Embracing Your Inner Nerd

I come from a long line of nerds. In my family, we were so nerdy we didn't even know what 'nerd' meant. And most of the time, excluding the hell of our teenage years, we didn't really care.

Wikipedia (See? Nerd-like, I have provided a link) have a good definition for nerd: a term often bearing a derogatory connotation or stereotype, that refers to a person who passionately pursues intellectual activities, esoteric knowledge, or other obscure interests that are age-inappropriate rather than engaging in more social or popular activities...a nerd is often excluded from physical activity and considered a loner by peers, or will tend to associate with like-minded people.

Obscure, age-inappropriate interests was us to a T. My sisters and I were, over the years, totally obsessed with the following subjects: Vikings, Romans, Germans, Spanish, Chinese, buttons and stamps (we had massive collections),Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, cats, Victorian literature, and poetry.

Not surprisingly, my sisters and I had a tough time finding like-minded people. We had a few friends, but like us, they tended to be nerdy too. My sisters were a little more athletic than I was, but that isn't saying much. I was the pathetic kid who always got picked last at every ball sport; in fact, I often caused quarrels -- "That's not fair--we had her last!" -- "No you didn't, we did!" while I scowled and stared at the ground. Middle school and high school were no fun at all. I'd go through labor again before a week's worth of junior high, and believe me, that's saying a lot.

My parents were both spectacular nerds. They got married very late, in the early 1950s, meeting through a Christian match-making service where they were able to view each other's particulars on file cards. My father was impressed that my mother liked poetry and was learning Spanish; my mother was impressed that my father read books and did not drink or smoke. She overlooked the fact that he did not have a job; he overlooked the fact that her height was listed as 6' 2". (The agency had made a clerical error: she had told them 62 inches in order to avoid the shame of having to say "five foot two").

As kids, I loved my parents, but I was embarrassed to death by them. I was embarrassed by their disparate heights: my father, rail thin and just under 6' 4", stood over a head taller than my slightly pudgy mother. I was also embarrassed by the fact that our parents were more than a decade older than our peers' parents and had met through a match-making agency, which struck me as terribly shameful. The younger, trendier parents of our friends had met at dance halls or universities or clubs. If any of them had met each other through a match-making agency, they were too savvy to tell anyone. So was I. For some reason, this question came up a number of times; I always half-lied and mumbled that they'd shared a common love of Spanish, books, and poetry.

Nerds tend to give rise to nerds: my parents were so old that I hardly had a chance to meet my grandparents let alone get to know them, but from the sound of things, they were mostly nerds too. Strangely enough, though, I married a non-nerd; I think something in me yearned to even out the gene pool. My husband grew up athletic, sociable, and quite gregarious.

The gene pool evening out didn't really work: both of our daughters take after me.

My oldest daughter knows the Chinese celestial gods and the seven celestial warriors for each god. She can bore you senseless with fan fiction and used to entertain me for hours with passages from The Lord of the Rings. But she has inherited a little of my husband's sporty non-nerdiness: she's a great swimmer and socially gregarious.

My youngest daughter can sit in her room downloading anime fanfiction until the cows come home. She can bend your ear about things like the history of tea in China, the meanings and origins of different clan seals in Japan, and the Korean syllabary. She is learning Korean, Chinese, and Japanese, and enjoys tutoring me in Turkish (the blind leading the blind maybe, but it's still impressive). She knows the Turkish national anthem and can belt it out on the piano; she knows all the capitals of just about every country on earth, including Kiribati and Sierra Leone. She can tell you all about the hexidecimal representation of color (please don't ask me) and has a total of eleven Yahoo accounts. She has lectured her friends on the differences between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (language and nationality) and complained at a restaurant that had the characters for 'Shanghai' (上海) upside-down. She loves to design her own desktop background, and at age 9, was able to tell her business management teacher the keyboard shortcuts for 'copy', 'paste', and 'cut'. And she couldn't ride uphill on a bicycle if her life depended on it.

Sometimes I feel like we ought to be doing more interesting things. Surely a teenager should be socializing and having fun with her peers? On New Years Eve, my husband and I were shattered, having spent the entire day teaching. "Do you want to do anything special?" I asked our youngest, thinking she might like to go out.

She looked at me shyly. "Want to sporcle?" (Sporcle, in case you don't know it, is pretty much Nerd Central, along with Free Rice.)

And so we sporcled out the old year, together, my girl and me. We had a blast too: African capitals; countries with K; recognizing countries by shape. Ahhh...

What can I say? Like mother, like daughter.