"Avatar" and the cross-eyed kid

As I’ve confessed here before, I’m a big-time geek. By my definition, geeks are sort of like nerds except we can’t do math.

Geeks play Dungeons and Dragons (check), they’ve spent at least one Halloween dressed up as a character from Star Wars (check), and they start life thinking of the opposite sex as an alien and vaguely dangerous species (check).

As a kid, I took geekdom to an additional height: I was cross-eyed.

Not just a little bit, either. I was halibut-boy. I couldn’t help looking in two directions at once. When kids asked what I was staring at, the honest answer was, “I don’t know.”

“Cross-eyed creep” was one of the memorable nick-names that I carried like a bag of sand through elementary school. (Did I mention that I was also little?)

Which explains, maybe, the joy that I felt escaping into worlds of fantasy, from Narnia to Middle Earth to Arrakis and Tatooine.

Part of my later fascination with the outdoors — with mountaintops and bogs and tundra plains — is the alienness of those landscapes, the sense of slipping free from Normal.

The latest Imaginary New World discovered and explored by a fellow geek is the jungled moon of Pandora, brainchild of James Cameron.

His film “Avatar” is being trumpeted in the geek community and tonight I’ll be taking a van-load of thirteen-year-olds to see it. It doesn’t get much better.

But there’s a catch. A sad, sort of sci-fi-esque wrinkle.

I may no longer look like Admiral Ackbar (if you’re not geek enough to get the reference, that’s okay), but the surgeries that corrected my appearance couldn’t make my eyes work in concert.

I only see out of one eye at a time. Which means that I can’t use those cool 3-d glasses that bring Pandora to life.

Once again, I’ll be left behind, forced to look at a make-believe world from afar, with nothing more than my imagination to close the gap.

Which is fine, I guess. Better than fine.

Geeks can’t do math, and we don’t always see straight, but we sure know how to dream.