Marginalized By The Marginalized

As I write this, the big Comic-Con event is going on down in San Diego. It is something like Super Bowl Sunday for people who I have always understood to be known as geeks. People will often say "nerd" instead, but to me the two are quite distinct and I don't know how they come to be conflated. A nerd is someone who is exceptionally adept at things like science, math and the like. A geek is someone with an inordinate enthusiasm for almost anything, comic books being a classic example.

Of course, Comic-Con now encompasses virtually anything with at least a tenuous connection to comics, but that's not really what interests me. It's the status of geeks in society, and that of what they love. Stuff that once existed on the margins is now very prominent, and geeks allegedly are no longer excluded from society or subject to the same sort of ill treatment that they once were. I don't exactly know how true that is.

What I know is that when it was relatively uncool to be engaged in such things as video games, I was into them. By the time it all became very fashionable, I had lost interest. I don't know whether there's a connection really, although I will say that I don't much like these things being cool. I don't hate them at all and I certainly don't hate the geeks, but I think I liked it all better the way it was. I liked comics, science fiction and the rest being countercultural, not mainstream.

It's to the point know where awfully attractive women will claim to be geeks or nerds, which I tend to disbelieve. Perhaps there is no good reason to. I'm operating with an old rule book, I suppose, or I'm envious. Perhaps I'm something like the older children in "The Polar Express", no longer able to hear the bell. I don't know quite what it is with me and this stuff, except that it's plain enough that it's not quite my thing.