The death of the nerd

I lied. I know. There have not, in fact, been more of the promised blog entries. And I'm sure that you all are absolutely withering on the vine without my insightful commentary about aspects of a life you don't live. But after a week of creative resurgence, my writer's block has set in again. So rather than stare at my manuscript and demand it to write itself already, here I am. Today, I'm going to briefly examine nerditry, and why it has largely become extinct.

You wouldn't know it from the outside looking in, but nerdhood is an exclusive club.¹ It takes all manner of forbidden knowledge and shibboleths just to gain membership and acceptance, and even then there's a pecking order depending on what your nerdy fixation is, and how in-depth your knowledge of the subject is. Being so closed off socially makes for miserable times in high school, but speaking as one of their number I also felt a bizarre sense of belonging. I didn't belong to the student body at large, but fuck those guys. If they didn't understand why comic books and ironic enjoyment of awful movies were so much fun, then they were the ones missing out, not me.²

But in recent years, something's happened. The trend has reversed. The nerd has come into vogue, and suddenly everyone's trying to put their nerd cred forward as proof of cool. It's superficial at best--beyond the thick framed glasses, most people just lack the obsession with detail that the garden variety nerd has in droves--but the problem is that it's watered down an entire subculture.

Don't get me wrong. To an extent, I'm happy to see nerds more widely accepted. The fewer kids finding themselves turned into locker stuffing because they kept their Star Wars bedspread past age eight, the better. But some of what made it special is gone now. There was a brief time when it was something of a badge of pride to call oneself a nerd, just as pop culture was starting to come around to the ways of the basement dweller. But now, like Hot Topic did to goth and punk fashion, nerd has become something to be sanitized for public consumption and marketed accordingly.³ Make everything sleek, cool, and assembly line.

Take the example of Comic Con. It's long been a nerd touchstone event, a place where fans could gather and discuss, meet the creators of the things they enjoyed, and have a good time. Hollywood studios, however, saw it as a way to increase their cred with a potential target audience, whose high number of Sailor Moon figurines on their shelves told the studios there was money to be had. Suddenly, Comic Con is being used as a platform for studios to parade out their geek-friendly franchise movies with a crocodile smile and a hearty clap on the shoulder. "Isn't this cool, everyone?" they ask you, expecting you to trip over yourself while delivering your emphatic agreement. And true to form, nerds rise to the occasion wonderfully.

I'm not against bringing people into the fold. But the nerd is rapidly becoming just another unique snowflake getting caught up in the rampaging snowball of pop cultural homogeneity. SciFi, a stalwart on the frequently watched channel button of many a nerd's remote, was sanitized last year into the somehow more mainstream-acceptable entity, SyFy. Poorly made comic book adaptations flood our movie screens like fresh crack on the streets of the Bronx.⁴ Nerd has become a curio instead of a way of life, either a fashion novelty or a potential media cash cow. And as it becomes further co-opted, the people cease to matter. And without those people, those special obsessives who stuck by what they cared about even in the face of social suicide, all we're left with are grown men and women sticking to their childhood hobbies because people told them to.

-PK


¹ No girls allowed.
² This was not without cost; I did miss the crucial high school experiences of Homecomings, football games, females, and sunlight.
³ I have infinite respect for marketing people for making loneliness and obsession commercially viable.
⁴ The crack is cheaper, of higher quality, and unlike the movies, made by people who care about the end product.

Radio silence

We're eight days into the month, and I haven't blogged for any of them. It's not like my life's gotten any busier; I had an active holiday weekend but that was really about it. No, I've found, to my great pleasure, that I've started writing again. I don't know why I'm suddenly able to do it right during what's usually one of my blank months, but I think the existence of this blog helps a good deal. It keeps the muscles in shape, so to speak. Whenever I sat back down in front of the keyboard every fall when my muse woke up, I always felt like I was shaking off a few layers of rust as I started banging out sentences. Not so this time around.

Everyone's got their creative process. Some people exhaustively outline every detail before they write word one. It's like they will a skeleton into being, and then it's just a simple matter of packing meat on top of it. I fall into the opposite camp, where everything is on the fly. No outlines. Random bits of dialogue and description scribbled into the margins of my notebooks. Concepts getting filed away for months, years at a time, only to spontaneously show up in stories I never even thought to put them into.

