is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Cuidado: Nerd On Board.
When I was in the sixth grade, I was a total nerd. I am not suggesting that I am no longer a total nerd. It's just that when I was in the sixth grade, I was a nerd in all innocence. What I mean is that I had no idea that I was a nerd, nor that being a nerd was something someone might not want to be. I just had my enthusiasms, and I went with them.
For instance, cats. I really loved cats, and I read all the books in the school library and the public library about cats. I knew everything about how to tell when cats are sick and when they are healthy. I knew just what you could and couldn't hope to train a cat to do or not do. I knew all the cat breeds. And I was very willing to help other people get to know these things. One thing I would do was volunteer to do displays on the display board in the hallway outside the school library. So I would draw intricate color-marker drawings of a selection of my favorite breeds, and also make signs and charts describing what the characteristics and pros/cons of the different breeds were. This would take hours, but I would never think of it as hours, or as work. It is not hard at all, I'm guessing, for any of us to summon up a visual image of me doing all this cat-tastic activity, especially me spending the hours to make the display on the bulletin board... summon up that image and what do you get? Movie about a doomed nerd.
So I did displays. About cats. And also about the biographies of famous women like Helen Keller or Clara Barton or Florence Nightingale, etc. (After the cat books were all digested, I moved on to biographies.) Nancy Drew in my spare time. I had no idea that reading was dorky.
But lots of kids of my age at that time were already aware of what it means to be a nerd or a dork. I was not. In fact I was still not aware of all this two years later in the 8th grade, when I lost my best friend because of my nerdiness. Becky and I had been best friends since I had arrived at the elementary school we attended together in third grade. We were very close best friends, and she shared many of my enthusiasms. We even had a club called J&B Incorporated, and we had pencils and Tshirts made. (Nerd! Dork! Todd Solondz could write a screenplay about me, and then I would, as with all his movies, neglect to go see it! Maybe I could get Daniel Clowes to do it instead? Then I maybe I could watch.)
At some point, however, Becky grew up and I did not. This is not to say that she all of a sudden became mature and left me immature. It's just that the form of her immature behavior changed from mine, and hers suddenly included an intense awareness that she and I were not popular. In fact, we were nerds. That situation was unlivable for her.
She desperately wanted to do something about that. I didn't see why it mattered. Turns out, she could only become popular by betraying me and being really mean to me along with a bunch of other girls for a very long time. That made me grow up in some ways, almost overnight.
I'm not blaming Becky for anything. I still have the note that she and a bunch of other mean girls wrote to me in 8th grade. And now when I occasionally get it out and read it to friends, we all laugh with the long loud laughter of "oh. my. god. i. am. so. glad i am not a tween anymore!". It's all OK.
(However, that betrayal was formative for me in ways that sometimes I have to admit to myself when I catch myself constantly expecting other people not to want me around. Even when there is no evidence that they might not want me around. Even if all the evidence points to them loving to have me around. We are all crazy in our idiosyncratic ways, and often our crazinesses are formed by events that we no longer even think about, and that, if we did think about them, we would refuse to allow to have power over us. But that's the thing about other people and their behaviors. They have powers over us that we cannot control, for better and for worse.)
I still have my enthusiasms. And, to tell you the truth, anyone who ends up being one of my good friends for a long period of time, that person, he or she also still has her or his enthusiasms. There is nothing more sad than an adult who has given up on such things. When you meet people who seem flattened out, like a dead tree stump that isn't even painted gold or anything, there you are encountering an adult who has lost all connection to his or her dork-ass enthusiasms. (I hope Becky got hers back. I no longer know where she is, though I occasionally wonder what happened to her. I left Cleveland Heights, Ohio in 1980 and didn't really ever go back.)
I thought of this today as I mocked my dad for his intense interest in explaining to me what is meant by having a guitar tuned to open D. Apparently it changes EVERYTHING about certain very important rock songs. He was very animated in his explanation, and he actually was lamenting that he no longer keeps a guitar in the trunk of the work-car that he drives around SF. Because he was fully ready to make me step outside Burger Joint and observe him as he stood in the street strumming a guitar to show me all this. And you just know that he would be making GUITAR FACE, too! And that, my friend, is some enthusiasm. I hope you have some of your own.
You'll note that I was mocking my dad for his. It's just the way it is. We will, on occasion, be mocked for the things that also make us lovable. Dad said to me, "you always were sassy." And I repeated back to him something he had said to me at the beginning of the lunch in another context (sassy!): "We are all just big versions of the kids we were." He laughed. Most of the mocking I give or receive these days because of enthusiasms is a loving kind of mocking, the kind that appreciates the depth of the commitment to the enthusiasm even when it doesn't share that particular enthusiasm. It's not the mean kind of mocking at all. In 6th grade I didn't know anything about mocking or being mocked, at least not for liking CATS or MAGIC MARKERS, i.e., for being enthusiastic about SOMETHING in the WORLD. I was oblivious. Then I became aware, and it was painful. Then, over time, others' mocking stopped having anything to do with how I made my decisions. And that is at least some part of what it means to be a grown-up! You no longer mock others unless you do so out of love. Or you ignore those who mock you out of something other than love. And hopefully, you'll still be the kind of person who will get mocked for having some nerdtastic attachment to SOMETHING in the WORLD.
6:46 p.m. - October 14, 2005
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