It has been documented that I am a closet nerd. This is probably why I find xkcd funny and when someone raves to me about the shape of the graph of tangent theta squared, I think it's cute rather than worrisome. I see nothing wrong with nerd-dom, in fact. The stereotypical junior high school boy nerd story is a pretty great one - finding the light side of the sometimes awkward process of growing up, being socially inept, zits, insecurity, too many videogames, forming a microculture to protect oneself against a macroculture. Watching it from the outside, seeing the poor, besotted, spotty thirteen-year olds of the quebecois school across the way from me, it makes me smile. Huzzah for the emo kids and goths and mathletes and socially awkward gamers, for the boys who teach themselves the C-chord on the electric guitar in the basement in a sort of futile chase of cool. You'll get over yourselves, eventually. But treasure the halcyon Donnie Darkoesque times you get to experience before you get there. They'll be over before you know it, and there's something irreversible about it all.
I'm not sure why I'm waxing nostalgic about junior high - God knows seventh grade wasn't that fun. Now that I'm out of high school, at the ripe old age of eighteen, with life all figured out, I'm free to reminisce about the adolescence microcosm, AOL and junior high dances.
xkcd.com
This post is dedicated to my best friend Emily, who never let the large amounts of rather bad comic books she read get in the way of awesome.