I like the spontaneity. I like being able to surprise myself. If I know everything in advance, there's no discovery in it for me. And if there's discovery, there's no point.

I'll blog more regularly now. And I promise there will be footnotes next time.

-PK

Apples & Onions, Part Two

Chicago and New York are two great restaurant towns. They cater to every ethnic niche imaginable,¹ with quality ranging from road kill to five star levels. Both cities have their specialties, of course; New York is known for its proud Italian heritage and the sheer volume of marinara that implies, while Chicago's German and Polish roots have its restaurateurs making food so big and hearty that the odds of you finishing it are astronomical, or dare I say...gastronomical?² But occasionally those culinary lineages bleed into each other, creating vastly different approaches to the same dish. In this installment of Apples & Onions, I'm tackling one of the most widely-known: the hot dog.

Most New Yorkers I've talked to describe the lowly hot dog as a "snack," and this attitude I think illustrates the difference in attitude between New Yorkers and Chicagoans. In Chicago, a food isn't worth eating unless it's a whole fucking meal by itself.³

The New York hot dog is simple. On a plain bun, you put a dog that's been bathing in warm water while it eagerly awaits the $2 bail necessary to release it into the world. Mustard and ketchup are standard. Sauerkraut and onions in some kind of wackadoo spicy sauce are less common, but not unheard of. Virtually anything else, forget it. A small thing to take up some room in your stomach, the opening act to a much more elaborate show later on.

A hot dog.

The Chicago style hot dog is a very specific kind of hot dog, for which one should accept no substitutes. You get a boiled beef dog on a poppyseed bun, for starters. You top that with mustard, raw onions, tomatoes, a pickle spear, celery salt, and relish the same shade of glowy green as that nuclear fuel rod that rides on Homer's back for half of the opening credits of The Simpsons. Under no circumstances should so much as a droplet of ketchup touch the thing.

A hot dog that has been dragged through an arboretum.

Like I said: full. Fucking. Meal.

I didn't start eating hot dogs until relatively recently. I hadn't liked them since childhood, but a combination of digestive and financial desperation meant that the three bones I was spending per day at the nearby halal cart had to be put to use elsewhere. I found that both the New York and Chicago patterns weren't really all that bad; I'd just needed time to appreciate that it was a food not as instantly enjoyable as its distaff counterpart, the burger.

I like a foodstuff with some heft. They say the stomach doesn't know it's full until ten minutes after the fact, but I know for a fact some foods out there can make your stomach start to reconsider its vacant space after bite one, and I like those foods. So in a straight contest, the Chicago dog gets my vote. But I've learned to appreciate the New York dog for what it is. It'll never be an entire meal for me, even a bunch of them.⁴ But when I've got a little time and cash, it does just fine.

Just hold the ketchup.

Next time on Apples & Onions: transit. Getting from point A to point B in a city that is very, very interested in you not getting to point B.

-PK

¹ And a few that aren't. I'd tell you about them, but I can't think of any examples.
² Just kidding, that would be gay.
³ And you will have four of them.
⁴ Unless I decide upon a lifestyle change, going from Well-Adjusted Man to Sad, Sad, Fat Fuck.

Some navel-gazing fluff about writing

In my boredom today, I watched a bunch of videos on CollegeHumor. Now, it may be just that I'm their target demographic, but I rather like the site and its vids. Sometimes they go for the easy joke, parodies that barely scratch the surface in the same manner that the "______ Movie" series does. Other times, however, they have biting commentary where it hurts to laugh both from sheer hilarity and because it's uncomfortable to acknowledge how true it is. One of the vids I watched took a swipe at one of my favorite directors, Tim Burton. It endeavored to satirize the elements that have become staid or stagnant in his work, to the point of showing up in all of his films. By this Burton fan's estimation, they were successful.

Tim Burton is a man with a very distinct voice as a storyteller. His world alternates between swathes of desaturated greys and blasts of loud primary colors, with all the gothic twistiness and disaffected loners that come with that territory.¹ I've always admired his insistence on being true to himself. He doesn't water down his vision for anyone else's sake, and I can get behind that kind of purity. But the video's satire is pretty damn accurate, and to my own dismay I felt like I could predict his latest effort, Alice in Wonderland, with utter ease specifically because his other work's given me such a clear idea of how his mind works.

