SCA and nerd culture
I had this notion recently that my life was deficient in whimsy. I guess I was feeling a surfeit of plodding rationality--work, bills, earnest self-improvement--and felt the lure of the silly and stupid. In response to my overly unwhimsical existence, I began re-evaluating my relationship with Nerd Culture, that constellation of misfit subcultures I have traditionally avoided.

Would I have been happier in high school had I fully embraced my inner nerd? (How "inner" my nerd was to others is a question I'd rather not contemplate.) By embracing my inner nerd, I don't mean simply wandering around high school with spaz hair and clothing that contravened every bit of hard-earned knowledge handed down to teenage boys on how to attract girls.

(To any horny teenage boys out there, know that rule one is, "At least attempt to appear to give a shit about your appearance.")

I was, and am, a huge nerd in many respects, prone to orotund pronouncements about things I don't have any real knowledge about--e.g. the music of John Cage or the legal issues surround abortion--not to mention the use of pompous vocabulary like "orotund." And yet I have never been able to fully embrace any particular aspect of Nerd Culture: Dungeons and Dragons, They Might Be Giants/Weezer, or any activity that involves regularly dressing up in costume. As a huge nerd, I find myself invariably turned off by the presence of groups of other nerds. Is this what it's like to be a self-hating Jew?

Yesterday I began thinking about the Society for Creative Anachronism, those folks who dress up in medieval garb and drink mead and (judging by the one event I stumbled into in college) hook up with other SCA nerds. I looked through the Wikipedia site, finding myself suddenly and surprisingly charmed by the mission of the SCA: "The Middle Ages as they ought to have been." (That is, sans the plague, backbreaking toil, bed bugs, and near universal peonage.) I have known many people who have enjoyed the SCA and probably even learned a lot about history because of it. I found myself mulling over whether the SCA could fill my whimsy gap.

Then I searched Google images for the phrase "Society of Creative Anachronism."



I quickly realized that I am such an over-the-top, self-conscious nerd that the notion that I'm being automatically pegged as the "nerd in the room" would drive me absolutely crazy. To be so fucking out there with your nerdiness that you dress your own children in medieval garb for your Sears family photos? It's beyond any level of insouciance I could muster. If you're a nerd, it takes guts to let your nerd flag fly. Paradoxically, nerdiness and self-confidence seem to merge when pushed far enough.

I don't know if I am insufficiently nerdy or insufficiently self-confident to do the straight up nerd thing to the hilt-- and, in fact, this inability probably represents a strange weakness in my character.