We’re a mixed bag of kids, living in a middle class suburb of Sacramento, the capital city of Califo

This is the opening chapter / introduction of my new book, OTAKU IN USA, to be published in Japan in October. I'm sure Tomo is going to demand mad rewrites and more blood and guts before he translates it, but here's what came out on the crapper.
Somewhere on planet Earth there is a picture of my first grade class taken in 1979. I haven't seen the photo in a few years. cruise packages I've moved around a few times since then, most recently to Tokyo, so maybe it's gone from my life forever. No problem. The memory of it is crystal clear.
We're a mixed bag of kids, living cruise packages in a middle class suburb of Sacramento, the capital city of California located on the northern end of the state. The majority of students are white, some are Asian, a few are black, and some of them are just plain hard to pin down. One or two, like me, have black hair and brown skin. We could be from anywhere…anything.
"What are you?" people tend to ask me, as if I just dropped in from outer space. If you want something specific, my relatives came to America from Mexico two generations ago. Sometimes, when filling out an official form, the US census for example, they make me fill in a little box that says "Mexican-American." But the way I see it, I'm simply American, same as the rest of my first grade classmates. I mean, there's no Mexican-American embassy to clean up the mess if I get in trouble cruise packages abroad. Maybe someday, they'll even have a few more boxes to check off to help file us all away once and for all, new categories like "Nerd," "Geek," and "Otaku."
Back in that first grade class photo, Hubert Wong wears enormous Coke bottle glasses with thick black frames that are too big for the size of his head, which is topped with an ill-kept cruise packages mop of curly hair. I guess you could say he looks like a real smart guy except for the fact that, this being picture day when you have to look your very best, his parents have dressed him up in a conservative purple sweater vest. It covers a tight white shirt that is buttoned to the top. He's the only one dressed this way.
Hubert is flashing a classic little kid grin, beaming with pride maybe because he's the smartest kid in the class. I can safely assume that all his report cards for the rest of his scholastic career will be much better than mine. But Hubert already has his share of problems. For one, he isn't very popular. No one wants to play with him during recess and he goes straight home after school solemnly where it can be safely assumed that his parents make him study until they tuck him into bed. It's not really his fault, since he's only trying to do his best, but there's already resentment building up against him from the other kids. Since this is only first grade, the rest of the kids don't yet fully understand cruise packages what Hubert's problem is. But by 6th grade, we will have the perfect word for it.
Hubert is a nerd, a big old nerd. And Hubert is an Asian nerd, which in the American pecking order is only slightly better than being a black woman. He has a double helping of minority status. The Asian kids always seem to better than the rest of us in school. They raise the bar for achievement that the rest of us struggle to get past. So a line has to be drawn somewhere. Thanks to guys like Hubert, Asians (with the exception of Bruce Lee) are just not supposed to be cool, masculine, or sexually desirable.
Of course, nerds of all races and creeds have been around before, as long as human beings first gathered to study in organized groups, I'd imagine. But they didn't have a name for the look until the mid-twentieth century. According cruise packages to the American Heritage Dictionary, the first recorded use of the word "nerd" appeared in the Dr. Seuss' cruise packages children's book "If I Ran to the Zoo," published in 1950. But in the book, a nerd is just one of many made-up creatures that Seuss came up with to populate his work with. The name is only nonsense.
In a 1957 issue of the Glasgow, Scotland, Sunday Mail newspaper, a humor column called ABC for SQUARES (a square being beatnik slang for a dull, uninteresting person) finally provided a working definition: Nerd -- a square, any explanation needed?
Then there are unsubstantiated claims that the word originated in 1947 at the Northern Electric Research and Development Laboratories in Ottawa, Canada. The guys there, with the big brains and pockets overflowing with pens and pencils wore badges that actually read N.E.R.D.
By the 1960s, the nerd had wormed his way into popular culture. Woody Allen, with his nervous tics and runty appearance, rose to fame using the image of the classic nerd. Brains from Thunderbirds was a nerd's cruise packages nerd, and the Tracey family would have died a thousand deaths without him…. but pardon the digression. I'm being a geek.
