Kurt Cagle

04.01.09

“Bella was such a Mary Sue!” my teenager said in disgust after she got home from seeing the movie Twilight. “Mary Sue?” “Yeah, you know, she was like this little too perfect girl. Talk about epic fail!” she replied heading upstairs. “I promised my cosplay group I’d IM them when I got back and talk more about it.”

03.24.09

I was a bit … weird … as a teenager. As part of an Air Force family we moved frequently, and like most teenagers trying to distinguish themselves from their peers, I tried to use my strengths – an active intellect and an ease at working with abstractions – as a way of establishing myself in the new schools I constantly found myself in. I was the “smart kid”, the one who took to carrying around large books with titles such as “Principia Mathematica” by Bertrand Russell and Whitehead Alfred North in order to impress people with my intelligence (okay, so perhaps my social intelligence was not quite as well developed at that stage).