But first, this is stuck in my head :

Anyhow. I had a good and fruitful idea of what to write about tonight, but I forgot it. Which is disappointing, because I had actually managed to remember some of them long enough to write about lately.

But the idea, she is gone, and we must carry on.

Been pondering the central problem of nerdity today, which is that non-nerds have this whole area of awareness that we lack, namely social context. This awareness is so important to human beings that lacking it is almost like having a missing sense.

We are socially blind. And that causes problems.

But what makes it even worse is that we, as a culture. lack both the vocabulary and the consciousness to even talk about what it is we nerds are missing. The people who have the social sense don’t know it – the fish don’t know they’re wet – and the people who lack it obviously cannot perceive what they are missing either.

And so when people try to explain why something we did was wrong, they inevitably fail because they presuppose our having this social sense and so to us, their explanations can sound like either total nonsense or like they are trying to trick us into feeling bad by invoking some mystical sixth sense they say they have but cannot explain.

And of course they cannot explain it because they have this sense and we don’t. It’s like trying to explain the color yellow to someone born blind. It would take someone of extraordinary insight and articulancy to even get the basic concepts across.

Know anyone like that? Hint : You do.

Who knows, maybe my destiny is to do for nerds what Temple Grandin did for autism. Bridge the gap with words from my unique perspective as someone who is part of the problem and can see the problem clearly and yet also has the necessary detachment and articulacy to diagnose and describe it.

Oh look, another potential career. I will put it with the rest.

Most of us nerds have very painful memories of ending up “in trouble” or otherwise ending up at the short end of the social stick, with people glaring at us and mad at us and everything, for reasons people either cannot explain or whose explanations do not make sense to us because they refer to things we do not comprehend and which seem to us to be either fictional or the very least arbitrary.

And so a lot of people of my ilk conclude that people are irrational. unfair, and untrustworthy. What else can you think about people who keep getting angry about things you cannot perceive and have to take their word that it even exists?

This is, however, a fundamentally irrational conclusion because it presupposes some sort of conspiracy to hurt the nerd personally by punishing them for random and unpredictable things, and that assumption is laughably enormous and not even vaguely likely to be true.

Trust me : you are not that important to people.

What they are asking of you is neither arbitrary nor cruel and it certainly isn’t part of some effort to make you feel bad for no good reason. It’s the exact same things that they expect from everyone else. And most people have it,. at least to some degree, and so expecting it from you is mistaken but it is not irrational.

See, ours is an invisible disability. So invisible that most people don’t even know it exists and those who do don’t necessarily understand it. Worse, it is often as invisible to us as it is to others, and so there is this enormous gap between the nerd world and the mundane world filled with mutual ignorance and misunderstanding.

This is a very hard topic to discuss with my fellow nerds as it cuts right through to some of the most painful memories they (and I) have and the way they adapted to cope with those painful memories.

Why? Because my theories on the subject lead inevitably to the conclusion that in those painful moments, the nerd in question was, in a sense. at fault.

Not morally, of course, or even intellectually. It as their fault only in the sense that it is them who has the problem and not the world, and therefore it is them who has to change to adapt to the world, not the world that has to be adapted for them.

After all, if a blind person demanded that the entire world be changed so that they can navigate it as well as a sighted person, without needing a cane or a dog or a knowledge of Braille or anything, we would think that was pretty absurd.

But the thing is. the decision that it is the world that is at fault, while fundamentally irrational, is absolutely necessary for most of us when faced with the problem of a world that expects of us something we cannot even see.

Without that coping mechanism. ours would be a truly terrifying world filled with invisible dangers and undetectable hazards.

Which, come to think of it, is how a lot of us feel about the world.

So of course. we very often conclude that the world is crazy and that only in our highly intellectual worlds of fandoms and conventions and a relatively lack of expectation to conform to these invisible rules does the world make sense at all.

That’s certainly how I feel about it. Science fiction conventions are the places where I feel the most confident and free. Dealing with my fellow nerds is easy for me.

It’s normal people who freak me out.

So because this line of thinking of mine goes against said vitally needed coping mechanism, my fellow nerds’ reactions to them can be very strong, even extreme.

And it amuses me to note that in the past, I have reacted exactly like the clueless nerd that I am and been all, “What? Why are people so mad? What did I do wrong?”.

But I have grown and learned since then, and now I am very careful about to whom and how I even bring the subject up, and when I do, I know to expect considerable blowback (to put it mildly).

Which means that I have learned to be less of a clueless nerd.

And who knows? Maybe you can too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.