BREAKING NEWS! I’m a nerd.  

Just kidding. You know this, I know this, my mom knows this, the stranger across the street knows this. We all know this. To say otherwise or to reject the notion that I am one is nothing short of a bald-faced lie. I used to try to hide my nerdiness, at least just a little. Tried to conceal it to some extent, but I was just lying to everyone around me. I used to be ashamed cause I cared too much about my image. But that was just a façade, that wasn’t me. That was just a sliver of my personality, and my mind. Just the ice on the surface. There was more to me that needed uncovering. Shrek once told us that “ogres are like onions,” but he wasn’t just talking about ogres. Humans are onions too. We have layers. We’re deeply complex individuals with differing interests, passions, and pursuits. So be free to like what you like. Time spent trying to cover up is wasted effort. Stop being sheep: liking what your friends like, doing what your friends do. Stop being parrots: saying what your friends say, posting what your friends post. You are you. Embrace it. 

That being said, we all know that any nerd worth their salt likes sci-fi and fantasy. It’s a given. Speculative fiction in general, and nerd-dom go hand in hand. Sci-fi and fantasy permeate all facets of my life. It makes up the majority of what I read, what I watch, what I play. Fiction is just much more interesting than real life sometimes. For introverts like me, we don’t meet people of different sorts. The people we talk to and associate with are mostly like us. Homogeneity at its finest. But with stories, you come in contact with so many different people and character archetypes. In this modern age, we don’t have daily adventures, go on quests, or journey to the ends of the earth. There’s little peril in our lives. When we travel, we go for leisure, for rest & relaxation. An adventure for us is going on a day-long hike for the ordinary, or hiking the entire Appalachian Trail for the thrill-seeker. We don’t go swashbuckling, or monster hunting, or drop rings into volcanoes. Instead, we are blessed with the doldrums of work, eat, sleep, rinse, repeat. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Stability is conducive to staying alive. But we like to daydream, we like to break away from the monotony, we like to find an escape. That’s why we binge watch Netflix, that’s why we play videogames, that’s why we read. 

My mom once told me that she feels like people don’t really read anymore. I’ll never forget that, and I’ll never stop repudiating that statement. In my opinion, this is one of the falsest statements I’ve ever heard. Just because reading for pleasure isn’t a priority in her life does not make her statement true. Plenty of people read for fun. Why else are millions of books sold each year? Why else are some books translated into 25+ languages? Cause people read! Even if we just take her words literally without reading between the lines, we can see that objectively what she said is incorrect. Most office jobs require you to read, surfing the Internet requires reading, most news outlets require reading. Reading at its most basic, is an essential life skill. And as long as life is comparatively easy for us, privileged westerners will always seek escape. We’ll always get caught up and emotionally invested in stories. Some people choose not to read books. They find their escape through movies, TV shows, and videogames. That’s all fine and good. People don’t all like the same things. But it’s hard for some people (like my mom), to see that life has more paths than just A, B, C, and D. Not everything has to be compartmentalized into different boxes. In fact, not everything is going to fit perfectly. And not everything is going to go according to plan. Life is full of unknowns. Made up of coincidences, unexpected twists & turns, and a considerable amount of luck. 

A healthy outlook on life includes expecting the unexpected. You can only prepare so much. A lot of things are out of your control. There’s no possible way to ever be in complete control. That’s something that sucks to hear for the control freak, but sometimes shit happens. There’s nothing you could’ve done differently. You need to accept it, and move on. Reality is constantly changing. The best-laid plans can be undone by the smallest things. That’s why it’s important to be adaptable. In an ever-changing world the best you can do is to roll with the punches. It only helps so much to plan ahead, to save for emergency, to give yourself options. But know that things will not always work out, and that’s okay.  

That’s why we have fiction to escape into. Not all stories are predictable, but all stories are fixed, scripted. They do not change over time. There may be options in place for you to experience the media differently, but they are written a certain way and they are unchanging. The twists and turns are limited to what the creator has written, scripted, or programmed in. You may be surprised a time or two, but unlike reality, the story is complete. If we’ve read the text, or watched the movie, or played the videogame, we know how it will end. Fiction is based on real life, but it is not real life. And it is not our life. In modern society, we have constraints, restrictions, and regulations in place that prevent us from doing certain things, and prevent us from being involved in certain situations. The only way to experience these things is to live vicariously through the characters. The rules and regulations for the most part, are in place to keep us safe. To prevent chaos and anarchy. Like I said, monotony is a blessing and a curse. 

