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THE COOL NERD MANIFESTO

I’m a nerd, but I’m a cool nerd, and I wrote a manifesto. It’s so cool it’ll liquify your brain, and I put it in bulletpoint form because that’s what cool nerds do.

* Intellectual curiosity is in. This means, even if you already know lots of useless crap, you always want to know more. If someone knows about stuff you don’t know, a dorky nerd would fake it and try to come of as knowing about stuff. A cool nerd is impressed by others’ knowledge, and is excited to hear something he didn’t already know because it happens so rarely.

* Self deprecation is cool, but only if it’s obvious that you actually are cool but you are pretending to be uncool and insulting yourself might even be taken for sarcasm. For example, if you say “I acknowledge it’s geeky to know this, but guess what! I know who the Captain of the Enterprise was before Captain Kirk took command, isn’t that cool?” That’s cool nerd self deprecation, because obviously everyone would want to know this information. But, if someone else says (after you explain that it was Captain Pike, and that he will also be in the new Trek movie opening on May (which of course you are going to dress up for)), “that’s so dorky. You’re such a goober,” You don’t agree with them and nervously push up your glasses. Oh, no, instead, if you’re a cool nerd, you give them the dorks are not nerds lecture (see below) and hopefully in the process drive them to drinking.

* When in doubt, let your enthusiasm carry you forward: People love it when you get excited about stuff, and the more obscure the stuff that excites you the better. So, if Biff starts talking about how chicks dig him because he can smash beer cans on his forehead, the cool nerd gets excited along with him and studies his technique in order to engineer a formula that will make him be able to do it without leaving a mark (and thus get even more chicks, who will bring along hot chick cool nerd friends who will ask you how you did it).

* The knowledge that, eventually, you’ll be the master of all you survey means you don’t get nervous very often in most social situations. Nerds, by definition, know a lot about stuff that most people don’t like to deal with, which means people dump all the work on the nearest nerd they can find. But a cool nerd sees this as an opportunity to use those nerd skills to gather all the knowledge, and thus all the power. Benjamin Franklin is a good example. Think he got nervous when people called him Mr. Baldy four-eyes? No, of course not. He was like “I discovered electricity, ho! Plus, I’m the original blogger. That’s right, who’s your daddy?”

* The cool nerd can make anything sound interesting. Things are more complicated today than they were, for example, in the past. That means by default people will tolerate more nerdiness if they know you can do things like unfreeze their computer or get them off the no-fly list. But the cool nerd goes one step further. He’ll actually tell you how he did it, and do it in a way that makes you want to hear more (then he’ll write a blog about it and get massive paypal money because of google adsense. Not right away, maybe, but it will happen. Oh yes, it will happen!).

THE COOL NERD REVELATION

Let me tell you how this all came about. I have noticed an uptick in the number of people throwing about words like “dork,” “geek,” and “nerd.” I was at the Sawgrass Mall, and I even heard a teenage girl refer to a teenage boy as “goober.”

Let me insert parenthetically (I use “parenthetically” here in a figurative sense, because, as you can tell, I am not actually using parenthesis. Actually, I am using parenthesis to insert this little thought about the use of the term “parenthetically,” but not for the idea I introduced above by saying I was going to insert it parenthetically. By the way, have you ever noticed that people put up two fingers on each side of their head to indicate “in quotes” which is supposed to mean they are being ironic or even making fun of the term they are saying while their fingers are up? But they never make little C’s with their hands to indicate they are inserting a “parenthetical” thought. That’s because they aren’t cool!).

My parenthetical thought is that if you use the term goober, then you have an even higher level of social incompetence than the person to whom you are hurling the supposed insult. Therefore, it is best not to use the word. I mean, really, what kind of dork would call someone a goober?

Anyway, being at the Sawgrass mall is always a traumatic experience, and as we all know traumatic experiences lead to artistic insight (just ask Van Gogh. Guy cut off his ear just so he could be inspired. That’s why he did it, right? For the artistic insight? What a Fracking dork goober. GOSH!).

Usually, if my wife suggests we go to the Sawgrass mall, I run away screaming. This is an outlet mall located in Western Broward County (Broward County is the county where Ft. Lauderdale, formerly of Spring Break fame, is located. It’s just North of Miami-Dade County, which is where Miami Beach, currently of hurricane/wild party fame, is located). Not only is it an outlet mall, which already makes the average husband nervous, but it is a massive behemoth, with strikes terror into the hearts of millions of husbands.

It’s more than a mile long, and shaped to look like an alligator. I am not sure of the benefit of shaping it like an alligator, unless you expect a lot of people to visit by helicopter, in which case they will (I suppose) think to themselves how cool it is to shop at such a cleverly designed outlet mall as they order the pilot to land next to the snout. But there are no helipads that I know of on the property, so the whole thing is still a mystery to me.