Every writer wants to be distinctive in a way that makes them leap off the page. I think it's an inferiority complex about our medium--after all, we work with walls of text, not bright canvases or blocks of clay. It's not something that's easily demonstrable. If you're going to impress a girl, you're much better off playing her the song you wrote than you are dumping a stack of a hundred pages of black and white in her lap and saying, "Enjoy!"² A few writers have that ability, to utterly own a sentence from syllable one to syllable end. Stephen King does his whole stream-of-consciousness thing, Aaron Sorkin builds his stories on a foundation of rapid-fire dialogue, and Warren Ellis has perfected the art of the grotesque simile. But the rest of us work to achieve that standard, so that every sentence they write feels like it's undeniably theirs.

That balance is hard. You put more of yourself into your work, you also put more of yourself out there, and unless your true self is Guy That Everyone Likes³, the less likely it is you'll appeal to a bigger audience. Now, for some people that's fine--I personally would rather write something that a thousand people absolutely have to read than something a million people might get around to reading because they'd heard it was pretty good.

But beyond just not appealing to all the right demographics, there's the very real danger of stagnation. I want people to know what to expect from my writing in only the broadest strokes. Otherwise, I want them to stay guessing the entire time. I can think of a few writers who recycle characters, exchanges of dialogue, and even entire plots from project to project. Some don't realize they do it. Some do, and defend it with a cry of, "I'm just giving the people what they want!"

As an unpublished twentysomething trying to make myself heard in a city full of unpublished twentysomethings trying to make themselves heard, I'm not exactly a qualified expert, but I don't think the audience always knows what it wants. I think it thinks it knows, but a surprise, whether good or bad, is far more likely to trigger real thought and discussion in them than just more of the same. Of course, there are plenty of things to prove me wrong. Two and a Half Men is anything but groundbreaking, but it is also one of the most-watched shows on television. Meanwhile, innovative stuff either continually struggles for ratings like Mad Men, or dies an untimely death like Dollhouse.

I'm not exactly sure what elements make up my voice as a writer yet. I know I like wordplay, long exchanges of dialogue, female protags, Americana, and footnotes. But I also do my best to try and subvert those things if I feel I'm leaning on them too much.⁴ I'm still figuring out what does and doesn't work for me. And once I do, rest assured, o hypothetical readership, you won't be getting more and more of the same from me.

Unless, you know, that's what you want or whatever.

-PK


¹ A disproportionate number of them are also named Edward. And by "disproportionate," I mean "three."
² I did, in fact, do this once. Consensus is that I got a million points for style, and zero points for anything that actually mattered.
³ If you are, chances are I hate you. Which would mean you're not the Guy That Everyone Likes, so I don't hate you, which would make you oh my god I've gone cross-eyed
⁴ For instance, wouldn't that last sentence have been an absolutely perfect place for this footnote?

Bleearrrrgh

Hello. I'm as surprised to be here as you are to be reading this.¹ I spent the better part of yesterday wrestling with the worst hangover I've ever had, and the Saturday before it wrestling with select patches of Manhattan sidewalk and street.

I do not normally drink to excess. I enjoy alcohol and its effects, but I have a tendency to stop myself before I get too far. With beer, this is easy; my stomach doesn't have enough room for the amount of beer it would take for me to truly get bombed out of my mind. Wine and liquor are a different matter entirely, where it becomes a case of slowing myself down before I get ahead of my own built-in failsafes. Most of the time, I succeed.

Unfortunately, most does not mean always.

This past weekend, I started things off with a whole can of FourLoko, which might be the world's most vile concoction this side of purestrain santorum. Unpleasant going down and a significant blow to my sobriety, but not a punch I couldn't take. From there, a train ride and cab ride to a known open bar, the first of three planned stops that night. At said bar, I entertained myself with the nearby foosball table and the vuvuzela my friend Mike decided was an exhibit meant to be touched.² I also entertained myself with one, two, three, four, five gins & tonic downed in rapid succession. It was an open bar; better get my money's worth, right?

Excessive amounts of alcohol affect everybody differently. My friend Colin becomes an utterly belligerent son of a bitch. The aforementioned Mike likes fighting, with hilarious consequences. When I drink too much, I don't act like a problem so much as I become a problem. My ability to walk or even stand completely deserts me, and I find myself suddenly playing the title role from Weekend at Bernie's.³ If I'm safely in the confines of a dorm building, this isn't much of a problem--I get dragged down a flight of stairs, put to bed, and the rest of the night goes on without me. But other problems present themselves if I decide to go full-body flaccid in the streets of Manhattan. For instance, how will I get home? And how much help will my friends be if they're almost as hammered as me?

