Geekery

Recently we finally got a dishwasher and we naturally gave the box to Kirk to play in. It comes equipped with two doors and two windows.



Kirk has been referring to it as his spaceship. Mr. b has been calling it a TARDIS. Either way, it’s been fun to watch him play in it. Of course now it’s relegated to the basement but still. Kirk would announce, "Bye! I’m going to space. See you later!" and then disappear into the box. I love his imagination and his fascination with space.

I don’t feel like having us as his parents has in any way forced science fiction upon him. If anything, it’s simply made it more available to him but the tendency has always been there on its own. Kirk quickly focused his attention on Buzz Lightyear, rather than Woody, when first watching Toy Story. We have had nothing to do with his preference for The Incredibles over Ratatouille. Sure, when he was in his Star Wars phase last year we had a selection of lightsabers already on hand for him to play with. But even when he was a baby he was captivated by the planets and robots in the Baby Galileo video. That’s not something you can predict.

I do remember having the same natural predilection when I was little. I loved the Maurice Sendak "Little Bear" stories but my favorite one was where Little Bear went to the moon. I would tape the Wonderful World of Disney Sunday Night TV movies and only keep the ones like Earth Star Voyager. My first hazy memory is of seeing Star Wars at the drive-in with my parents. I didn’t know it was a specific genre that I was drawn to. I never even made the connection until decades later.

There’s the concept of the Stealth Geek that I enjoy. (Though lord knows in our hipster music circles everyone is pretty open about their Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica and Lord of the Rings obsessions.) I think that Kirk is already showing awareness of a receptive audience. When a friend of the family was over recently and she mentioned Star Trek he started chatting excitedly about the show. He’s got his favorite couple of episodes and showed off how he put action figures in his Little Einsteins rocket to use as the Enterprise. But when he was around his cousins over Thanksgiving he didn’t mention anything of the sort. They talked about Cars and whatever attack-Mr.-b’s-cousin game they were playing. I’m impressed that he’s already that cognizant of the cultural divide. And that he finds common ground with people to discuss something they find interesting, instead of just going off on his own topics. I’ve realized I do that, too. I unconsciously keep a mental catalogue of common interests with rarely seen friends and acquaintances so that I always have an easy conversation starter when I do see them.

It’s intriguing to hear people’s reactions to Kirk’s interests though. Some just shrug it off as inevitable. Others think it’s cool that we don’t have to put up with the usual Barney and whatever garbage. But it’s not like he doesn’t watch any of the standard PBS/Disney Channel/Nickelodeon kid’s shows. He just mixes it up with stuff that we genuinely enjoy as well. And frankly, I don’t see anything wrong with that.