I don’t know about you, but I would rather not be a knight at war, or try to save the world, or shoot aliens. I value my life too highly to willingly put myself in that sort of danger. I’d much rather undergo these stresses in my imagination and not anywhere else. At heart, I’m a wimp. That being said, it doesn’t mean that these types of situations don’t intrigue me. They are thrilling, in part, due to the fact that I can experience them without being put in harm’s way. We sometimes take for granted how blessed we are to be able to do these things behind the comfort of a screen or a text. Life is hard, but not that hard. We’re not hunter-gatherers anymore. Constantly fearing for our well-being and that of our loved ones.  

We’ve evolved in the centuries since then. But even with a more progressive society, some things still remain the same. Language for one, is a building block of society. Language unifies people and is our primary form of communication. As long as the latter remains true, language will always remain an institution. But let’s not forget that language also gives us a sense of identity. It helps us feel like we belong. We find comradery with those who speak the same language(s) as us. We find satisfaction in being able to communicate with our kith and kin without prying ears. As is the case with most children of immigrants, I had the opportunity to grow up bilingual. But unfortunately for me, I squandered it. Something I sorely regret. I took Chinese school for many years, but due to lack of practice, understanding, and desire I never did become fluent in the language. Granted, Chinese employs thousands of characters and multiple intonations. It does not use a standard alphabet. But I’m not trying to make excuses right now. My unwillingness to learn Chinese was a severe failure on my part. As was my norm growing up, I approached any hardship with the same tactic: flee, no matter the cost. Never a prudent method… although not something I would learn for many, many years. 

I guess I’m trying to correct that now. I’ve been using Duolingo to learn Spanish for almost a year now. It’s going well, and it’s fun. It’s a different experience than learning Spanish in school, but I would say it is equally as effective, but less time consuming. The lessons can be done at my own pace, on my own time. Languages intrigue me nowadays, especially since I’ve been spending more time planning out my fantasy series. It’s coming together, but very much still a work in progress. Some days more than others, I feel extra pressure to get cracking at it, but masterpieces can’t be rushed. It will come together in time. I will have to keep working at it little by little. But isn’t that just how life goes? Dreams don’t come true overnight. You can’t sit there waiting for things to happen if you don’t put the time and effort in. That seems pretty obvious, but let me tell you, as a youth I spent quite a lot of time waiting for good things to happen. But that’s not how life works. 

You have to take action. If you want something you have to reach out and grab it. You can be passive and laidback, open-minded and easy-going, but at some point, you’re going to have to make a decision. You’re going to have to make an effort. Some things you have to actively pursue. Don’t get me wrong, some things will come to you, life isn’t always cruel. But the things you want the most, you have to work the hardest for. But like I’ve been saying for months, what you want for your life is not always what someone else wants for theirs. So, you have to stay focused. Easier said than done. But keep grinding until toil turns into results. 

That’s the difference between who I was before I went to therapy, and who I became afterwards. I went through a necessary metamorphosis and discovered that ok is not good enough. Do I want to be mired in mediocrity or do I want to be great? Your car won’t advance if you aren’t in drive, likewise, your life won’t progress if you don’t have drive. Keep pushing. Isn’t that what they’ve always told us? The little engine that could. The morals we learn as kids from children’s books and Aesop’s fables are important. There’s a reason we’re taught these things at a young age. They’re vital to our success and growth as youths. I obviously can’t speak for anyone else, but I lost track of these things along the way. I don’t know what exactly caused me to lose ambition, to lack motivation—likely an amalgam of different factors, but regardless the result was that I was stuck in neutral for two decades. But here’s the thing, I had writing talent this whole time. I truly and honestly believe that. But I never unlocked my full potential. I didn’t put in the effort; I didn’t realize my dream. I was too caught up in other things. 

