Last night, after we ate avocado salad and watched Transformers, I wrapped Maymay up in my arms and we quietly talked our way to sleep.
“I’ve been thinking about what kind of a geek I am,” I said into his shoulder.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“I mean that I’m not the sort of person who can spend hours in a bookstore or get really psyched up over research or academic papers,” I answered. “And I never really have been, but that’s sort of how I’ve always understood being a geek. I’m much happier to spend that time in an art store or making something, that’s what I’m actually passionate about.”
“That makes sense,” he said mildly, his usual response to my out-loud rambling thoughts.
I thought for a few breaths. “I think I need to redefine my geek identity.”
When I was younger, there was no question that I was a geek, a nerd, and to be such a creature came with a very narrow set of definitions. Among these, wedged between getting good grades, liking Star Trek and wearing doofy glasses (all of which I did), was the silent insistence that geeks and nerds date other geeks and nerds. If, of course, we were lucky enough to date at all. One of the reasons I took to ren faires so gleefully was because they broke this mold in a new way; not by hiding my geekhood, but by redefining it as part of my sex appeal. Unfortunately I never managed to meet a nerdy boy in a leather jacket on a white horse while I was there.
Though I never specifically pursued the male nerd image the way I did white knights and rebels, smarts have always appealed to me. And although very little of the imagery around nerdiness really got me going, I did harbor some long-standing and desperate crushes on very smart boys. I suspect one of the reasons they lasted as long as they did was because there was nothing in the stereotype to mess with my underlying preference for power exchange. The nerds of my younger days were never gallant, chivalrous, or sassy, but they were vulnerable. Shy. Wanting.
On a personal identity note, although I have since learned how many different ways a person can be smart, when I was younger being “smart” matched up perfectly with the kind of people who do spend hours in bookstores and jones over research. So though I never really adapted to this kind of geekery fully, I faked it stunningly well. And it’s taken me ages to work my way back out of that fake, and even longer to be able to say, honestly and sincerely, that sometimes bookstores bore me. That research fails to thrill me. That I would rather be somewhere else. And had I known that ten years ago, it might have changed those crushes. It certainly would have changed me.
There was only one problem, I realized, as I hit my 18th birthday with nary a boyfriend in sight. Most boys are not white knights, rebels, or nerds. Most boys are just, well, boys.
