After graduation, I looked out over the landscape as if I was finally ready, as if I deserved it all, as if it owed me something. Oh misguided and overzealous former self, what a great big idiot you were. I graduated with degrees in English Literature an Anthropology, not one but BOTH of the traditional useless degrees. That’s right, the only way I could have wound up less prepared is if I’d thrown in a dance degree or something related to musical theater, and yet I EXPECTED WORK TO COME TO ME!
When the Nerd Ate Me
Doodling in class
I recently found a crappy little book of sketches from High School which made me think….
This Blog is an experiment. It is my first ever venture into the published arena, and it is meant to broaden my horizons as a writer while connecting me with like-minded individuals. This is… a journal.
I’ve never written a journal, all my endeavors on the writing front have been in fiction rather than in putting myself- my thoughts, feelings, passions- on the page and making it all about me. I never wrote a diary, but I found that I expressed myself in other ways, beginning, really, almost ten years ago in High School. Through theater I put myself in front of an audience, through fiction and poetry I expressed my view of the world as I saw it, and through random nerd-scratchings like the one heading this post I realized that my geekiness was my journal, my form of expression. Mike Mignola, Kevin Smith, Alan Moore, all heroes of mine making such a huge impact on the way in which I viewed the world that I barely noticed thats what they were doing. This, I believe, is the essence of Nerdism; that a passion can be so thoroughly ingrained in a person that he or she can’t help but express it.
Welcome to DorkTorch!
Nerds are mainstream… and rightly so.
Today you have business men in their thirties calling themselves “nerds” because they are casual gamers, or maybe they own a comic book or two, or maybe they’ve seen The Dark Knight and Star Wars three whole times. It’s easy to be a “nerd” when they sell Atari T-shirts at the gas station and when the entire Firefly series is accessible on NetFlix. Yet any purist nerd, when not attempting (and failing) to casually slip extended universe canon into conversation or desperately fighting traffic to make it home to catch the newest episode of The Walking Dead, will debate you, in depth, on the very definition of Nerd itself.
What is a Purist Nerd? Someone who takes so much pride in being a nerd that they casually or overtly look down on you for even joining in on a conversation relating to something they are passionate about. I believe these people have it wrong. When has it ever been a bad thing that people are showing an interest in something which you also love? Is it ever too late to jump into Doctor Who, or Star Trek, or Batman? Stop being dicks, Purist Nerds. A new era has emerged.
DorkTorch 