Dictionaries still place the word “nerd” among insults, but it’s clear that the status quo has changed.
I had a fairly typical outcast social life when I was a kid. I wore big red glasses, dinosaur t-shirts and a mullet. I was ignored more often than I was beaten up, and I’m not sure which is more insulting. I had little social interaction outside of playing video games with a boy who had Down syndrome or asthmatically wheezing my way across a soccer field, but the few I had were fateful.
The boy who handed up an Aliens comic to my bunk at Space Camp when I was so homesick I couldn’t sleep. A delinquent “big kid” who showed me how to play Magic: The Gathering but left out all the rules. My grandmother, who planted me cross-legged in front of her television with a dusty VHS of The Empire Strikes Back. My father, who took me on regular trips to the library to rent Robin of Sherwood or Doctor Who and watch for hours on end.
The interests that I formed very early in life – those which spoke to something in me, and seemed to enrich my days – are the passions that I carried with me like a giant awkward suitcase. It wasn’t until I locked eyes on the only other outfielder in t-ball that I discovered a kindred spirit. We were both eating grass.
The things I loved then (and love now) seemed like a sanctuary, like a private joke that only my friend and I understood. They felt safe and familiar. We could walk home after school, shut ourselves up in a room with enough ramen noodles and orange soda for the night and wrap ourselves up in our hobbies like a warm blanket. They were more than hobbies, though. They were passions.
I still remember when I wouldn’t even bother explaining the oversized poster of the Daleks hanging above my bed. I just said it was a show, and that my dad brought it home for me from London. That was the impressive part. Now, however, the exclusivity is all but gone.
The days that only belonged to us, where we huddled in the art-closet at school playing Magic or Dungeons and Dragons in the dark while listening to Dio and Weird Al, those are gone. They belong to a vast group of people, but you know what? That’s okay, because they always did.
Things that were “nerdy” when I was a kid are no longer the trappings of an exclusive club in a tiny town. The internet and social media have exposed and connected all of those nerd cliques who grew up together. They have begun to melt together (with some resistance) like the blobs of a lava-lamp into one über-group that rampages its way through message boards and organizes 1000-man LARP events (don’t get me started).
The question is: has nerdy stuff become more popular? Being neither willing to subject myself to the black under-recesses of the net to find opinions nor considering myself a prophet, I will simply say this:
Being nerdy isn’t necessarily more popular, it’s just bigger and much more visible.
Having actually seen people with these interests (and them having seen each other), stereotypes of the past have proven false. Not everyone who reads She-Hulk has a prepubescent mustache and Cheeto fingers, and not every Star Trek fan orders their Taco Bell in Klingon and snorts so hard in laughter that they need to dig through the Dungeons and Dragons character sheets filling the glovebox of their 1983 Fiesta just to find their inhaler refill.
However, that isn’t to say that those people don’t exist. I’ve spent time with them, and they frighten me. In the internet age, one can become an expert on a subject in an afternoon of reading (which I love, by the way), or find interests they never knew they had. Some believe that this takes the passion of the collector out of the equation and that this makes “weak-nerds.”I am not so bitter.
My childhood is gone, but much like the fellows of my generation, I don’t reject it, but carry it with me. My passions and interests are spread like a thin film of butter across the web, and acceptance abounds. “Nerd” is no longer synonymous with “loser.”
Anyone can be a nerd about anything, so long as they hang up their hat at the end of the day and slide themselves into the familiar comfort of their mildly-obsessive, not-necessarily-culturally-acceptable-to-be-that-into-it hobby.
