You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)
Felicia Day
For my mom, who is kooky and unique and taught me to be both those things and more. Even though my childhood wasn’t “normal,” she did her best to help me become who I am, and I love her for it.
Foreword
by Joss Whedon
There’s about twelve guys in very fine suits, scratching their heads. I’m in a boardroom at a major Hollywood talent agency, having just presented my internet musical, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. With me are the other writers: my brother Jed, my sister-in-law Maurissa, my brother Zack, and Felicia Day. Though we’ve created the piece, we have no clearer idea of what to do with it, how to actually put it on the internet, than these fine-suited minds do. They hem and we haw. Their resident internet expert suggests tentatively that we could maybe put it on YouTube—but only if we cut it up into three-minute bits, because no one watches more than three minutes of anything.
Which is when the redhead pipes up.
I’ve asked Felicia to come because I know she’s internet savvy; her series, The Guild, was a guidepost for me in mounting Dr. Horrible. I’ve sat with her, a couple of times, to learn about how it all works. I know she knows her stuff, but it’s still a surprise and a delight to hear her take the conversation and just run with it, own it, slam-dunk it, knock it out of the park—. She sports-metaphors the shit out of that meeting. Talks rings around all of us, experts included: This site has the bandwidth but not the views; this one requires a fee; yes we could go here and charge up front but we’d be compromising the ethos of the endeavor . . . . I’m practically glowing, watching this girl, who looks all of fourteen, school a roomful of Professional Agent-Men and I realize, oh, of course: I’m having a Buffy moment. They never saw her coming.
I have personal heroes, and Felicia Day is one of them. She’s kind and loyal and funny and weird—but that describes a lot of my friends. She’s pretty and I want to touch her hair—but that describes, sadly, almost all of my friends, including the lads. But Felicia has something few of us do. She’s fierce. She’s more than a self-made woman—I sometimes think she’s not a human woman, that she willed herself into existence, before willing the world to make a place for this new, unfathomable creation. Felicia is stronger than I am, and stranger than I am, and she double-majored in math and violin (which she felt compelled to tell me within five minutes of meeting me). I love her for all these things. I love this book because it relates, hilariously and occasionally harrowingly, how she came—or brought herself—to be this singular (though double-majored) creature.
It’s hard being weird. No—it’s hard living in a culture that makes it hard. This book deals with hard—without rancor, without the ugly flush of one-upmanship. Felicia created a persona of the bewildered waif who somehow manages to manage (and occasionally triumph). That persona is a gloss on a similar, but more painful, reality. Her odd, compelling journey was more difficult than a lot of us who knew her knew. But that’s part of her gift: she makes crippling anxiety look easy.
Another part of her gift is that she’s damn funny. Even if she’d come from the heart of normcore, her tale would be worth telling and well told. But she was raised in Crazytown, and the more foreign her territory, the more delightful—and somehow more relatable—her tale becomes. Reading this book is like spending an afternoon with Felicia, hearing breathless tales (they’re always breathless—Felicia doesn’t pause when she talks) of achievement, despair, and dazzling, almost transcendent nerdiness. This is the story of someone who found her place in a corner of the world that literally didn’t exist till just before she showed up. Felicia’s place is always off the edge of the map, where dragons wait, and this story is more than a memoir. It’s a quest. If you wanna survive, stay close to the redhead.
She knows her way.
Introduction
Whereby I introduce myself to people who have no idea who the hell I am, but have found themselves in possession of this book. Welcome, stranger!
I recently experienced the perfect summary of my career at a Build-A-Bear store inside a suburban mall in Lancaster, California.
Okay, sure, a single adult woman in her thirties with no children might not necessarily pick that as the first place to kill an hour of her life. But I’d never been inside one before, and I’d already spent twenty minutes outside like a creepster, watching actual legitimate customers (mostly toddlers) go inside and, like modern-day demigods, craft the companion of their dreams. At a certain point, after eating two Auntie Anne’s pretzels, I decided to throw off the societal yoke of judgment.