I wrote this post for Wedding Bee, where they are doing a “Secret Life of Bees” in honor of the movie and to reveal the secrets of their “bee” bloggers. My pen name over there is “Mrs. Cherry Pie.”

I even made a PIE CHART to illustrate the four very random “secrets” I’m going to share!

Har har har, I slay me.

Let’s start at the top, shall we?

Girl Geek: I am a huge, hopeless nerd…
Happily, is not terribly uncommon to find girls among geeks these days. I suppose we’re still a rare breed, but not nearly as endangered as we once were.

• My geekdom got an early start in middle-school, when I dedicated myself to transcribing 200 pages of hand-written Sailor Moon fanfiction to the Geocities site I coded in raw HTML. Do you like streaming MIDIs and scrolling text? I sure did!
• When I signed on to Wedding Bee, I told everyone that I met Justin through my ex and dear friend, dubbed therein as “Mr. Fox.” Did you know Mr. Fox and I were Internet sweethearts for 14 months before we met in person?
• I built my first computer from parts when I was 16. Not terribly uncommon these days, but much stranger in 1999.
• In my senior year of high school, I became a Cisco Certified Networking Associate (or CCNA certified). My high school was one of the first nationwide to certify students.
• I thought about skipping college and working in tech during the dot-com boom. Glad I didn’t.
• I worked as network support, then tech support, then research (beta-testing IP Multicast software!) for the university computing center in my first year of college.
• I spent one summer building computer systems for a local retail outlet before finally moving to departmental desktop & network support for the University of Oregon, where I worked my entire college career.
• My first job out of college was at a prominent Seattle Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firm.

And yet… some days I can’t stand computers.I’m not nearly as much of an uber-nerd as I once was, but I still take a shining to anything hardware, software, or Internet related.

Oh, and let’s not forget Sci-fi. Here’s Justin and me as Kara Thrace (Starbuck) and Lee Adama (Apollo) from the “new” Battlestar Galactica this Halloween:

Turning Japanese: I lived in Tokyo & speak Japanese!
In my original geekdom, I had a huge obsession with anime (Japanese animation).I pretty much ate, slept, and breathed anime between the time I was eleven and the time I was sixteen… Strangely, this is VERY common with “kids today” but “in my day,” especially in the midwest, there was NOTHING on the air and very little at the video store. My bff and I used to go to film festivals 3 weekends of every month at different branches of the University of Michigan and watch terrible fan-subtitled and fan-dubbed bootleg imports of shows that hadn’t yet been released to the US.

I even took a community college course in Japanese language one summer, but since my high school didn’t offer it, I couldn’t really follow through. When I moved to Washington state midway through high school, I had the same problem and was instead stuck finishing three years of French. Merdre!

After moving to Washington, I started being less interested in the cartoon aspects of Japanese culture and more interested in the rounded whole. Justin introduced me to sushi on our first date, and we became regulars at Toyoda sushi in Seattle.

When I started at the University of Oregon, I declared a major in Magazine Journalism and later picked up a minor in Japanese to tack an extra year onto the language requirement. This “minor” got a little more “major” when I decided to pack up and move to Japan for a year on exchange. (Leaving Justin to twiddle his thumbs.)

I spent the ten months between September 2003 to July 2004 living with a host family in the very metropolitan Shinjuku district of Tokyo.

It was a profoundly life-changing experience and to date, probably the most incredible, frightening, perspective-building, challenging, and satisfying thing I have ever done and will ever do. I HATED it and I LOVED it and to this day I would not change a thing. I kept a blog the entire time and ,if you are interested, you can read about my experiences in Japan in the archive. Or visit my photo galleries from 2003-2004 and 2007.

Justin came to visit me for a month and together we traveled to Hokkaido and Okinawa. I spent some time traveling the Kansai region (Kyoto/Nara/Osaka) with Mr. Fox, saw Nagano and the countryside with my classmates, and visited the Japan Alps (Kanazawa, Takayama, Shirakawa-go, Matsumoto) last year with my family.

I still maintain contact with my host family, and though my spoken Japanese is suitable (and listening skills intact), I’ve lost most of my literacy for kanji.

I would like nothing more than to spend another year or two living in Japan with Justin, and possibly to bring up young children there before moving back “home.”

Love Life: He’s my first and only!
This MAY fall into the category of TMI, but because virginity seems to be a hot topic on Weddingbee these days, I thought I would share anyway.

I never planned on saving myself for marriage… so I didn’t. But ironically, it didn’t end up making a bit of difference in the long run!

You know Justin and I are technically “high school sweethearts.” You also know that we were together for almost eight-and-a-half years when we were married and that we spent a good deal of that time dating long distance – even overseas.

BUT… I never mentioned that he was also my first time. (D’aww.) And gosh, since that first time, we’ve just stayed together through thick and thin!

I don’t think either of us intentionally planned or even expected what became of our relationship, but we are both very glad things went the way they did. Sometimes I do get a laugh out of our history… it’s so sweet in an “almost” traditional way, which is ironic because in many ways (including sexual politics and orientations) we’re some of the least traditional people I know.

And no, I don’t have any photos to illustrate this “secret.”

Lama glama: I got a tattoo at a bachelorette party!
Even thought it sounds like some kind of fancy sherpa, “Lama Glama” is actually the scientific name for “llama,” one of which I have tattooed to my left arse cheek.

It looks like this:

I got this tattoo in 2007 at the bachelorette party of one of my good friends. And no, I was not drunk at the time. Let’s get to the back story…

Among my gamer-geek friends, “llama,” meaning “lamer” or “loser” became a term of endearment. They started using “hey llamas” as a greeting, which quickly stuck to a whole group of people who became known as “The Llamas.” When I came back from Japan, most of The Llamas lived in one part of Eugene, Oregon, that was subsequently titled “The Llama District” or “Llama D” for short.

The Llamas were born in 2002 and survive, many members stronger, to this day. One of the female Llamas was planning in September 2007 and wanted to get a new tattoo at her bachelorette party. As a measure of support, and because I’ve always wanted a tattoo, I had a llama penciled onto my bum while she got the symbol of the Unitarian Universalist church.

Many Llamas at that same Llama’s wedding:

Random? Yes. But that about sums me up.

Filed under: Uncategorized on November 10th, 2008