Lame: The new cool
My last post about how I’m out, loud, and proud as a nerd brought my biggest response to date, which tells me two things. First, it tells me that all of you are also pathetic geeks or proud geeks (which, let’s face it, is pathetic). And second, it tells me that people enjoy it when I admit to being lame.
Why? Because it validates them in being lame, too. It lets people know that they’re not alone, that they are not the only person doing stupid shit. It allows people to unburden their souls and admit to watching Star Trek marathons or to having liked the Spice Girls. You start to realize: I’m not the only person who dances alone to Devo.
Look. Everyone does lame things, but everyone paradoxically tries to be cool and suppresses their lameness in order to project an aura of coolness. But because we’re all lame, what’s lame is really cool and what’s cool is really lame and it’s all just a big shell game.
Yeah.
Think about it for a second: Doing lame stuff makes you cool. Being willing to admit it makes you brave. And everyone loves the brave lame cool guy or gal. Tell people your lamenesses and they’ll scoff, but secretly they’ll be crapping their pants over how cool you are.
So.
The other day I’m at the bookstore, sitting in one of those big comfortable chairs and drinking a latte and reading. And the book I’m reading is Twilight. In case you’ve been living under a rock (I’m looking at you, Patrick Star), the Twilight series is Dawson’s Creek with vampires. The target market is 17-year-old girls. And I know this because as I was reading it, two 17-year-old girls walked by and laughed at me.
I turned to my wife, Robin.
“Is it totally lame for me to be reading this?” I asked her.
She didn’t look up from her magazine. “Almost four o’ clock,” she said.
I’m so cool that my wife doesn’t even pay attention to me. I’m that off-the-charts cool with my comfortable chair and teen fiction and knowledge of calculus that she can’t even relate. I’m so cool that I can’t be in a new environment for two days before my digestive system malfunctions and I get all uncomfortable and gassy. My mom says, “You’re like an old man.” Yeah, I’m that cool.
I’ve read the entire Harry Potter series several times through.
I’d rather stay in than go out, almost without exception.
I get really excited at the prospect of having a new computer.
And… okay, deep breath on the next one.
I watched Sex and the City from beginning to end. And I liked it. And my wife and I went to see the movie. And I liked it. I was literally the only man in the theater. But I have this theory that being willing to admit you like unmanly things actually makes you more manly. Makes chicks dig you more, because you’re sensitive.
So yeah, that’s right. I know that Carrie chose Mr. Big and that in the end, Miranda married Steve. You got a problem with that? Talk to my cool counselor. He’s four, and we have the exact same taste in everything, including SpongeBob SquarePants. And he didn’t introduce me to SpongeBob; I’ve been watching for seven years. Do the math.
So right about now, some of you are wondering what you’ve gotten yourselves into. I thought Johnny was cool, you’re thinking. But that’s your old paradigm. Lame is the new cool. Johnny is cool, but cool isn’t what it used to be.
And if you’re still bothered by my particular breed of new-cool, just keep in mind that most of you know me from forums and Twitter. Since you were there too, and since you’re reading a blog right now, how old-style-cool can you really be? Go to the local high school and ask the football quarterback how many blogs he reads. If he takes a break from having sex with cheerleaders long enough to answer, I’d be willing to bet the answer is less than one.
Admit your lameness and embrace it as your coolness. It’s liberating. The popular kids in high school had their moment, but they peaked and then went downhill. If you never peak, you can never decline, which is exactly why I like punk rock. Not supporting “what’s in” or even “what’s normal” makes you cool-recession-proof. It makes you forever awesome.
And the people who would scoff at your admissions of lameness? They probably already think you’re uncool. Chances are you’re at saturation with them, unable to appear any less cool.
It’s like Mitch Hedburg said about his idea to make EZ Cheez fluorescent: “If you’re willing to eat room-temperature cheese that comes out of a can, you’re probably not going to be mad that it glows in the dark.”
Embrace your lameness, my lame-cool non-IRL friends. It will set you free. Do it now, as part of my…
… wait for it…
SUPER NERD-OFF!
Post your lamenesses to the comments if you want to admit it and see if you can become super-cool. Then tell your friends, and pass them the link to this post. Encourage them to become cool, to try to out-cool you.
The coolest lame story wins a free signed copy of my book, to be decided in one week. Chuck, remind me because I’m so cool I’ll forget.
Note: We’re looking for lame-cool, not lame-creepy. Admitting to obsessing over Hello Kitty cartoons is pushing it.
Now go, nerds. Go!
Nerdvana
Now, I want to be careful to take personal responsibility in my life, and not to unduly blame something outside of me for any of the woes I’ve encountered. But with that said, I’m pretty sure that technology is entirely responsible for my past failures with women and my lack of a social life.
And to drive this point home, the other day it dawned on me that I no longer have any friends.
This was a shock, because “having friends” is something that everyone takes for granted. Which is really insidious, because taking-for-granted means you’d never think to ask yourself, “Do I have any friends?” in the same way most mothers wouldn’t think to remind their husbands, “Don’t give the baby any Kahlua.” You don’t get up in the morning and wonder if an invisible alien saucer is over your house, or if a hot dog has replaced your Achilles tendon.