Ironically, for someone who previously didn’t like to directly address his emotional issues, I’ve always been an emotional person. That’s what depression does to you. You fluctuate between wearing your heart on your sleeve and bottling everything up inside. You’re filled with rage and melancholy. And sometimes happiness leaks through. But you were never taught how to process your emotions. You saw things as black and white. Anger, pain, and sadness are unequivocally bad. Happiness, joy, and love are inherently good. Right is right; wrong is wrong. It isn’t until you’re older and more mature that you begin to understand that none of this is necessarily true. There are grey areas in life, that’s the long and the short of it. There’s good and evil, and everything in between. But as a teenager, all of this went over my head. Nuance is unfamiliar to adolescents. And so, I stunted my mental and emotional growth. I wanted to be left alone, so my parents left me alone. They gave me what I “wanted.” Not the best approach in my opinion. You need to consistently check on your children’s well-being: physically, mentally, and emotionally. But I can’t blame them too much. They didn’t know any better. Parenting is hard. Most aspects of it require learning on the job. So, as you get older, you see your parent’s mistakes and you either learn from them or you repeat them. The latter, we can say is the epitome of folly. 

But anyway, I digress. A benefit of being left alone is that I had a lot of time to write songs and poems. The songs weren’t all that great, seeing as I didn’t have much musical talent, so I guess you can say I wrote poems and glorified poems. Nevertheless, this was good exercise, and a precursor to my recently discovered life ambition. In my still developing mind, I did not equate songwriting/poetry with fictional writing, computer programming, or screenwriting. They were all separate entities to me back then. But writing is writing; art is art. Nothing can change that. These are all forms of expression, and if they convey a message then they are a language. And if they are a language, then they tell a story. 

So, as I get older, the landscape becomes clearer to me. No longer do I see see literature, videogames, music, visual art, and movies/TV shows as autonomous vehicles. All unrelated things. But I see them now as pieces of one cohesive unit. Art is interconnected, writing is interwoven. There is an undertone linking them together. The genre drives them in the same direction, and as such, rather than being distinct products, each of these is instead merely a different facet of the same masterwork. The same art expressed through different mediums. Each medium emphasizes a different emotion, illustrates a different picture, but they all have the same goals. There’s no better example of this than what the Marvel craze has done for the media in the last thirteen years. 

When the first Marvel movies came out, before the term Marvel Cinematic Universe was even coined, I was in high school, and I did not know my superheroes. I mean—sure I knew who Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man were—but didn’t every single boy who grew up in the 90s? We knew who these three were by name and appearance, but we likely didn’t even know that DC and Marvel were two different companies. I remember one year during a church retreat one of the icebreaker questions during small group was, “who is your favorite superhero and why?” Me, not wanting to give a basic answer said, “X-Man,” thinking that this famed superhero group was actually in fact one singular individual. I wouldn’t learn for many years, that the answer I was actually looking for was, “Wolverine.” Up til this point my only exposure to Marvel had been a week that I had spent playing an Avengers videogame on Super Nintendo at my uncle’s summer home, and a Captain America novel that I had asked my aunt to buy me. Boy, has that changed and more.

I would say, “you could call me a Marvel fanboy,” but that would be grossly understating it. I am a Marvelite, no doubt about it. But it took me some time to get there. In high school, I didn’t have many friends, but one of the few I did have I nerded out with OD. I was fortunate enough to share an English class with him three out of four years. We talked about things ranging from Lord of the Rings, to Star Wars, to Iron Man. And boy did he talk a lot about Iron Man. This kid loved and idolized Tony Stark. So we can say this is where the Marvel seed was planted. It didn’t take long to grow. The summer after my senior year, I worked at a camp. In my free time I would go to Borders with a friend and we would buy comics. This being my first foray into the industry, I didn’t actually know where to start, so I picked up the first graphic novel that looked interesting. It was The Ultimates, which I did not know was a modernized, alternate-timeline version of the Marvel Universe and not synonymous with Earth-616. I operated under this misconception for years. But because I had read some comics and played a few videogames, I had a reputation in my first two years of college as being a comics guy. So naturally, as we watched the post-credits scene in The Avengers where Thanos made his first cameo appearance, everyone turned to me for an answer. An answer I did not have, but was too embarrassed to acknowledge. 

