Origins: Hannah, Part II

In the first part of this post, we covered the first half of my life as a nerd. From cats, to science, to boy wizards, to HTML and nerdy fan websites.

Part II is here now, and instead of a fancy intro, lets just start.

HERE WE GO.

PHASE 10: FANFICTION

Oh man. Guys.This is the first time in the history of this blog where I have actually had to stop myself from panicking and deleting all of this. Maybe, since this is the first one of the post, you'll somehow forget about it by the end?

This is a chapter of my life that I guess I am just now facing...and now that I think about it, I think I've maybe only told a few people about this.

So here it goes.

Hey Mom and Dad, remember when I used to write a ton in middle school? Filled like....12 notebooks?  Yeah. Yep. It was Fanfic.

I'm sorry if I've broken your hearts.

What kind of fanfic, you ask through your tears? Does it matter?

Luckily for the world and my future children, I have since disposed of said notebooks in a way that most shameful things can be destroyed: by fire.

PHASE 11: THEATRE

Because of Lord of the Rings (see part I), I decided that I would really love to be an actor, mostly in order to marry Elijah Wood someday. But after I was in my first play (Sherlock Holmes) I was addicted.

This phase lasted about 5 years, and I even applied to universities with the plan to get a degree in theater. My focus? Shakespeare. Man, I loved Shakespeare. I just got Shakespeare, you know? Until I realized that Shakespeare was really the only thing I liked about theatre.

Also...high school theater kids?

PHASE 12: BAND

Oh man. BAND. Band was great, but if you were ever in band, you know that when you are in one of the band classes, you end up doing everything else, including...

Jazz band, pep band (the only way you could get me to a sports event), I was in marching band.

I hung out in the band room at lunch.

PHASE 13: WELSH 

The Welsh language isn't nerdy, and neither are my reasons for learning it. What made it nerdy was my friends and family. I made the mistake of saying something to them that they will never, ever forget.

I have never lived it down.

(Though I would like take this opportunity to tell thousands of people that Erika up there actually owns an Elvish dictionary. WHO IS THE NERD NOW, MELLON?! Hah. Loser.)

PHASE 14: FANART

This is just becoming a secrets-about-Hannah free-for-all, isn't it. Buuuut since I'm putting it all out there, I may as well just go all the way.

I draw fanart.

I'd like to say I don't, because (most) fanart is the scariest stuff you'll ever see. (Go ahead. Stare at that. Think about it a little. Cry if you have to. I did.) The scariest fanart resides in the darkest corners of the internet, where none go besides those few who type in "The Avengers as Ponies" (Don't...google that.)

I'd like to say my "fanart" is more character study, since I'm an illustrator and it's good to practice character design...right?

But I'll let you decide for yourself. Behold, an example of my fanart.

Yeah, no. Sorry guys. If you are truly meant to see it, you will know where to look.

PHASE 14: VIDEO GAMES

I'd always liked playing video games with my family and friends, but they were usually the really simple, multiplayer games.

A little while ago, though...I truly found the joy in playing a first person game. It has only gotten worse since.

And then when I did every single (let me repeat that, every single) quest that was available in Skyrim, I thought I would be done with games forever.

But nope. I found Minecraft. I found Borderlands. I started playing the Sims again.

Someone is going to need to lock me in a room by myself without any technology whatsoever and never allow me to leave that room.

PHASE 15: CATS STILL

Yep. Cats still. I don't think I ever got over it - and the internet certainly hasn't helped at all. 

I wanna fall asleep buried in kittens every single night.

PHASE 16: Nerd Rock Bottom

It's all over, you guys. I'm on the downward spiral. My Mom, in her moments of self-validation for birthing a nerd, always said "Just don't hit Nerd Rock-Bottom..."

I think I've hit it, Mom.

I think I've hit it hard.

Origins: Hannah

ORIGINS: HANNAH

Part I

A little while ago I found myself in a game store. Not like video games...but a real one. The kind where you walk in to see board games, and eventually if you walk far enough through the thick clouds of body odor, you end up in the very back, surrounded by the unwashed social misfits you only ever saw huddled in the corners of your high school, all staring up at you as if you were some sort of strange mirage.

I don't want to delve too far into the reasons why I was in such a place. All I know is that I had a little bit of an existential crisis.

So here we go. We are going to take on the massive and probably terrifying task of tracking my nerdiness back to its origin. Wherever and whatever that may be.

