Fans v Geeks v Nerds
Lately, I’ve been contemplating the difference between fans, geeks, and nerds. What can I say? As an avowed geek with a brain that won’t shut the fuck up, these things happen.
Here’s what I’ve come up with. Fandom is a summer fling. Intense. All consuming. But in short order, easily forgotten. The guy you adored and then, two years later, you don’t know how that weird t-shirt ended up behind the couch. On the other hand, geekdom is true love. Life changing. Never ending. Makes you do things you never thought you’d do. My own areas of geekdom include Star Wars (the original trilogy only, and in the original theatrical release only), LOTR, myth collecting, and some of the Doctor Who canon. It used to include Lost, but the last episode killed it for me.
Which brings me to nerds. After much thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that nerdy-ness is being socially awkward without meaning to. This is WAY different from the hipster concept of ‘being first to like something,’ as in ‘it’s not cool now, but wait and see.’ It’s also not the same thing as always being ‘on trend’ with a few geeky interests to show a non-conformity to cool. That’s still careful cool-nurturing, and if you can do it, go you. But nerdy-ness requires the complete lack of knowing you made a mis-step, which is not necessarily tied to giving a crap about the mis-step in question.
Case in point: writing long blogs about nerdy-ness is quite possibly a nerdy move. I don’t really know, and that makes me a nerd.
All of which leads to the mac daddy question (to me anyway): Can you be a geek without being a nerd? After much contemplation, I have decided that the answer is a definitive ‘no.’ Geekdom means you care so much about something, you can’t help but be a nerd–as in outrageously socially unacceptable–in order to celebrate whatever it is you randomly adore.
Fellow geeks, you know what I’m talking about here. This is stuff like attending a key Halloween party in an ill-fitting, home-made Sailor Moon outfit because you couldn’t imagine going as anything else. Or going toe-to-toe with an uber hottie about a particular point of geek lore (how can you not love Tom Baker as the Doctor?), even though it flies in the face of your base instincts for achieving good-looking offspring and hot sex.
In the words of Nick Hornby’s About a Boy, it’s about singing with your eyes closed. That’s love, and IMHO, that’s what being a geek is all about.
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