Again, this was just a façade. Keeping up appearances, but not actually knowing or embracing who I was or what I was interested in. For years I suppressed my nerdiness, but once Marvel started becoming mainstream and less of a subculture, I immediately started gravitating towards it? GTFO. That just made me a bandwagoner. A sheep following the hot trend. I’m not afraid to admit that this was me for a long time. A trend follower not a trendsetter. I wasn’t comfortable with who I truly was, so I tried to cover up and be someone else. We all know how that goes. Most people can read through your fakeness. They may not be able to pinpoint what exactly is off with you, but they can see the strange aura emanating from your body. Stay true to yourself and eventually things will come together. And when things come together, you have to seize the opportunities. 

In these Covid times, I’ve been doing just that. Making good use of the extra free time that I’ve been afforded. That comes with the territory of being unemployed on two separate occasions in the same year. One of them was due to my own choice, but that’s beside the point. For the first six weeks of the new year I relaxed, stress-free and unencumbered. I had just quit a toxic work environment and was feeling good about it. I started writing, and reading more. I worked on a puzzle, I played videogames, I did crossword puzzles, I went to the beach. Just did whatever the fuck I wanted. Oh, what a great time it was. But then reality set in. I needed to re-enter the workforce so that I could earn money again. So I found a job, and worked there for six weeks, until Covid happened and I was laid off. 

At first I was bummed out, feeling like I was back to square one. But when I saw the dollar amount on my unemployment checks I didn’t feel so bad anymore. I was being paid to sit on my ass! But I knew I had to stay productive in some sense, just to keep my mind active and engaged. So like I had done in my first stay-at-home phase, I devised a schedule for myself. I allotted a two or three hour time limit to each activity that I engaged in, and thus I never felt bored. This allowed me to devote time to each item on my growing list of interests, while maintaining balance in my life. 

Obviously, they didn’t know it at the time, but the timing of the launch of Disney+ could not have been more perfect. They had a strong launch in November, carrying an initial library that included most of the Marvel movies. They had a few months before Covid hit, to build up rapport. And by the time March came around, I was hooked on the service. My girlfriend and I had started watching MCU at the beginning of the year, and we really enjoy it. Since the Thanos incident, my interest in the Marvel movies had slowly fizzled out, but hadn’t died completely. It was hard to keep up with these movies when they came out with two new ones a year. I had this feeling that if I missed one of the movies, then I wouldn’t be able to watch a subsequent one and still be able to follow along adequately. Now I wasn’t wrong per se, but these movies are also designed to be standalone. I didn’t call myself this at the time, but I’ve always been a completionist. When I fanboy about something, I nerd out hard. I need to have the full background, know the full context, and be familiar with the full story from start to finish. This has always been a part of me, but I’ve taken it to a whole different level in the last three years.

When they first started releasing the MCU movies, I was not familiar with their vision. I didn’t know what it was that they were trying to achieve. I’m sure most others did not either. The world has not really seen a crossover media franchise like this before. Sure there was Star Wars, with its movies, TV shows, and tie-in books, but it’s never had the same feel. The quality of the content varies massively work to work. MCU on the other hand is consistent in both quality and tone. Each work speaks the same language. But like I said, I didn’t know this until much later. So when the movies came out during Phases 1 and 2, I saw these as just movies. This wasn’t a multimedia world that I was immersing myself in. Now, I never was much of a moviegoer. I always preferred to watch things in my own home. I wasn’t watching much TV in college either, so I didn’t see any of the commercials promoting these movies. So on many occasions, I would find out that the movie was leaving theaters, and be like, “damn… Missed another one.” 

The last one I ended up watching on my own was Guardians of the Galaxy. And although I did watch Black Panther with some friends, I was far out of the continuity by that point. It became more about spending time with them than it was about watching the movie. But Disney+ changed all of that. It brought the MCU right into the palm of my hand. Within reach. I don’t remember what factored into our decision, but in December, we had watched The Indiana Jones films, and to my surprise Katie really enjoyed them. I figured that if she liked that franchise, she might also enjoy MCU, and it turns out I was right. I was interested in revisiting the series, since the movies were now easy access, so you can say I had a bit of an ulterior motive. Regardless, we enjoyed the movies so much that we were watching one or two a week. At that quick pace, I figured we would finish in three or months or so. And I found that I was going to miss watching these movies, I needed more.

