Recently I heard from a former classmate from elementary school on Facebook, which got me thinking about that period of my life. I've tried not to remember that time in general because it was fraught with unhappy memories like my parents' separation and general dissatisfaction with my environment. It's almost like I didn't exist prior to a defining moment, which occurred in high school, or that the person I was was in fact someone completely different. Still, once I went off on that tangent I started pulling all sorts of bits and pieces out of archived storage, even with my horrid powers of recall. Of course, being the token non-white kid, the other kids tended to be not friendly to me. That may be a chicken-and-egg question of sorts: perhaps I acted withdrawn (an unhappy home life will do that to a kid), which led to further ostracization—or perhaps I clammed up because there weren't too many friendly faces around. Looking different does imply a lack of commonality. I remember being harassed quite a bit, for example, by this one older kid who, as I was leaving school, would ask me if I knew what a dick was. And there was always the infantile rhyme, "Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these", complete with angling the sides of one's eyes up and down and pulling one's shirt out for 'these', as in mammaries. The ones who did talk to me were pretty much future geeks who didn't mind so much that I looked different from them. Not surprisingly then, I tended toward the academic rather than the social.

There was one geek, call him T.W., who was smarter than me but shorter, so he had to take more crap sometimes. He was cool to me because we were kindred geeks. Later on, perhaps it was junior high, he tried to fit in more, eschewing the geeky sort and pandering to the cooler folk. I hated him for that, seeing it as a betrayal of sorts. Not that I couldn't see why, but of course it hurt my feelings. The supreme irony is that years later I also tried to be closer to the mainstream, deluding myself to think that I'd changed, when I really was the same geek I always was. Once a geek, always a geek; tigers don't change their stripes. Even now being a "productive member of society" and having a kid of my own, I'm that same person who looks at the world from a different angle than the masses. I changed school districts in 8th grade, and didn't keep in touch with T.W. I hope he succeeded in his metamorphosis.

The real driver to all this self-analysis is that lately I've taken renewed notice at my stumbling in social situations and realizing that I was just like T.W., trying to be someone who I'm not. Ultimately, I have to quit berating myself for not being more "normal" and embrace my geek roots. Normalcy is for the mundane! Case in point, I effortlessly grok xkcd humor, which means I'm irrecoverable. (And I use the word 'grok', which means doubly so.) In a way, I'd hoped that I'd be able to raise kids who would grow up to be less socially inept. They'll still be "weird", being bilingual and having a dad who instills an affection for technology and the offbeat in them. Yet if I can give them a stable environment at home, I think they'll turn out ok. Sachie's a geek of sorts, but having an intact nuclear family, she's definitely much more sociable. If she's any indication, there's hope. That doesn't mean relationships will be easier for me, but that's how it goes.

It's all good. Along the way I learned how to have fun, and although I have my down moments, I always bounce back. I don't even hate the people who messed with me all those years ago—even though I can't shake the ingrained conviction that I'm better than they are for having run the gauntlet that they subjected me to. Hopefully I can live my life to a higher standard.