And so you go through life assuming your tendons are not hot dogs, that the skies are free of saucer people, and that the baby is not drunk. And that you have at least some friends.
“I don’t have any friends,” I told my wife Robin one day over dinner.
“Yes you do,” she told me. “They just don’t exist.”
Oh.
Oh, that.
Literally speaking, this is untrue. My friends do exist, but they’re still not IRL friends. And if you were easily able to understand that last sentence, then congratulations… I welcome you to the world of the friendless. You. Lame. Nerd.
My last post was about how Christmas is gay (and the other day, I found myself donning now my gay apparel and it made me want to want to watch Judy Garland movies), and re-reading that post took me back to a conversation I had had with my gay buddy Nick. I’m not black. I’m not Hispanic. I’m not gay, and I’m not a woman. I’m not Jewish, Muslim, or part of a goat-sacrificing cult. I’m not old and I’m not young. I am smack dab in the middle of what passes for normal in this country, and that means I’ve lived an unassailed life. I told Nick that I could try all I wanted to understand what it’s like to have people insult and harass you based solely on your apparently incorrect choice of beard over boobs or vice versa, but that I would never be able to truly get it.
“What’s it like to be called a fag?” I asked. “Is it like if people called me a… a honkey?”
But even then I couldn’t stop giggling as I said it because honkey is a funny word. And slurs aren’t supposed to be funny — they’re supposed to be hurtful. So I knew I wasn’t getting it.
“Oh, Johnny,” said Nick. “You don’t think you’re a minority, but you are. Think about it. You’re a huge nerd.”
And because I am not actually very huge, I knew he intended “huge” to modify “nerd” and not “you.”
“Are you thinking about grammar?” he said. “You are, aren’t you?”
Hell.
It all came down upon me in a rush. I’ve blogged about grammar before. I’ve corrected people on grammar before. I’ve laughed about how a certain sentence’s structure was funny before. Can you believe they put quotes around “do not”? I’d say. And then I’d laugh, and nobody would understand why.
And the technology. Oh, the technology.
The non-IRL friends I was referring to are non- “In Real Life” friends, which means they’re Internet friends and, naturally, would understand that lame-ass way of saying it. And yes, I have Internet friends. A lot of them, actually, and I talk to them constantly. I used to burn my days on the Men’s Health forums, and then we pulled an online coup and started our own forum at Training Anarchy. I joined Twitter, started exploring the blogosphere, and met Chuck Westbrook. Then I met Havi and her yellow assistant. Then Mak0shark. DocHobbes. Jen Louden. Mad Asthmatic. Just this morning I emailed with Jenny the Bloggess and got some praise, and I’m all giddy about it because her writing is so funny that it quite literally makes me shit peachpits.
The vast majority of IRL friends I do have are far away, back in Toledo and Columbus. And let’s face it: they’re geeks too.
“Dude,” I’ll say to my friend Paul, “remember when you were a sysop on that old BBS with that guy back when you had that ‘fast’ modem and it was only 2400 baud and you had a 20 MB hard drive and we thought it was so awesome, and we were at that sysop’s BBS party watching Darkman and someone rang the doorbell of his apartment right when that guy stuck his finger in Darkman’s chest?”
“Ha,” he’ll laugh. “That was so prior to the advent of flash memory.”
I’ll remind him about the stunning ANSI graphics of Global War and Pimpwars, reminisce about the days of 5.25″ floppies and the debut of SVGA, and think fondly about how we used to write computer programs in BASIC that caused the Apple II’s in the school’s computer lab to flash “Water on disk.” And I actually wondered why I didn’t go on a second date until I was 19.
Today, all of my stories revolve around people who may in fact turn out to be 90 year-old Lithuanian midgets living in the basements of illegal zoos.
“I know this guy who gave both of his kids Mohawks,” I’ll tell Robin after a haircut discussion.
“Who?”
And then I have to admit: “TheGreatOne.”
And recently, I find myself talking in meme-speak. For those of you who have a life, a meme is a themed idea that replicates virally on the internet. Which is actually an explanation that is even less clear.
Example: Someone on a forum (it’s usually /b/) finds something interesting and creates an image. Like whoever decided to take a funny picture and make a motivational poster out of it:
And then someone else does it:
Then another:
And on and on. Possibly my favorite meme of all time is fail. And so all the time, I find myself witnessing a person floundering and say, “Fail.” Or someone will do something bizarre (typically, it’s me) and I’ll say, “LOL wut?” You start to ask for the “sauce” (source) of something you find. You refer to masturbation as “fapping.” You say, “I shit trains, now what?” You start to make reference to hazzing Cheezburger.
I find all this to be tragically funny, but usually people look at me as if I’m wearing a really, really funny hat. Like this one:
And like nine times out of ten, I’m not.
I have a wife now. And two kids. And a house, and two dogs — one of whom repeatedly bites me in the crotch. So family-wise, I ended up doing okay. And from time to time, even my wife will say, “Fail.”
But I still don’t really have many actual friends. You guys are it. Now, won’t that guilt you into sticking around and commenting on my blog a lot? No? Well, then, fuck you guys. I’m going to hang out with my Warcraft guild.