Before we begin, there's something I need to explain. As I was thinking back on my life, I had a realization. That most of my "nerd" phases were more like obsessions. Obsession that I was incredibly loyal and dedicated to.

When I love something, I don't just love it. I flat out obsess over it. Even as a 25-year-old, I still find things I love and I just...hold on to them for dear life.

PHASE 1: CATS

I believe it all began with cats.

I loved cats.

I mean, you don't even know how much I loved cats.

My only goal as a child was to obtain as many cats or cat-related things I could.

PHASE 2: SCIENCE

My love for cats was only matched by my love for space. Yeah, space as in...the solar system and stuff. There was a point in my life when I knew almost all 50-or-so of Jupiter's moons and I would make sure everyone knew it.

My favorite planet was Saturn...by far.

PHASE 3: CATS AGAIN

I just want to stress how intense my love of cats was when I was a small child.

My laser eyes will obliterate anyone who keeps me from holding every cat.

PHASE 4: POKEMON

Come on. If you are currently in your twenties, then you know what it was like when Pokemon first became a thing. 

Pokemon was the best. Especially when you opened that fresh pack of cards. It was like freaking Christmas morning! You never knew what you'd get, but you knew there's at least one rare in there. Just waiting for you to see it, to cherish it, to show your friends, and maybe even trade for a Charizard or something. 

Usually you just got like 5 more Weedles or whatever.

But we all wanted that stupid Charizard! And those of you who were lucky enough to get one were the envy of all. Oh and those of you who were even luckier and got the freaking HOLOGRAPHIC CHARIZARD?

You were Gods among children.

I never got Charizard, but my brother did. And when he showed the neighbor kids, one of them bit him.

PHASE 5: SPORTS?

Not nerdy. I included this because I'm feeling vulnerable and need some sort of redemption before I delve even deeper. I used to play sports. A lot of them.

I don't know what happened.

PHASE 6: HTML

Oh that's right. This happened. The internet happened. And with the internet came my discovery of HTML code. I could make my own Internet!

It was my ticket to a lifetime of pasty skin and strained eyes.

PHASE 7: HARRY POTTER

If you're new, then let me tell you now. There have been few things that have rivaled my dedication to the Harry Potter fandom. I read the books when I was 11, and subsequently cried myself to sleep that summer when I didn't get a letter. From the 4th book on, I was at every single midnight release - dressed up. 

My sister, Annie, finally gave into my pestering and started the books last year.

I could go on and on about sentimental stuff like how Harry Potter made me feel less lonely when I moved and had no friends, or that Harry Potter made me love reading again, etc, etc...but I'll leave it at this.

PHASE 8: LORD OF THE RINGS 

Oh man. I did love LOTR. The fact that I usually still call it "LOTR" should tell you that. I wish I could say I'd read the books first, but that wasn't the case. Although... I began reading them almost immediately after seeing the first movie, and I was truly dedicated. The final one was the first time I'd really cried during a movie.

Unable to deal with these new emotions, I hid inside of my sweatshirt so nobody would see my Lord of the Rings-induced tears.

PHASE 9: A COMBINATION OF PHASES 6 and 8

This is an example of one of those times where two nerd forces combine to make something nerdier.

When I was 14, I was the creator and webmaster of an LOTR fansite.

I gathered news, interviews, statistics, and photos and compiled them all on a crappy little website made completely of tables and hosted on Angelfire.

If I still had any of the original graphics or anything, trust me...I'd post it. But maybe it's a good thing that it seems to have disappeared forever. Just know that the font Papyrus was used in excess and that most of the website revolved around Elijah Wood.

We've made it halfway through. There's quite a bit more. The rest covers the second half of my life so far, and we get into some pretty dark nerd stuff.

The second post is almost done, so it won't be too long to wait.

Three Legs Are Better Than None

By now you are probably pretty familiar with some of my (mis)adventures with pets.

But what you probably didn't know, is that my pet history is a long one. That is, if we define "pet" as "a creature that has been kept in confinement and given a name."

Under that qualifier, I have had frogs, a spider (it lived on our deck and I fed ants to it every day, idk), silkworms, like a hundred ladybugs (I named all of them), snails, a couple dogs, a psychotic cat, rats, and fish. A lot of fish. Too many fish. By the time I was eleven I had quite an impressive fish cemetery in the backyard.

But besides all of those pets, my family also has had their fair share of rodents.

After my sister’s first set of hamsters devoured their own babies and left their remains for her to discover, I thought perhaps we were done with rodents forever. 


