Nerdism personified

It is strange that the older I get the geekier I become. I mean, I was actually excited yesterday when I heard that they found a new largest prime number, which is incredibly important if…ok, to be honest knowing that a number that is millions of digits long is prime really has no practical application outside of really obscure cryptography purposes but, hey, it’s another prime number. And they still have to test it by doing things like “can we divide it by 3? Well, how about five? Seven, then? Damn, this might take a while….”


I do find now that though I am not as fast with math as I used to be (and way too reliant on spreadsheets for my own good) I probably understand and appreciate the ideas behind all of the high level math that I was taught. I’ve joked with people that I reached the level in college courses where numbers no longer existed and all you were dealing with were greek letters and neverending discussions about the imaginary portion of the equation. This is actually true. I still deal with imaginary portions of equations to this very day and for the life of me I cannot explain it. The square root of negative one is i, or maybe j, but it exists. You just accept that it does.

I bring this up because it just shows how a school subject changes as you get older. As a kid math was a competition to the point that a) I made state in the Illinois math competition my senior year of high school, b) said state math competition had an official song, c) I have heard people referred to as mathletes without a sense of irony and d) math competitions have marked the only time in my life where I could look around and realize that I am the coolest guy in the room. Then in college and starting work math became my tool. I’ve mentioned many times that I really only have two skills and being good at math is one of them. Being able to spin numbers around and make sense of them has built a career for me. But it really was just a tool that was just a step above a parlor trick. Now I actually enjoy thinking about how numbers work and thinking about the paradoxes around infinity and how some infinities are larger than others even though they are all still infinite. I don’t understand everything and I am much too old to develop any great theorems but I really enjoy reading up on the theories.

God, I’m such a nerd.

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.

Critical Definitions

It dawned on me while watching Weird Al that I had seen an awful lot of bands playing the Uptown Theater. So, for the Wednesday Night Music Club I thought that I would feature one of them. This is Damien Rice performing a mind blowing version of “I Remember”. You really need to watch or at least listen to this one. It will be ten minutes well spent. Plus, it just shows what an incredible addition Lisa Hannigan was to his performance.

(For those wondering, I’ve also seen Wilco, Lyle Lovett, Lindsay Buckingham and Elvis Costello each play the Uptown Theater. Now realize that Weird Al can play the exact same venue as those guys. I don’t know if I should be depressed or extremely impressed. As someone who is still petitioning for the Monkees to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame I really think you could make a case for Weird Al. Who else could be relevant as a novelty artist for nearly thirty years?)

Not surprisingly, I did get a fair amount of crap today for attending a Weird Al concert. I wish I could pass it off as field research but let’s face it, it’s not like they had to drag me to the show. As I mentioned last night, it was a gathering of nerds, geeks and dweebs. However, few people understand the caste system that exists between these groups.

On the bottom end is the dweeb. Dweebs tend to be scrawnish nobodies with minimal social skills. They don’t possess the intelligence of the other two groups and also tend to be slightly more anti-social. They also tend to be short, scrawny types for a reason that has never been made quite clear. Best example of a dweeb that I can think of is DJ Qualls character in The New Guy, who basically starts out the movie as a complete loser.

Next up is the geek. Geeks are best identified by their intense fandom into one specific genre. This gives us Star Trek geeks, Star Wars geeks, Buffy geeks, D&D geeks, and of course Comic Book geeks. These people will spend every waking moment learning every bit of minutiae about their chosen field and will debate whether or not Wedge Antilles really destroyed the second Death Star if given the opportunity. It’s important to note that geeks are actually a social being by nature. They go to conventions where they dress up as their favorite characters and have in-depth conversations while in character. It’s kind of the entire point of being a geek, to meet up with other geeks. Why learn Klingon if you don’t have anyone else to talk to? Sure, they might only be interacting with a very small niche. This separates them from the last class, the ruling class, and the one that I am a member of.

This of course would be the nerd. Most often represented by the symbols of the caste (glasses, allergies and an unearthly competency with math) the nerd is the highly intellectual yet socially backward ruler of this underworld. There is no problem that cannot be solved with an equation, no situation that cannot be rectified by reading a book. In essence, the dream of every nerd is to discover the meaning of life by sitting in a quiet room with no outside distractions and just thinking. Other people just get in the way of true knowledge.

Hence, nerds tend to have issues with relationships. My best example is based on something a friend told me. When women tell you about their problems it is vital to remember that they are looking for sympathy and not solutions. This is a problem given that my entire livelihood revolves around being presented with a problem, analyzing it, and developing a flowchart filled with critical tasks and timelines in order to solve it. Women don’t want that as they already know the solution before they even start complaining. I still don’t know if I’ve ever learned this important fact.

Yep, so in the end I’m a nerd albeit one with some geekish tendencies. It’s what happens when you grow up fascinated by math and science and grab an engineering degree. I’m not bothered by it anymore. Thirty plus years of being called a nerd does result in granting you a rather thick skin when it comes to insults and trust me, I’ve heard all of them. But this is what makes me who I am and it’s what made me successful. I might wish that I was smoother or a little less detailed focus but I really wouldn’t want to be somebody who wasn’t me.