Profile of a Geek: Jai

JAI

Giving me a grumpy face for taking too many pictures in a train ride to NYC several years ago.



My husband Jai grew up in rural Maine (think mountains, moose, and hour and a half long drives to the movie theater).  He may have been a geek from birth.  Family lore is that at the tender age of three he would watch nothing besides his Star Wars movies.  Now this may have had something to do with the fact the you could not get cable in rural Maine in 1986, and dishnetwork did not exist (to my knowledge), or it could be that he was just born to be a geek. 



If he wasn't born a Geek, by the time he left for college he was a card carrying member of geeks anonymous.  During his high school years he was the founding member of his high schools Audio-Visual Club.  Now, I thought the AV club was just something that only happened at TV, like 28 year olds in high school, but not only was my husband a member of his club, it was his idea to start it.  Like any good geek of the late 90's he played Magic, The Gathering with his friend (that's singular of course, because it was not cool to be a geek in the late 90's) and talked about whatever Anime was currently on the top of their awesome list.  Sadly, this was far before the days of digital cameras, and I don't have a scanner, so I cannot share any photos from these early years, but he did get his senior picture taken with this really big sword:

Zuul added for scale.

 and I think they says it all.





Zuul wants to be just like Daddy

In college, he met one of my very best friends Renee, and they continued their geeky journey together.  Anime started out as their vice of choice (subtitled of course) and they quickly moved on to Dungeons and Dragons, Computer based RPG's and Bad Scifi movies.  Renee then introduced him to me and 6 months later he moved to Michigan to mold me into my geeky self.  



Jai, Me, Renee and Cook at the Lafayette Cemetery.



Now of course, when we first met he was trying to impress me and I was in my Goth/Punk phase, so he pretended he was really into that too.  But deep down in his heart he was a geek and was plotting to turn me to the dark side. 

At Michigan State University, where he got a B.S in Science (Okay, Microbiology, but I like to just say he does science for a living), he met a whole new band of geeks.  He stayed up till the wee hours of the night playing Marvel, a superhero based Dungeons and Dragons for those of you not in the know, and he begged me to play with him.  I, of course, refused, for two reasons.  First, I have a feeling I would have been treated like this:

And second, I don't know if you have ever played with hard core gamers but every gaming session pretty much ends up like this:



Also, I insisted that if I was a Mutant for his super hero game my only ability would be to turn purple, because I am a firm believer that not all X-men like mutations are going to be super helpful.  He insisted I would just die all the time and finally stopped asking me to play.

After he graduated from Michigan State we moved to New Haven, CT so Jai could get his Masters Degree in Science from Yale.  He could not find a new D&D crowd there so he threw himself into video games, reading comics and sci fi TV.  He spent the next four years rewatching every episode of Battlestar Galatica, Farscape, Babylon 5, Star Trek, and Stargate, (SG1 and Atlantis),   playing endless hours of Ratchet & Clank, Elder Scrolls, Neverwinter Nights and Civ IV, and reading Sandman, The Watchman (before it was a movie), and pretty much anything super hero related he could find.  Some of these things he made me do with him, and I have to admit Farscape is a damn fine show.

Once we moved to Memphis in 2010, and finally had some extra money he begged to play World of Warcraft. He had always wanted to play it and after watching a few seasons of The Guild he really had the itch. So he spent the next two years Raiding and leveling up, which was great because it still doesn't have any D&D friends. Sadly, money got tight was we prepared to welcome Zuul into the world and Jai hasn't played WOW since she was born, but now he has a whole new little geek to play with and one day, when she's a little older he may just get that D&D buddy he's been longing for.

He's off to a good start geeking her up.  Zuul is only 4 months old, so we don't let her watch TV.  But Daddy is always quick to add "Except for Dr. Who."