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.

Being Smiley

At church this past Sunday, I was far too occupied with addressing technical matters to get very much from the spiritual message of the day, but one thing did penetrate into my mind and linger. It was something about smiling at people, and thanking them for smiling at you if they do that. I think all this was supposed to be very good, but I'm not entirely sure about all of that. I was rather anxious at the time it was said.

Even so, smiles were on my mind recently. Like anyone (and perhaps even more than most), I find smiles difficult to fake or to create in response to nothing. I've been told lately that my face is not incredibly expressive. Even when I see a moment when I'd like to smile, I find myself struggling to come up with a convincing one. I feel like I contort my face in such a way that you'd think I didn't know what a smile was supposed to look like. At such moments, I feel like Nixon or Mitt Romney. Still, I try to do that, but I think I end up looking creepy.

Misery Loves Misery

Following current events is an essential component of being informed, but it frequently comes at the expense of morale. Each days leaves me more knowledgeable about the sorry state of affairs. There are consistently new depths plumbed in exploration of the human condition, and all too seldom are there any new heights to balance them out. Something that's been interesting to learn is how little people desire to be secure against emotional and mental offense; indeed, they seem to seek out and embrace such outrages.

Far be it for me to suggest that there's nothing to be offended by: if you're not mad, you're not paying attention. Even so, one can see people performing magic tricks of outrage daily. The meaning of the word 'scandal' seems to have been entirely debased or lost altogether. They once applied to shocking outrages of earth-shaking significance. The Pentagon Papers and Watergate were the real deal. The "unsafe at any speed" Corvair and the poisoned Tylenol meant something. Society got a taste for it, I guess- started to pine for it every day- now we desperately scrape for something to make due with.