Where was I? Oh, yes, I usually run away screaming, but sometimes my wife fools me into agreeing to go shopping with her in this little slice of hell on earth. For example, she’ll use suggestive hypnosis techniques. Sometimes, she just says “do you love me” and looks all cute and my heart melts and I just have to do it because I want her to be happy. Or, as in this last case, she said we were going to the mall to see the Watchmen movie, and not to do shopping of any kind.

I saw my mistake once I realized we had to walk through the whole mall just to get to the movie theater. It’s like Lucy and Charlie Brown and that stupid football.

As I was sitting down to recover from my shock, I heard the above mentioned goober reference. It got me thinking. On facebook, one of my friends said on her little update thingy that she was watching the Sunday morning political shows, and how great that was, and someone responded by saying she was a dork. But being into esoteric, generally intellectual pursuits is not dorky, it’s geeky. Dorks have a lack of social skills. Geeks are into esoteric, generally intellectual pursuits. It has nothing to do with a lack of social skills. A nerd, by the way, is a person who is a geek, but in more than one field. Of course, this is common knowledge, so you already know this, but I like beating dead horses, so let me expound upon this theme with painful detail.

I went to Dictionary.com for help defining the difference between geek, nerd, and dork, but they got it completely wrong, which shows they are a bunch of goobers. So here are my definitions:

Dork: a person lacking or completely devoid of social skills.

Geek: a person with a more intense and highly developed interest in (and perhaps even skill or knowledge of), a subject matter than the rest of the population.

Nerd: A geek, but with interests and/or skills and knowledge in a wide variety of subjects

As you can see, the geeks and nerd definitions make no reference to social skills. Thus, you could be a cool geek or a cool nerd, or you could be a dorky nerd or geek. The one has nothing to do with the other.

Of course, if your geeky interest tends to bore or annoy people, you will have to have extra good social skills to avoid having your interests turn you into a dork. For example, if you are fascinated by stamp collecting, and you talk obsessively about it at a cocktail party, you’ll likely 1) drive everyone to drink way more than they should, or 2) cause everyone to avoid you or 3) both.

But, if you have the social skills to make it interesting – maybe you are the life of the party or you have a quick wit or great melons or something, then you can talk about stamps and everyone will want to listen. You’ll make it seem cool. Not because your interests are totally cool, but because you have the social skills to make it seem cool.

This, by the way, is why nobody but other physicists understand Chaos Theory (the theory, not the T.V. show). The people who are supposed to explain it to the rest of us spent so much time learning how the theory works, they didn’t have time to attend toastmasters classes.

As a result, when they go on Larry King live and try to explain it, your brain shuts down and the only way to wake it back up is with a shot of tequila with a beer chaser (now that I think about it, I find myself resorting to that just about any time I watch Larry King live. Does he have to sink that far into his shoulder blades? C’mon, man, it’s freaky!).

If you are a geek or a nerd, it is a good idea to memorize the above definitions. It’s a great way to make anyone who calls you a dork to regret having done so. If you play your cards right, they’ll regret having talked to you at all, much less calling you a dork, and they won’t dump all that work on you like they were planning.

THEM: You’re such a dork
YOU: technically speaking, I’m not a dork. I’m more like a geek.
THEM: Same thing
YOU: That’s a common misunderstanding. But don’t let your ignorance bother you. You see, dork indicates a lack of social skill. Geek indicates interest in an uncommon area. Obviously, I have highly developed social skills, so I’m not a dork.
THEM: Obviously.
YOU: But I do enjoy a rather obscure interest.
THEM: You don’t say.
YOU: Which makes me a geek.
THEM: But-
YOU: Nevertheless, I’m sure you agree that when I was discussing the fascinating conflict in grammatical syntax between rational construction and intuitive construction in regards to artificially created languages such as Klingon and Elvish, I was also showing a highly sophisticated level of social interaction.
THEM: Um… I have to go.
YOU: Okay, but give me your email. That way if I think of any other interesting theories, I can share them with you.
THEM: No. Get away from me, you goober.

So it seems like there are a lot more geeks around than there used to be. And they are less touchy about being called geek. There don’t seem to be a lot more nerds, although the ones that do exist seem to be less dorky. You’ve always had your super nerds – Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin – the people who are so good in so many fields that people make movies about them regardless how how annoying they were in real life. However, the normal nerds – about the same number of them.

But within the population of nerds, there has been a rise in the number of cool nerds. Those are people who are nerds – geeks but in many fields – who also have higher than average social skills. Bloggers, motivational speakers, evil computer geniuses, history channel documentary hosts, they haven’t reduced their nerdiness, but they have upped the ante on the cool factor. Hence, the cool nerd manifesto.

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That’s the end of the original post.  This was one of the first posts I wrote where I got comments.  I love comments (hint, hint…), so I was really excited.  Here was the first comment:

Best god damned analysis on dork v geek v nerd I’ve ever read. I will now use this as an authoritative informational source and cite to it accordingly whenever the need arises…

p.s. ben franklin was a pimp, too, but everybody know this

And then another comment was:

Ben Franklin was the founding pimp