Revenge of the nerds (not literally, nerds are a very peaceful bunch on the whole)

Now, I make no secret of the fact that I am a big fan of nerd boys and girls. Nerds, geeks, mathmo’s – whatever words take your fancy, they take mine. I love science nerds, people who are into bonsai, people who do little experiments or research things just for fun, people who goggle/dictionary any unknown word. Love it. I had a realization a few years back that almost everyone I’ve ever dated either did debating in high school, played chess, played some kind of role playing game, or had their nose stuck in a book for large chunks of their life. Or all of the above. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not some kind of a brain on a stick, ethereal, divorced from my beating heart and pumping veins, no, on the contrary. I like physical activity, I like the sun on my skin, I like pop culture, I can dig the blonde and bouncy and low carb conversations. I dig cheeky smiles and the dramatic, theatric, arty too. I dig lots of things. In moderation. But mostly I like the nerdier side of life.

So, how delighted do you think I am that I am now working at what I fondly (but privately) label the sheltered workshop for nerdy sustainability types?? By sheltered workshop, I mean sheltered from the elements, from the shriveling gaze and contempt of non-nerds, and the slow slow slow as a wet week starting from square one thinking of non-sustainability switched on types (not that people sit in boxes).

Friday was case in point. Meeting, Director making jokes about alternative universes, later someone using a humerous chaos theory analogy to explain a situation. Puns and literary references mid-meeting. Getting up to draw a graph to explain a concept – complaining that you need a third axis to really explain it. Now it’s not like people are spouting Shakespeare at the coffee machine, doing jousting in character as the Earl of Monternarry or quickly solving math problems mid sentence, or anything that obvious - but if you are on the look out for the nerdy signs, they are there. (Probably scattered in some way that we could model, probably something we could write up as a paper..). Aaah, bless.

And why does this make me happy? Well; it takes one to know one. As Jung said:

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate to others the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible . . . If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely."

Working in local government with an abundance of 1960's edition engineers with a penchant for sexist jokes and concrete, who never question authority figures and have side parts - was sometimes a lonely affair.