Welcome to The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century. I’ll assume that you came here from the link in the Slashdot article, Why Nerds are Unpopular (900 comments and counting when last I checked — be sure to check out the discussion and also the original Paul Graham article). Stay a while!
(Here’s one reason to stay: my photos from the Naked News party.)
According to an article in USA Today, here’s what’s going into the gift bags that will be given to performers and presenters at the Grammy Awards this Sunday:
“A-listers” like Springsteen, Nelly or that very cute Nora Jones will also get to select items from the gift lounge, where they can choose from goodies like a $500 Stetson cowboy hat, Safilo eyewear ($350 to $750) and Jabra wireless headsets at $300.
It’s enough to make you want to fire up Kazaa Lite and download everything — even stuff you hate — just out of spite.
…I have a meeting with Syd the accountant and all kinds of programming work to do. More later.
One of the themes of the popular television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer is that the monsters and demons of high school are worse than the vampires and demons that Buffy fights. Buffy can dispatch the vampires with a quick stake through the heart, but she can’t do that with the Heathers who constitute the school’s social elite.
If you were like me in high school, with glasses, braces, possessing an apititude for computers, the sciences and writing, and a Dungeon Master of renown — you probably got the crap beaten out of you and then stuffed into a locker by some goombah on the football team. Although each of us handled it differently — I became a master of Schmooze Fu, others withdrew into themselves, and a few either ended their lives, had it ended for them or sought revenge on their tormentors — we’ve all paid the price of being different.
Ubergeek Paul Graham has taken a detour from his usual topics — the ubergeeky programming langauges Lisp and combatting spam — to write the essay Why Nerds Are Unpopular. It’s a lengthy but engaging writeup of that chamber of horrors we call high school and why being smarter than the average bear is more of a liability than an asset during that stage in life. Here’s an excerpt:
Because I didn’t fit into this world, I thought that something must be wrong with me. I didn’t realize that the reason we nerds didn’t fit in was that we were a step ahead. We were already thinking about the kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others.
We were a bit like an adult would be if he were thrust back into middle school. He wouldn’t know the right clothes to wear, the right music to like, the right slang to use. He’d seem to the kids a complete alien. The thing is, he’d know enough not to care what they thought. We had no such confidence.
A lot of people seem to think it’s good for smart kids to be thrown together with “normal” kids at this stage of their lives. Perhaps. But in at least some cases the reason the nerds don’t fit in actually is that everyone else is crazy. I remember sitting in the audience at a “pep rally” at my high school, watching as the cheerleaders threw an effigy of an opposing player into the audience to be torn to pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre tribal ritual.
(I should scan some photos from my high school yearbook and post them. Brrrrrr.)
I skipped out on yesterday’s peace rallies, not because I’m gung-ho for an invasion of Iraq (I’m unconvinced of the need to attack Iraq, although I might go along with invading Saudi Arabia), but for reasons that Peter Bagge illustrated so eloquently in Confessions of a Reluctant Anti-warrior. The simplistic and muddled logic, the attempt to throw in every cause, having to breathe the same oxygen as some of the local A.N.S.W.E.R. folk, knee-jerk anti-Americanism, a required blind allegiance to the Palestinians’ cause and the hooligans who will attempt to destroy a Starbucks today and then filling out job applications there next week.
(I know of which I speak, especially the bit about the muddled logic: I’m expecting a lot of the not-so-smart mob from Reclaim the Streets to show.)
At the same time, I find the hawks equally repugnant, what with their equating of protest with treason, the thinly veiled racism and their broad-stroke blaming of “The Left” for everything.
Bagge’s right — where is the “they can all go to Hell booth”? Count me in for that!
I’d been on the trailing edge all night. I arrived at Dorian’s birthday party just as everyone was about to leave, at Lederhosen Lucil’s show at the El Mocambo about five minutes before she headed home and at the Velvet Underground fifteen minutes after most of the gang from the Thirsty People of Toronto left. “You missed most of them; they’re already gone,” said Nikki, who placed a free shooter in front of me. It was green and minty — creme de menthe and creme de je ne sais quoi.
I ran into one of the very few I-should’ve-asked-her-out-when-I-had-the-chance people in my life. She was there with her boyfriend, and every compliment — “I saw you on Love by Design, you were hilarious, you totally should’ve gotten the girl”, “You’ve lost weight and you look even cuter!” — was like a sharpened shard of prison lunch tray jammed into my heart. I reminded myself that I’d had an absolute blast the night before, so my net weekend so far was still far ahead of the average “Gee honey, wanna see what’s on the ‘new releases’ shelf at Blockbuster?”
Luckily, the Velvet is well within my stomping grounds, so I had a chance to chat with some other people I knew, including Jacqui from the TorFun mailing list and a number of people I know from busking. One in particular, a very cute woman tapped me on the shoulder as I was passing by the DJ booth. She was a familiar face but one I hadn’t seen in a while. She wore a red strapless dress and a string of valentine’s heart lights around her neck. The wire from the lights ran to her purse, where I assume there was a battery pack. It was cute and geeky all at once.
“Hey there, Accordion Man,” she said. “That thing makes you very easy to spot. Is that why you carry it around?”
“Hello, Heart Girl,” I said. “The accordion’s useful that way, yes.”
(By the way, the score is now Accordion Guy: 2, HelloMyNameIsScott.com: bzzzzzzzt!)
“Why’d you cut your hair?” she asked. “I loved it when it was long and you had the big forelock.”
Pleasant conversation ensued — I will never tire of hearing girls say “I’ve always loved the accordion” — right up to the point where she said “I remember the exact date we met. May 24th.”
Thank you, magic accordion, I thought. Tomorrow, I’ll clean you with real Windex and not the cheap generic brand.
“The day after that, I met the love of my life.”
Like I said, I’d been running late all night. Why stop now?
A linebacker walked towards us. I can’t say for certain that he’d ever been a linebacker in his life, but he could’ve been.
“This is my brother,” she said. “He’s come here to visit from Vancouver. I haven’t seen him in such a long time.” She did the introductions and then excused herself to go to the bathroom.
Big Brother put a beefy bear paw on my should and said “I was watching you. So, you like my sister, huh?”
I am the descendant of diplomats, and genetically-passed instinct told me to not say the truth: Why, actually, I’m having this fantasy where I’m covering her with ice cream and biting her bum. I thought I’d save the kinky stuff for later.
“I know her from before. I played some tunes for her last spring.”
“Oh. Good.”
That’s when I called it a night.
David and Irving, the guys behind Promise’s dance party events, inform me that a club scene for a movie will be shot tonight at Alto Basso (near the corner of College Street West and Grace). Naturally, they’ll need people to make the place look full. If you’d like to be in the movies, put on your best clubwear and be there by 9:30 tonight.
