Life as a Nerd

So, I can’t say that I watch Portlandia though I can say that I did hit on Fred Armisen’s wife once at a concert (Sally Timms, who is now his ex-wife not that there is any coincidence there. Actually, that is purely a coincidence.) Still, this sketch hits upon something that has been bouncing around recently which is what does it mean to be a nerd.

Now growing up I was undoubtedly a nerd. I’m not sure if I have ever left it, more like I have grown into the role and become more comfortable in my skin. I still wear glasses, not as a fashion statement but because otherwise I’m blind. As the skit states, taking off my glasses doesn’t turn me into a swan; it leaves me with a bad tendency to walk into walls. Kim correctly states that I look much better without glasses and I agree that I do but I’ve been wearing glasses for 75% of my life. I’ve been wearing glasses for just slightly less time than I have been wearing shoes. I’ve promised Kim that I would look into laser surgery and have put off and reneged and feel guilty as hell about that. But that just shows how attached someone can be to an object that has come to define you.

But I am straying from the point here. Now that there is a sense of nerds being cool it really raises the question of what being a nerd is and people who are posing. However, it isn’t that being a nerd is popular it is the fact that a lot of the aspects of being a nerd (video games, comic books, computers in general) have now become mainstream. I grew up in the Dungeons and Dragons crowd with people who memorized Tolkein; now everybody has seen the movies and reads about a boy wizard and is surprisingly attracted to stories about moody teenage vampires. This is a good thing. There is a reason why we were fans of these genres to begin with and as opposed to music I don’t feel as threatened by having others become fans. More people reading Captain America doesn’t bother me as much as knowing the people who picked on me in high school have now claimed my favorite band as their own.

What a nerd is, or at least what everyone who called me that implied, is someone with low self-esteem, who is anxious in social situations, who is smarter than average and has escaped into topics and crowds that he can relate to that does not correspond to what everyone else is doing. Basically being a nerd is not being average or typical or walking the standard path. There is a surprisingly fine line between being a nerd and being punk rock. You could make a introverted / extroverted connection or one is more making their own reality versus confronting reality but the idea behind it is the same. We don’t fit into the normal box and we are not going to force ourselves to conform to that box. People make from of what is different and what confounds them and that is why I was called a nerd. It hurt of course, but it made me who I am. I’ll take my life today over any life formed by a personality that I had to contort myself to make it work.