of my failed attempts at school. I tried joining the school band, no cymbals or trumpet for me mind you, I wanted to beat the drum much to the amusement of my band master.. Do you think you can carry this around during a march past he would ask.. and I just brushed it away as that was the easiest thing to do. So along side the big able bodied boys learning to keep beat on the huge drums, I learned too. And then I tried the guitar. I went to the first day of class and the minute I learned I had to buy one to join I chickened out. If I had gone to my parents with the demands of a guitar I would have heard an earful for sure given my history. I tried to sing, even join the choir (lets just say I was not the only reason the teacher abandoned us). I tried my hand at art - my teacher gave up on me in despair, no sense of color she said lightly, cooking - my culinary skills are tribute to those classes. I would stand with a book in a corner and wait till all the others were done then I would push to the foreground and eat all the fun stuff {wink}. I decided I would try HAM - Amateur radio. I got tired of the dot and dash pretty soon - how boring, why would someone do that rather than pick up the phone and call? I asked the school founder and a big HAM fan this and he glared at me with such intense that I made a bee line for the door. I tried Karate but my body ached so much I never made it to the 2nd session. My parents held hope for me till the end, and encouraged me as I stumbled to one class after another! Or rather they pretended to encourage me (I can imagine my dad telling my mom "As long as they keep her busy")

Then I found my true vocation, talking.. now that was something everyone knew I would excel at and I did that for a while.. traveled around the city and district in search of something to talk about. With my history, my parents refused to let me go beyond that. Spent hours looking up quotations and cutting out interesting articles on the newspaper. But sometime in college, I saw all the fun I was missing out.. when my friends sat in the audience gossiping I was up on stage talking about something inane like "What came first - the chicken or the egg" .. honestly who cares! And that was the end of that!

I studied to be a computer engineer and enjoyed my work with geek-ish satisfaction! Working late hours, bringing work home and smiling through it all! But then I tried my hand at motherhood.. stumbling through the sleepless nights when I poured the water into the formula box and just anointed my baby with water when no one was around and claim "Oh I bathed him!"! Lets just leave out the gory details of my motherhood stumbles... there are many posts in this blog which are a tribute to my fumbling through!

At the end of it all, I do not want to do what I studied for, and we have figured that I wasted all my school days trying to figure out what I was good at and ending up empty handed. The only thing I am good at is talking and I get that out of my system by my long phone calls every day and this blog where I rant on and on. Geek or not? thats for you to say!