« Feel the Beat | Tailor Made »
Friday
Aug122011

Love Monkey

DateFriday, August 12, 2011 at 12:00AM | AuthorTravis

Ten years ago today I was sitting in my parents living room watching Charlton Heston yell at a bunch of apes with a girl. Little did I know that five years later that girl would become my fiancee and another two years after that said fiancee would be my wife, which brings me back to today sitting on the couch watching Charlton Heston yell at a bunch of apes with a girl.

Ten years ago I had graduated from high school and was heading off to my parent’s alma mater to become a third generation Rice Student. I had just gotten out of a horrible relationship as is to be expected as all high school relationships are horrible relationships as all high schoolers are horrible people who make horribly bad decisions. Ten years ago I had fantasies of what life would be like ten or twelve years in the future and most of those involved me being alone and definitely did not involve me sitting on a couch watching Charlton Heston yell at a bunch of apes with a girl, but this blog post is not about those fantasies. That blog post has yet to be written three years from now. This blog post is about the girl.

I knew the girl before I found myself sitting on the couch in my parent’s living room with her watching Charlton Heston yell at a bunch of apes. She had dated a friend of mine in high school that was just like any other high school relationship for the same reasons that any high school relationship is what it was. Since in that summer ten years ago we both found ourselves single and enjoyed each other’s company, it was only reasonable that we thought we should hang out together. I wasn’t interested in a relationship as I was about to head off to college and she just wasn’t interested in a relationship. It was a perfectly reasonable pact and would have worked fine but this girl was so different than any other girl I had ever dated. Our first date was pretty traditional for our pathetic small town: we went to a movie and then wandered around Wal-Mart (don’t hate me, hipster), but I knew something was different right from the start when she suggested the movie and picked Jurassic Park III. Our second date largely consisted of sitting in the SciFi Section of the Walden Books store in the mall picking up random books off the shelf and comparing notes. I had found a Nerd Girl.

Nerd Girls are on the rise and seem to be much more prevalent and vocal than that were even ten years ago. I’m not sure if it’s a result of the interconnectedness that Nerds have on the Internet, or that society is more accepting of “alt cultures” (of which I think definitely includes Nerdery), or if the ideals of the 70’s Feminist Movement have been distilled enough by time that women have realized that there can be more than one type of vocal, self-assured Independent Woman who doesn’t have to burn her bra and throw away her razor, but can freely declare that Han did shoot first. The point is that when you’re in a relationship with a Nerd Girl, things are different because you don’t have to try to find a common ground to build your relationship on. It’s already there for you, paved out by the likes of Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury, Gene Roddenberry, and Joss Whedon. No, dating a Nerd Girl does not mean everything in a relationship is easy and that you won’t have the ups and downs of a regular relationship, but I have to say that you do get a different feeling in the pit of your stomach when you’re standing around the water cooler at work listening to your coworkers plan on playing hooky in the afternoon so that they can all see Captain America because their wives won’t go with them and then realizing that you can’t go with them because your wife would get mad at you for seeing Cap without her, which brings us back to Charlton Heston.

Before the bookstore closed and they kicked us out, we pooled our money and bought a couple of books. It was a buy two get one free sale, so we each picked a book we wanted and then agreed on a book that we’d share. (It was the second date and we already had joint property. It should have been a sign, but I guess we were a little slow.) The free book we got was a new printing of Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes, which inspired the movie series. We both read it, enjoyed it immensely and decided that we should see the new Tim Burton Planet of the Apes movie. To make it even cooler, we decided we’d first watch all five of the original Planet of the Apes movies before we went and saw the new film. This is how ten years ago I found myself sitting on a couch in my parent’s living room watching Charlton Heston yell at apes with a girl. We watched ten straight hours of intelligent ape related movies and it was somewhere in that time that I realized there was nothing wrong with being in a relationship when you went off to college. Fortunately for me, she had also changed her mind on relationships, because she said yes before I asked her out sitting in a darken theater before we watched Marky Mark yell at some apes. Fortunately for me, she said yes five years later. Fortunately for me, she said yes again two years after that. Fortunately for me, she’s said yes every day for the past ten years.

Fortunately for us, James Franco heard our tale and decided that the only way to reward this tale of Nerd Love would be to give us another Planet of the Apes movie. It’s only fair that if he worked so hard to increase our Ape marathon from 10 hours to 12 hours, we take full advantage of it. That’s how I find myself ten years later once again sitting on a couch watching Charlton Heston yell at some apes with a girl. I couldn’t be happier.

Travis, what’s on your pull list?

Kris, what’s on your pull list?