So I turned to the comics. In my free time I had stumbled across a website that had a Marvel reading order, from start to finish. Initially I was only looking to read the crossover events, the biggest stories. Marvel has over 35,000+ issues, there was no way I was going to be able to read all of that, so I was looking for something more condensed. And I started transcribing a list from this website. Now I’ve always been a list person, but as with many other things that occurred during Covid, I’ve taken it to another level. The Notes app on iOS is great for this. That is honestly the only thing I use the app for. I don’t take notes on there… I make checklists and rankings. So it started out with an MCU movie checklist just to keep track of what we watched & when, then it progressed to ranking the movies from most liked to least, then it continued on to Star Wars, and most recently we now have a Disney movie watch list. I’ve got a problem man. I spend hours compiling and transcribing these lists. It may seem like a waste of time, when I could just easily google this stuff instead, but I like it. It’s therapeutic. Well anyway, for three weeks these comic book reading orders became my pet project.

I had come across some ads for an Amazon Prime add-on called Comixology. They were offering a three month free trial during the lockdown, so I planned to compile my lists and then start reading. At first I was going to skip straight to the 90s, since I knew that anything published before that was wordy and super time-consuming to read. But as you probably guessed, my OCD wasn’t having it. The completionist in me said, “no. You will transcribe every single list. You will read from start to finish, and you will like it.” Who was I to argue with that? I stayed obedient to my inner voice. I ended up with 15 lists for the main continuity plus 5 more for alternate universes. There are over 14,000 comics that I have to read, and it will take me years to do so. But I needed more than just the MCU. This is how I truly became a comics guy. But it turned out that Comixology was not what I was expecting it to be. I thought it would be the Netflix of comics, where much of what I was looking for would be included in my subscription. But that was not the case. Comixology is a platform where you can purchase non-mainstream comics at a discount. Marvel and DC have a minimal presence on there, as their main focus is on more independent works like those published by Dark Horse or Image. I didn’t want the time I spent compiling these lists to be for naught, so I had to find something else.

Marvel was way ahead of me on this one. They already had a platform with exactly what I was looking for named Marvel Unlimited. I’ve always thought DC stories and characters are dumb, and there’s no long-standing independent comic that I had interest in reading, so Marvel Unlimited fit perfectly for me. It’s worked like a dream. I’ve been reading comics everyday since April, and I feel like I actually am starting to understand the Marvel Multiverse. There have been a handful of issues that I haven’t been able to find—mostly ones that are too violent, or co-brands with other companies—but I have not had many problems with this app. I’ve more than made up the $70 subscription fee that I paid for this service. The issues range from 10¢ (in the 60s) to $3.99 (current day). I’ve read 1,889 issues so far, so you do the math. I will read a comic while I’m eating breakfast. I’ll read several during the slow times at work, on my lunch break, when I’m watching Netflix/Disney+/Hulu. 

It started out slow. Like I anticipated, the really early issues are both wordy and boring. Some of them are weird, and some of them are confusing. The first list of 900+ issues took me 7 months to read. At the pace I was reading it would take me between 7 and 12 years to finish depending on if I was reading three issues a day or five. Obviously I did not want to spend over a decade reading comics; by the time I got to 2019 I would still be 10 years behind. So I upped my daily intake. I needed to read at least 5 issues a day, and try to reach for 10 or more, so that I could cut the time down to four or five years. At first it was just a matter of me forcing myself to read comics. It was a slog. But eventually my interest grew. 

Some of the comics were consistently incredible, like Fantastic Four, Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man, Captain America, and X-Men. Others were downright awful like Doctor Strange, Ghost Rider, and Warlock. Still others were pleasant surprises like Man-Thing, Howard the Duck, and Nova. Regardless I’ve gotten to experience it all. I’ve seen the character’s back stories, I’ve seen their character development. I’ve seen how the comics industry has changed over the years. I’ve seen different artists and I’ve seen different writers. There are different arcs and different visions, but all the characters and issues have been done in the Marvel manner. The “Marvel Age of Comics,” as they called it. What a truly wonderful franchise it is. I wish I could’ve grown up with them. It would’ve given me pleasure then, as it does now. But that wasn’t in the cards. I’ve started my journey, and I’ll continue on. Some kids never grow up, we just get bigger.