Geek Power

What must it be like to come up a geek and find yourself in fashion? When I was young we struggled, and then came Revenge of the Nerds, which I think was a big turning point. Decades later Napoleon Dynamite comes out and the point is driven further into the general consciousness: it’s cool to be geeky. Do the dorky kids of today even recognize the sacrifices, the challenges, of those of us who paved the way for them? I doubt it. One of the charming things about geeks is their lack of awareness of current trends. Well, as someone who spent his formative years around Ham radios and early home computers, let me tell you this victory was fairly easily won. Of course, I didn’t fit neatly into any one category. Sure, I was a geeky nerd sort, but I was also a member of the “slacker” crowd, being generally dirty and stoned, and I was also overlapping the border of “heavy metaller” or whatever they were called, with my Judas Priest t-shirt and my long-ish hair. I wasn’t trying to not fit in, I just wasn’t trying to. The only crowd I was trying to fit in with was that of my brother and his friends. That was the heavy metal part. The slacker thing was all my own. I really just didn’t care. Plus I have a certain amount of dirty hippie in me. But perhaps that's another post.

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