What is a nerd?

It’s a surprisingly slippery question.

I will always recall the moment I realized that there was such a thing as nerds and nerd culture. I remember I was sitting around playing D&D with some fellow students in junior high (in my school district, grades 7 through 9) and it suddenly occurred to me that I had more in common with the people there than just D&D.

Somehow, I knew that if they were into D&D, odds are they were also heavily into science fiction, heavy metal, and Star Wars.

The odds were also very good that they did well in school. That wasn’t a lock, because not every nerd is academically gifted – just most of us – but if you’ve the wit to play D&D at all competently, you’re no dummy.

Most importantly, I realized there were other people like me.

Of course, now, with the rise of the Internet and internet culture. we are all aware that there are millions of us nerds out there and that there is a vast and varied geek subculture that supports us in our nerdity.

But my revelation would have come in 1987 or so, so all of that hadn’t happened yet.

I imagine a lot of my fellow geeks went through a similar journey.

Eh, nerdy kids these days don’t know how good they got it.

Anyhow, enough biography. Let’s address the question : what is a nerd?

I don’t know, but I know one when I see one. Ha ha ha.

First off, we are a subset of the naturally occurring intellectual class. This is the percentage of the population that naturally develops a higher than average IQ and hence does well in school.

Nobody has to create this class of person. The human race seems to simply produce them without the need for any kind of intervention.

Now, whether any given society encourages and/or exploits this higher level of intelligence sadly varies wildly depending on culture, both societal and family.

But that’s outside the scope of this think piece.

Depending on how broadly one defines nerdity, it could be said that all the members of this naturally occurring intellectual class (NOIC?) are nerds of some sort.

But someone bound for law school is not just a “law nerd” by any stretch of the imagination. The line has to be drawn somewhere.

One of the defining characteristics of nerdity is a love for learning and the accumulation of knowledge. Nerds love to know things, and when it’s something they like, like Lord of the Rings, they will want to learn everything there is to know about their fave thing.

I’m not that kind of nerd myself. I’m a lot more omnivorous than that. I take in all kinds of information and it all gets sorted and formatted and reduced to its pure essence and that essence become part of my working model of the world.

There are lots of things I love. Like science and video games, both geeky. But I can’t imagine that making me want to learn everything there is to know about either subject.

I will definitely enjoy learning about them. An article or YouTube video about those subjects has a higher likely of attracting my attention than one about trains.

It’s the obsessive drive to collect that I lack, whether it’s merchandise or trivia. I love to learn and I enjoy having knowledge to draw on, but I get bored far too easily and I am far too restless to stick with even one of my favorite topics for a long time.

So I am more of a generalist. That’s my specialty.

More after the break.


Topic what topic

You have to admit, I kept trying to return to the topic of what a nerd is.

But it’s so hard for me to make the words go where I want them to go. I can’t be restricted to a topic. My mind refuses to be constrained by even its own ideas.

There’s a lesson for me in there somewhere, I think.

Now, there are worse sins than not being able to stick to a point. All that really matters is whether a writer keeps you entertained (or amused or engaged or whatever) with whatever it is they wrote. Whether they prove their thesis or not is secondary.

This was true of some of the columnist of old. Like my hero Dave Barry (sp?). He managed to get to a point where all he had to do was come up with 750 funny and engaging words a day, and everything would be all right.

I want that kind of life. Sure, having to come up with those 750 high quality words every day would be way, way harder than producing 1000 words of my usual drivel, but I know I would be up to the task.

And sure, the fame would be nice, and the money would be very very nice. But what would be the most appealing thing about it to me would be the simplicity of it all.

No more infinite corridor of infinite doors. No more option paralysis. No more constant, gnawing feeling that there’s something I am supposed to be doing and I am not doing it.

Just 750 little words and you’re done for the day. And you know what you’ll be doing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and so on.

That would be amazing.

Piers Anthony, another hero of mine, also talked something similar. He said he got to the point where he felt he owed the word 1000 proofread and edited and polished words a day toward whatever he was working on (and it could be any one of several projects) and as long as he got those words done, all was right in the world.

I wonder if that’s where I got the !K words a day idea?

And most importantly, absolutely nothing could change that obligation. Even if he missed that target 100 days in a row, on day 101 he still owed the world those words. Failure was absolutely no excuse to quit.

And that might seem harsh to some. But to me, it’s genius. Because it changes the equation so that failure is no longer an escape from the problem. In that case, the path of least resistance becomes to just do the damned thing and get it over with so you can do whatever the fuck you want with the rest of your day.

It’s a way around the laziness and procrastination endemic to us creative type people.

Shit. That reminds me. NaNoWriMo is coming up in 5 days and I don’t have an idea for what to write about yet.

I could just improvise my way through it like I did with my previous November novels. There, too, what I ended up writing bore little resemblance to what I had meant to write.

But I still need a good, solid, inspiring point of departure.

Time to start brainstorming!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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