20151021.0624

I wrote yesterday about feeling some disconnection from the nerdiness of my earlier life. That is, I no longer focus on the things I did as a younger person, at least not to nearly the same extent as I once did, and I feel some sense of loss that I no longer do so. It is as if a large part of my identity has fallen away or slipped away, and not because I set it aside (as is true of other things from my youth), but because I stopped nurturing it. The current week does much to remind me of this, of course, with tickets to the new film going on sale yesterday and today being Back to the Future Day. (I am less annoyed by the lack of hoverboards than by the lack of many other things--namely portable cold fusion.) But it is something that, despite my late realization of it, has likely been the case for some time, now.

That being less of a nerd (measured by open passion for a thing indicated by fixation on that thing and the display thereof) now than I used to be is somewhat disturbing proceeds potentially from several causes. There is some sense that I owe what I have to my nerdiness; Dungeons & Dragons did help me get into graduate school, and it was in graduate school that I met the Mrs. It was also in graduate school that I honed the critical faculties that have served me in my teaching (problematic as that construction may well be) and in my freelance work. (I have another piece in progress even now; work continues.) In addition, I have enjoyed myself as I have pursued several of my nerdier hobbies. I consider these good things. For me to have let my nerdiness lapse, then, comes off in some ways as failing to discharge an obligation, and I think it understandable that that would sit ill.

As I think on it, there is also a sense of having missed out. I spent my youth as a nerd, and I suffered for it (although, again, I did little to avoid that suffering and much to attract and enhance it). Now, in the United States, with nerdiness (at least in some forms) enjoying some overt social cachet, I am no longer a nerd (or at least not the kind of nerd that is valorized in popular culture--ineptly and inaccurately, as I have remarked). I am not in a position to benefit from current trends, at least not in my personal life, and something in me chafes at that. Something in me says that, were I a better nerd, I might be getting somewhere. I know that it either lies or is wrong, but knowing that does not silence the voice that says such things. I have been a nerd; I should know by now that knowing a thing does not make the world easier.

I suppose I will have more to say on the topic. There is still much to discuss.