Friday, August 21, 2015

DJ finds her ground

Less than 24 hours after leaving, DJ called to tell me about her first night. (Good daughter!!)  She was quite excited at meeting people who share a common interest, that interest being (wait for it) ....Dungeons and Dragons.  She's attending a polytechnical university, so certainly uber cerebral geeks abound; she is one of them.

When we toured the dorm this spring, I noted a dry erase memo board with glyph-appearing writing on it attached to the door of one of the rooms. 

"Is that calculus?" I asked.

"No, it's Elvish," DJ replied.

"What does The King have to do with it?" I asked, in my head, thinking, of course, of Elvis Presley.

What I actually asked was, "What's Elvish?"

DJ explained, "It's a 'language' from Lord of the Rings." (Spoken by Elves....naturally.)

I slowly turned my head to look at her and said, "These are your people."

So yes, her dorm room is adorned with posters of Japanese Anime, her first new friends are Dungeons and Dragons aficionados, and she wore a Kiki's Big Adventure shirt paired with shorts denoting her university.  She screams GEEK.  She also screams HAPPY GEEK. She doesn't scream transgender.  It's her choice to either wave the banner or go stealth.  I'm all for stealth for now, or forever...again, it's her life and her choice.  She still lives in the Bible belt and deserves to be seen as her true self and not through a prejudiced lens.  She's just a young woman leaving home for college for the first time. Why should she be any different from any other young woman? 

She's off to a great start :)