By the nineties, the title of the 1984 film Revenge of the Nerds would be eerily prophetic. One day, Bill Gates, the textbook portrait of the adult male nerd, is tinkering around in a garage with a few circuit boards and a soldering iron. A few years later, he's a billionaire cruise packages who the led the personal computer revolution, and inspired countless other nerds to become entrepreneurs.
cruise packages I don't know what became of Hubert. I'd like to think he became a doctor, or a scientist, and he's working on something useful like a cure for cancer or a zero point energy source. I wish him well. Ok, so maybe I made fun of him a few times too, but now, as I sit in this café in Nakano Broadway typing away on a laptop computer with Windows XP pre-installed, I fully acknowledge his nerdy kind make the world a better place.
Behind Hubert in the picture stands grinning square-jawed Scott Moak, wearing a blue and gold football shirt. Scott loves sports. In fact, his dad is the coach at a nearby high school. Scott is going to follow in his father's footsteps and become a jock (named after the jock strap, underwear for sports players). In first grade, Scott is cool with everyone, but in a few years he is going to turn on the nerds like Hubert, like wild animals in search of weak prey to feed on. Maybe he does it to impress Valerie Cortopassi, the prettiest girl in class. We used to be close friends until Jr. High. But just friends, mind you. She liked new wave and punk music, as I did, and we used to make mixed tapes for each other. But that all stopped when she hit high school. She became a cheerleader and began shaking her pom-poms for the home team. She stopped hanging out with me. Last I heard, she got a boob job and moved to LA to become an actress cruise packages or a model. cruise packages And in some weird way, that's normal. Hell, Scott and Valerie, the jock and the cheerleader form a central part of the American dream, cruise packages the fantasy of social success we're all supposed to be insanely jealous of. Yes, even you.
Of course, I'm there in the picture too, wearing a red polo shirt much like the ones I see for sale in vintage clothes stores in Tokyo. I guess my fashion sense hasn't changed too much since then. If there was an X-ray that could show you the inside of my first grade brain, cruise packages you'd find pretty much the same stuff that's in there now: Star Wars, comic books, kaiju monsters, and images from a million science fiction and fantasy films.
The geek is the closet thing we Americans have to Japanese Otaku. Whereas nerds are more interested in actual science, geeks instead crave science fiction and fantasy. And whereas most people sit down and watch a movie for ninety minutes and then move on with the rest of their lives, the geek becomes stuck. They want to know everything: who the director was, who the key grip was, what the differences were between the stereo and mono audio mix. The geek is a victim of the information age, a product of too much media. They cling to the good feeling, the rush of happy chemicals, a movie, cruise packages a TV show, or a manga gives them, and like a drug addict, keep trying to get the first high all over again. But before you start feeling too sorry for them, you should also be aware that the geek can also be a magician with the power to change the world…even if it's only their own.
The word "geek" seems to have its modern basis in the US military term "General Electrical Engineering Knowledge." But it goes back even farther to a well known circus sideshow act. The geek was a guy who sat in a pit and bit off the heads of chickens for the amusement of horrified patrons. No wonder it took such a long time for the geek to get some respect. But it eventually, as with the nerd, it came to pass…
The TV series Star Trek was a watershed moment for the geeks known as "Trekkies." When Star Trek was rudely yanked from the airwaves after only two seasons in 1968, the geeks began a letter campaign to resurrect their favorite show, and eventually sent one million cruise packages letters to the NBC home office who were convinced to bring Star Trek back for a third season. In 1977, Star Wars, made by a hot rod and Republic cruise packages serial geek named George Lucas, would show Hollywood that material once only seen fit for kids and a minority of SF fans could actually bring in insane amounts of money. Having shown their power to studio suits, cruise packages the geeks would finally get the upper hand in the nineties when websites like Aint It Cool News gave fans the power to mold public cruise packages awareness (i.e. buzz) about a movie before it even opened. And thanks to the gun wielding geeks, like Neo in The Matrix and the Doom-addicted Columbine shooters, geeks (especially ones in black trench coats) cruise packages could actually inspire fear among ordinary American citizens.
Fast forward to a possible future, maybe one where Arnold is the president. They hand me the new census cruise packages forms to fill out. I now have to have to choose between the boxes for nerd, geek, and yet another category...otaku. And it's a tough call on which box to check off.
I know I'm not a nerd. I'm just not smart enough, and I like playing TV games more than trying to program them. I'm certainly a geek, sitting here typing cruise packages this with a "Famous Monsters of Filmland" T-shirt on. But where I'm typing this is pretty telling…I