But then somehow we ended up with four little mice.

We named them Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin - because when I was 15 I was at the peak of my nerdiness.

It wasn’t long before we discovered (through observation) that Sam and Merry were, in fact, female.

So their names became Rosie and Arwen, naturally.

As you can imagine, these mice didn’t last long since they were only bred to live long enough to get from the pet store to your lizard.

Frodo was the first to go, as I found out when I awoke to his little corpse in my face.

The next to go was Sam/Rosie. We buried them in the backyard, releasing their little mouse spirits to depart on the long journey to that Mordor in the sky. (That’s what mouse heaven is called. I bet you didn't know that.)

So my sister Annie, who was like four at the time, decided to give the remaining two mice a cute little mouse bath using a little plastic Barbie hot tub. During this mouse bath, Arwen’s back leg was somehow injured/broken, mostly likely because mice shouldn’t be bathed as if they were human. (It was really cute, though).

For a few days, Arwen went about her normal mouse business dragging her broken leg behind her like some weird second tail. This included running on her little wheel, leg thumping along behind her.

But the first real indication we had of Arwen's complete insanity was when we noticed that half of her injured leg was...missing. Not being unfamiliar to the world of rodent cannibalism, we decided to separate the two mice, assuming it was Pippin who was chewing on her leg.

But when we awoke the next morning, the rest of her leg was gone, a bloody stump in its place. 

She had eaten her own leg. The entire thing. Just gnawed right through the bone.

I mean, THAT MAKES SENSE. WHENEVER I GET A PAPER CUT I JUST CHEW MY FINGER OFF.

Shortly after this, Pippin also kicked the bucket, probably from the shock of watching his friend eat herself.

We thought for sure that three-legged Arwen would follow, but no....you guys, true to her namesake, she would not die. She lived through hell. And by hell, I mean that she lived through her own self-induced hell. 

Because one day, we found that Arwen had a small little cut on her tail. And, following the same mouse logic as before, Arwen nibbled her tail off completely.

As if EATING HER OWN LEG wasn't enough!

At this point we all sort of wanted her to freaking die, because were just so tired of hearing the dull whacking sound her bony little leg nubbin would make on the metal bars of her wheel.

That Time I Made My Own Wand

As you've probably gathered from past posts, there have been few things that have rivaled my dedication to the Harry Potter fandom.

Out of all of the things I've done for/in behalf of the fandom, the most memorable and shameful had to be the events that transpired the Summer of 2003.

That summer the fifth book in the series was coming out, and I had spent one Sunday a few weeks before the release alone in my garage with my Dad's tools and a stick I had found in my back yard.

Making a wand.

Yep.

It took hours of intense whittling and sanding to finally get the perfect wand. The finishing touches? Burning the end of it to make it look "used."

I was so proud of it, and when I finally emerged from the dark garage into the garish summer sun, I ran straight inside to show my Mom.

(Did I mention I was 15?)

The day before the book was released, a few of my friends got together to prepare to wait, despite my mother's warnings.

"Hannah...you will be marching in a parade tomorrow morning at 8am. You will die."

We showed up at the bookstore around 6pm and sat on the pavement next to someone dressed as Professor Trelawney and another dressed as Dobby (it was actually a disturbing combination)...

When I was finally handed my copy of the book, I could barely contain my excitement.

I ran out of the store, wand in one hand, book in the other. Across the parking lot I could see my friend's car. I made a run for it, determined to do everything in my power to get home quicker. But since I was running like a maniac and not looking where I was going...

(Here comes the darkest moment of my life you guys....are you ready?)

I tripped as I leapt off the curb into the parking lot...

and flew forward...

luckily I stepped forward and caught myself before I biffed it completely...

...but not before my homemade wand went straight into my right nostril.

I cried out in pain and looked down to see my face-blood dripping onto the book cover.

My friends led me to the car and sat me in the back, where I proceeded to bleed all over the seat.

Despite being dizzy and exhausted, nothing could stop be from laying on my couch and reading the book all night.

After reading until about 6am, I realized that I had a parade to be to at 8. Not wanting to sleep through it somehow, I decided to get into my marching band uniform and go back to reading.

Around 7, I heard my Mom get up. She then found me, fully decked in Marching band regalia, on our couch with a dried and bloody tissue coming out of my nose, and tears in my eyes.

So, a wand was shoved up my nose.

JUST LIKE THE TROLL IN THE FIRST BOOK.

Like I said. Darkest moment of my life.