The answer is, "throw money at cabs until one of them drives us." Or "let a bunch of concerned gang members carry me down the block while my friend announces our presence by blowing his recently acquired and totally not stolen vuvuzela." The point is, due to my awesome friends I got home alright. And though the Sunday that followed might have been my worst one since the last time I had to go to Church, I'm mostly back to normal now.

This kind of drunkenness has happened to me two other times in my life. One was the result of seven Irish car bombs, and was uneventful. The first one, on the other hand, started with a chugged beer, then five glasses of wine. As I'd been planning to leave and rest for a while, Colin grabbed a bottle of peppermint schnapps left over from the Christmas season and handed me a shot, calling it my "leaving the room tax." And then he handed me another, and another, each time telling me I was "almost there." I devolved into a writhing mess, rolling in my bed and blathering about not knowing "what's real and what's false anymore."⁴

I won't be repeating this anytime soon. Like my writing, my binge drinking follows a loose calendar. In this case, it more resembles Christmas in that it happens once, and then there's a lot of time waiting for it to happen again. Except I don't think Christmas is anticipated with quite as much dread.

Moral of the story: FourLoko is fruit punch-flavored failure in a can.

-PK


¹ I jest, of course. I know there's no "you" on the other side of this screen.
² Pro tip: if you want to do something and someone tries to stop you, point to somewhere in the opposite direction and say "the guy" said you could do it.
³ And no amount of mambo music will make me mobile again.
⁴ My friends were decent enough to capture it on video. And show it to me. A month later. After they'd been constantly quoting it around me to my increasing confusion. As I said, I have excellent friends.

Blockage

This blog has been a fun exercise for me so far. It's cathartic, getting all these thoughts out into the ether, even if the only one privy to them is still me. There's something about seeing them here in the black and white that makes them feel more legitimate than the fleeting snatches¹ of thought that come up as I flip through the channels in my brain.² But the fact of the matter is, this blog is not just a journal. It's a symptom.

I have a rough creative calendar that's more or less held true for the past six years. From mid-September to April, I will be very productive, pumping out thousands of new words a day for one project or another. Around May, this will start to peter out. Then June 1st hits and I won't be able write, full stop. It will persist through the entire summer, no matter how many things happen to me that might be pen-worthy. Only in September will it all start to come back to me. I think my brain developed this cycle as a response to the school calendar, to save me from a seconds' boredom. Very considerate, higher mental functions, but now during the one time of the year when I'm free to write to my heart's content, the ink instead grows stagnant in my pens.³

I don't know how many of you out there consider yourselves "writers." I mean, everyone writes, but some people just have a certain feel for it. They're the sort of people who can feel whether a sentence is going to be a good one or not by word three. They'll read a particularly nice sequence of words and kick themselves for not coming up with it. You people with brains like that will know what this is like. But to those of you who've never really experienced writer's block, it's terrible and I hope you never have go to through it. I've heard writer's block be compared to not being able to get it up. I think it's worse than that. It's blue balls. It's not just not being able to perform; it's knowing that you've got it in you somewhere and when the time comes you just can't. And it hurts in a way that outside parties don't really get.

I'm primarily a fiction writer. I'm all over prose and drama. I've attempted poetry a few times, but it was the kind of awful verse that even Douglas Adams couldn't have considered on his darkest day. So while this is writing, it doesn't really count in my eyes. It's not my normal thing, just a collection of the flotsam and/or jetsam that's left in my big ol' empty head.

But Paul, didn't you write that absolutely superb and life-changing story last week?

Why yes, hypothetical reader, I did. Occasionally I'll have a moment where everything returns to normal and I can carve out a few paragraphs. It's something, but it's not quite the same, like eating Panda Express after your tongue has known the taste of real Chinese food.⁴

Everyone has their own cure for writer's block. Some force themselves to write, jamming themselves back into their creative groove. Some get drunk, have conversations with their drunk friends, write down the ideas that come out of it, then try to decipher it the next morning.⁵ Some read voraciously, the literary equivalent of striking matches frantically until one of them catches. My usual solution is to just ride it out. I'm almost positive a good deal of the blockage comes from fatigue, so why force something if I'm not up to it? Come September, I'm sure something will make it worth my wait. And until then, there'll be blogs aplenty. Lucky you.

