The First Time I Received Recognition for Being a Film Nerd

I was thinking last night, and remembered a rather amusing story that I thought would be relevant to tell. Just a bit of background:

I started really watching movies when I was 13 years old. That's when I started blogging, and have been doing it off and on ever since. At first, many of the movies I watched were ones that starred Mr. Johnny Depp, but slowly I branched out further. I started posting on a movie forum, Rotten Tomatoes at that time as well. Despite still being a kid, I started watching all these movies...and I loved them! So since then I've watched as many movies as I can, and my love of film really only has grown since then.

This story takes place a few years after I first started really watching movies. I was 16 years old. I had this really awesome Sociology teacher who didn't feel we should be working on the last day before Spring break. So he brought in Scene It?, split us into two teams and started playing.

When I was in high school, I was either ignored by most, or bullied relentlessly. As a result, I was very quiet in social situations (but never hesitated to speak up in class), and knew few people in the class. So people didn't know that I was a film nerd. When we had our turns, my teammates would look stupefied by the question, and I'd lazily give the answer (they were EASY questions to me!), and people started to wonder how I had all this knowledge. We easily doubled the score of the other team, and halfway through my teacher put me on the other team...where I promptly got us in the lead. My teacher had to step in to prevent it becoming a "Sociology class versus Jennifer Hanson" game.

I couldn't help it. Games like that are fairly easy to me. I hadn't even seen all the films we were questioned on. But a prominent screen shot would be included, and since I'd spent 2 and a half years on movie forums by then, I could tell what movie it was by an image or vague description, even if I hadn't seen it. Plus I have a weird sort of memory for trivia, I can remember the smallest details about something or someone if I set my mind to it.

I wish I could say that my performance permanently earned me the respect of my peers, and rose petals were tossed at me whenever I entered classrooms...but that was not the case. Spring break meant everyone promptly forgot about it, and when we got back to class, I resumed the position of the quiet, weird, rather plain girl who was either never noticed or mocked incessantly. But that's okay, because for just one day...I out smarted 24 other people, and felt really good about myself for doing so. I was a very proud nerd that day.