"Wow, you like Star Wars too?!"

I'm a nerd. Proud one, in fact. I like gadgets, grammar, webcomics, Stumble (stumbleupon.com), internet memes, geek rock, geology, British accents, science fiction and fantasy literature, DC Vertigo, Neil Gaiman, and Joss Whedon. I play instruments most Americans have never heard of (not that that's saying much), and I look forward to school every week. And I'm rather outgoing.

Therefore, I meet a lot of people with similar interests. Techies, Gaiman fans aplenty, a plethora of Whedon Fans, masters of the oud and mandola, geologists, tongue-clucking grammarians, writers by the boatload, and those who follow every last tweet of our beloved Jonathon Coulton (link). If you hear me, nerd folk, clap your hands say Huzzah.

So after meeting all these people while having all these interests, I often run into one trait that throws me for a loop. That is, when a common nerd meets another nerd such as myself with a common interest...and they are taken aback with amazement.

Like ya do, when I detect a nerd in a social setting and want to reach out to them without offering a high five and shouting "LOLOLOLOL DID YOU HEAR THAT BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER IS MAKING A CAMEO IN EVIL DEAD 7?! One?! Eleven? Eleventy one?"...which by the way is a fallacious falsehood, please sit down. Anyway, if I want to communicate, an attempt at doing so is to make a nerd reference. Like ya do. This is tricky and quite often ends in my sounding stupider than Cool English Teacher (http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1804409) from Collegehumor. Not work safe.

So I understand being at first surprised when a reference is unexpectedly dropped and received like that, and it's not at a con or a theater afterparty. But the utter shock can get a bit ridiculous...

I recently brought up the name "Jonathon Coulton" in front of another student I hadn't really met and were he a tad more acrobatic I believe he would have done a backflip for excitement. But it wasn't just a gladness that there was a shared interest...it was a grand jubilee that someone, SOMEONE in this school of 20,000 knew the name of Jonathon Coulton, arguably the most popular singer/songwriter of the fairly expansive subgenre, Geek Rock...of our time. Still, in the nerdcore world, hats off to MC Frontalot.

In no way am I saying that it's a bad thing that someone said, "Hey, that's really cool, this person likes geek rock too!". It just seems a damn shame how few other people they seem to know who are also familiar to such a large interest. A damn shame it is, and I'm considering taking it upon myself as a swaggering mission to educate the uneducated nerds (not an oxymoron) that there is hope, that they are not the sole individual in their school of 20,000 who knows who Doctor Steel (http://www.myspace.com/drsteel) is, even though there may only be two of us.

Maybe I'm just female.

Abrazo