-PK


¹ Hehehe. "Snatches."
² Food Network and Skinemax, mostly. Occasionally Nickelodeon.
³ Read that carefully, or you might make a hilarious mistake.
⁴ Ironically, authentic Chinese food uses less actual food product than Panda Express, unless cardboard counts as actual food product.
⁵ I tried this once. What I had thought was the beginnings of my next great work of sweeping importance turned out to be, disappointingly, a scrawled delivery order for empanadas.

Answer #3: Being Asian

I'll clear the air right up front. I'm not pure Asian. I'm half-Filipino, half-American. I could get into all the European ethnicities to which my dad owes a chromosome or two, but it would take entirely too long and your attention span is probably tenuous enough without me giving you actual reasons to click that neat little X in the top corner.¹

Even though I'm half-white and half-Asian, I don't look particularly like one or the other. I've had a lot of amusing guesses² as to what I was, and most of the time I'd be lucky if they were on the Asian continent altogether. My friend Conor, ever the gentle one, has said that I'm doomed to live out my life rejected by both. But the odd thing is, I'm actually not horrified by the thought.

I was raised around white kids, in white neighborhoods, one of a very small Asian contingent at a predominantly white high school. My university is a bit more ethnically diverse, but the ratio still swings heavily in favor of those who eat mayonnaise. For all intents and purposes, I'm a white kid. The only differences are that I fear not the rays of the sun, and I'm able to take ethnic umbrage when it suits me.

I've often joked at how bad I am at actually being Asian when it counts: my DanceDance Revolution skills are lacking, my ride of choice is not a Honda Civic, and my math grades would typically be more useful for spelling the word "coccyx" than "Alabama." But beyond the superficial, jokey things based in stereotype, sometimes I do feel a genuine disconnect with my Asian roots when I try to dig any deeper than the food. When I first came to college, I saw that there was an entire club for Filipino students. I got the necessary information for the first meeting, made a few jokes about chicken adobo with the people handing out flyers, and went on my way. Awesome, I thought. Time to reconnect with my roots.

When I went that night, I stayed for about two minutes. Those one hundred and twenty seconds told me everything I needed to know about them and about me. They were wonderful, inviting, and inclusive. They knew good food when they tasted it, and they were a really friendly sort. They also stood on almost zero common ground with me. They talked about Jollibee burgers, quoted comedians I'd never heard of, and used words with consonant combinations I'd thought were hitherto impossible. It was not for me.

But it's not like I'm a seamlessly integrated part of the caucasoid community, either. Before I realized what I was saying was odd, I used to let slip little neologisms unique to Filipinos (for instance, in my house, lights "open" and "close"). Also, I was able to milk the hell out of my half-ness when I was applying for colleges.³ Instant essay topic about how delightfully confused I was to have all these contradictions laid out before me, doubtlessly with some contrite, cliched title.⁴ Not my best work, but it was a college application. Nobody ever does their best work on those because they're too busy carefully wording sentences to be vague enough that a "Find and Replace" command will allow them to make it one-size-fits-all.

The truth is, I'm not delightfully confused. I'm not really confused at all. I spend less time worrying about sunburn, get to pretend I'm exotic, can realistically pass myself off as not being able to speak English when I don't want to talk to panhandlers, eat spicier food than most of my friends, and all I have to do in exchange is occasionally weather some mouthbreather's question of, "No, where are you really from?" Sounds like a fair trade⁵ to me.

What the hell is Paul doing here? Being Asian Being white, but with the added privilege of being able to tell racist jokes without people gasping.

-PK


¹ No footnote here. I just wanted to make you scroll all the way down the post...Wait, where are you going?
² Stranger: Are you Inuit?
Me: No.
Stranger:...Are you sure?
³ Amusingly, my dad had ethical problems with this, while my mom did not.
⁴ For example, "The Best of Both Worlds," or "East Meets West," or "My Genomes Are Like Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris Dueling to the Death, and Chuck Norris is Sort Of Winning."
⁵ The kind of fair trade where both sides amicably agree to a deal, not the kind of fair trade where farmers lie about how intimately children were involved in harvesting their crops so privileged white youth will drink their coffee.