So for a while now I’ve sort of felt like I was cool for a nerd and nerdy for a cool person (well, I would never categorize myself as a cool person, so I guess tie goes to “nerd.”) But something occurred to me today: I bet everyone feels this way.
I mean, I feel like I have some objective evidence. I have some modicum of social skills. I bathe regularly. I can carry on a conversation about pretty much everything. I read and write and use English good. So that’s the cool for a nerd part. The nerdy for a cool person part is probably a better and more even-handed case: I like math (like, a lot), I view the world through an economist’s lens, I play World of Warcraft* (it’s true), I play(ed) bridge, I hate bars and clubs (and feel really uncomfortable in them).
* – I’m not sure this is as good an indicator as you might think. Tennis player Taylor Dent was interviewed about his rehab and confessed that he basically spent all his time playing WoW when he was incapacitated.
But I’m sure everyone has a laundry list of half-cool, half-nerdy features. I guess ultimately this is probably one of those universal attitudes — I wonder if there are other dichotomies that people tend to classify themselves as splitting, though. It seems like most times people if anything like to view themselves as extreme or at least aligned, for instance with things like Democrat/Republican, good/bad at parallel parking (I classify myself as average, for what that’s worth), like/dislike Food X, indie/yuppie (I could be wrong about this; I feel like not just I but many of my friends also self-view at the boundary), airline preferences, pack rat/minimalist, romantic/player, etc..
After sifting through mountains of awful okcupid profiles, though, it seems like an astonishing number of apparently-cool people classify themselves as “kind of nerdy,” and vice versa. I wonder if in both cases that’s just generic self-deprecation or if they actually think they’re on this boundary.
