20151020.0636

I have no witty shower-thoughts today as yesterday. I have the memory of having had such thoughts last night or yesterday sometime, but I do not recall what they were. It frustrates me, but it is as it is.

I am given to understand that a new trailer for the upcoming Star Wars film is out and that tickets for it have begun to go on sale. Somehow, I doubt I will be able to avail myself of them in any real way, and certainly not for opening day. I am not entirely certain where I will be at that point, so I dare not look at buying tickets, and given the constraints of supply and demand, I am not at all certain that tickets remain affordable for the event. I am sure that I will see the movie at some point, and I may well even see it in a theater, but I am not as concerned with it as I once would have been.

That I am not is something I realized last night as I was thinking on a number of things. There was a time when I was passionately obsessed about things such as Star Wars; I have not made a secret of being a nerd ("Dungeons & Dragons got me into graduate school."), and there is no real way I would be able to do so in this webspace or in real life. My sympathies still lie with the nerd community, insofar as it can be described as a unitary entity; I suffered enough for it in earlier years (in large part, admittedly, because I made myself merit suffering), and memories thereof linger. But I am not nearly so much a part of that community now as I used to be. Certainly, I cannot devote the resources to participation in it that I once could, given bills to pay and the welcome obligations of family. I still find myself somewhat entranced by lore, by ferreting out the minutiae of things to understand them better, and the skills I developed in doing so find themselves put to use as my work continues, but I am less and less prone to devoting them to recreation. I am less and less apt to turn them to nerdiness.

In some ways, I experience that change as a loss. A certain satisfaction inheres in mastering bodies of knowledge, after all, and there were bodies of knowledge I had mastered as I engaged more and more fully in my nerdy pursuits. And I still work to master knowledge, to be sure, but no longer attending so much to emergent popular culture (I qualify because the freelance work does still embed me in ongoing mainstream pop culture, at least in some senses), no longer attending to the arcane information associated with nerdiness as I once did, leaves a vague sense of being unfulfilled. There is something missing.

It is something I shall have to consider more fully. I think there is more to say about the matter.