Notes on Nerds by Author friend John Rose!

 NOTES ON NERDS
By John Rose

So I was a nerd.

I still am. It's not something you ever really grow out of; it's a bit like being born with a birthmark.  But compared to the many cool people I knew in high school (most of who told me at my high school reunion that I was cool, which made me want to snap, "Why didn't you talk to me and hang out with me then, you asshat?"), I was a nerd.

A lot of people define nerdism through external stuff: glasses bound together with electrical tape, pocket protectors, lots of ballpoint pens, and so on.  These things mostly happen because of high school, because when adolescence imposes itself without warning as it so often does on the average teen, it can be a shock (remember, girls, when you went to bed all normal and you woke up the next morning and you had these huge things in the front, but let's not go into that right now).  So Average Teen very quickly develops a filter.  He pretends to be jaded and knowledgeable about things (most of them darkly adult) to help him blend into the herd, and it usually works because everyone else is doing the same thing.

Nerds, unfortunately, cannot do this.  Everything comes at us.  Everything is either utterly fascinating or boring; outrageously pleasurable or outrageously painful.  We have no way of stopping this, because we have no filter.  And in our youth, we are shut out, cast out.  Of course, later on we get OK with it and sometimes we even channel our nerdism into a creative pursuit, but the fact remains; there is no filter.  We learn to hide it for such things as work and stuff (after all, your boss hired you for office work and not for your extensive knowledge of Star Trek), but we always know, even if no one else suspects.  There is no filter.  There never will be.

As an adult, I've fully embraced my nerdism in a way that I could not when I was in school, but sometimes things are still problematic because I have no filter.  I never developed a filter because I didn't allow myself to get jaded about the stuff I liked and leave it behind for "adult things" which are often just as childish and infinitely more dangerous.  I'm still embracing all the things that I love, childish and fantastic and so unadult as they may be.

And for me, nerdism is defined through a deep and abiding fascination with these things.  I was insanely in love with monsters as a child; werewolves, vampires, Frankenstein, and so forth.  I devoured books on old monster movies from the library.  I wanted to do a report on werewolf legends for an English class, but my teacher absolutely refused.  (I did the history of comics instead.  She didn't like that either, but at least it wasn't werewolves.)

I loved everything I was not supposed to love.  I loved Star Trek, Star Wars, sci-fi, Batman, superheroes, horror movies, ad infinitum.  I maintained a love affair with cartoons and comics to the point where I was still watching Saturday morning TV long after others my age had quit, still reading Sunday funnies and still reading comic books in high school and into college.  I got into collecting action figures in college and kept doing it after I was on my own in the working world and suffering in my job.  The job got better, but the action figures sort of kept me alive. Things you love; these are what you stay alive for.

And a part of that is what nerdism is.  And everyone has it, whether they believe it or not.  My mother quilts.  She does not care for comics, cartoons, sci-fi, monsters, or any of these things, and does not share my passion for them.  But get her talking about quilting, about the differences in stitching, the difference between quilts made to go on a bed and quilt hangings, types of batting, types of cloth, and the passion she has is there.  I've done it to her several times, and each time she gets going about quilting, I smile to myself: Quilt nerd.

I've occasionally referred to it as Scrooge McDuck syndrome.  Most people, even those who do not read comics, know Scrooge McDuck: richest duck in the world, has the Money Bin filled with coins.  But what the average person doesn't know about Scrooge is that the Money Bin isn't all his money.  The character is, of course, a billionaire several times over and has business holdings all over the world.  But the Money Bin is all the money that he made while he was learning how to be a billionaire; when he was traveling the world seeking his fortune.  It is the money that he will never spend, and each coin is a memory of another time and place in his life, and he values each of them.  He has learned to treasure the things that have value to him, and not to someone else.  That is what life is about, and in a way, that is what nerdism is about.

If you are a nerd, or if you have been, then I invite you to embrace it, cherish it, keep it.  It is a terrible thing when human beings lose their sense of wonder, and I will not ever give mine up.  

Check out John's work and meet the Monster Grrls!
https://www.facebook.com/grrlsbook