Covering Up Your Nerdiness

In our high school staff meeting on Tuesday night I was talking about Star Trek and how I really enjoyed the movie. I also brought out the Burger King toy of Dr. McCoy which had been given to me by my friend’s young niece. One of our staff members told me that I should hurry up and reproduce before any potential wife found out how much of a nerd I really am.

If you’re reading this and you consider yourself a nerd, then I think that staff member struck an important chord for our kind: we need to concern ourselves with covering up our nerdiness. I am not suggesting that you cease to be a nerd nor am I suggesting that you live a double life, stepping out on your normal life to spend time with your proverbial nerdy mistress. I am merely suggesting that you cover up some of the nerdiness in your life, that you keep your nerd flag from flying at full mast. Successfully covering up the extent of your nerdiness can lead to a fuller life where you find yourself functioning in everyday society, earning the respect of your peers while secretly cultivating the nerdiness you’ve grown to love. Here are three easy steps to that end.


Step One – Limit Nerd Conversations
In my life I have heard plenty of nerd conversations. Conversations like this range from arguments of whether or not Captain Kirk could defeat Captain Picard in a fist fight to intense discussions of how Buffy’s relationship with Angel impacted her relationship with Spike. Chances are if you’re a nerd you’ve probably participated in a number of these conversations, raising your voice as you tried to convince the other party that you were correct on some minor plot detail or some piece of meaningless trivia.

The biggest problem with these conversations is that they completely alienate those in the normal world and push them away. If you want to be a functioning member of society you need to limit these conversations and keep yourself from getting excited and worked up over an argument about fictitious people who have no impact on reality. It isn’t necessary to completely stop these conversations but you need to be mindful of when and where they take place. When I worked at EB Games we used to spend every 8-hour shift having nerd conversations which was completely appropriate within the context of a video game store. However, when you’re pulling shots of espresso or sitting in class, no one wants to hear the ramblings of an incensed nerd. Limiting your nerd conversations is the first step to covering up the full extent of your nerdiness.

Step Two – Overemphasize One Area of Nerdiness
Most nerds I know can’t limit their nerdiness to one area. While working at EB Games we used to calculate our nerd score. A nerd score was the number of areas for which you considered yourself a nerd; the average score for the employees in our store was five. Nerds love nerding for various characters, television shows, movies and books; most nerds are compulsive nerds and manage to add one or two new nerd fetishes to their repertoire every year.

Unfortunately, those living in the normal world are not accepting of nerds who claim allegiance to seven or eight areas; the normal world is really only accepting of nerds who embrace one or two areas. So even though you may have encyclopedic knowledge of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and the Batman comics, you need to narrow that down and really emphasize one. By overemphasizing one area, take Star Wars for example, all those other areas are forced into the background and you’re simply seen as an enthusiastic Star Wars fan, not a freak with too many obsessions. You really need to commit to one area and use that as a cover up for the other areas of nerdiness in your life.

Step Three – Show Disdain For Other Nerds
No matter how big of a nerd you are you can’t nerd for everything; it’s impossible. There are too many movies, television shows and books to be a nerdy expert about them all. If you try chasing down everything there is to nerd about, you’re going to burn yourself out and miss out on those areas that you really care about, the first love which made you a nerd in the first place. My advice is to pick your horse and go with it; get excited about that horse and put all your money on that horse. Maybe, every so often, you bring another horse into the stable, but always have the purebred which you can fall back upon.

Once you’ve chosen the horse with which you’re going to run, immediately begin to distance yourself from all those other horses. This process is like selecting a dodge ball team on the playground; once your nerd players are in place, show disdain for the players that didn’t make it onto your team. If you like Star Trek talk about how terrible Twilight is. If you’re really into Harry Potter call those people who hang out in comic book stores the biggest losers in the world. If you’re addicted to playing Xbox turn your angst and ire against those nerds trapped in the World of Warcraft. Showing disdain allows you to set up an “us versus them” mentality which allows you to say, “I may be bad, but at least I’m not as bad as…”


Those are three simple steps which, if rigorously applied to your life, will help you to lead an acceptably nerdy lifestyle. These steps won’t make you any less of a nerd but they will help you function more capably in society. Hopefully, when those in your life adjust themselves to the limited levels of nerdiness which you choose to display, they will more willingly accept you for who you are. As you’re accepted you will be able to pull back the veil and reveal more and more of your true self and the depths of your nerdiness. And hopefully, by the time you’ve revealed the true extent of your nerdiness, those people will be too pot-committed to leave you.

Coming Out of the Dark - John 3:20-21 and Gloria Estefan

I haven’t memorized a lot of scripture in my day. Apparently I’ve been too busy filling my head with quotations from movies like Big Daddy and Can’t Hardly Wait. One scripture I do have memorized, though, is John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” I just typed that from memory and even though it’s missing a couple “begottens” and “believeths”, I’m pretty sure it’s about the same as it was when I memorized it 22 years ago. And even though John 3:16 is one of the most famous verses in the Bible I still felt a little trepidation about leading a Bible study on the third chapter of John’s gospel. How would I bring life to a passage that so many people knew? How would I inspire thought-provoking conversation about a chapter that most people had already thought about? When it came down to it, I wouldn’t; God would be the life-giver and inspirer of his very own inspired word.

As I was reading John 3:16-21 out loud to the group, I was struck by verse 21 in a way that I cannot begin to explain. I’d read John 3:21 before, very recently as a matter of fact, as I had prepared for the Bible study. Yet in that moment, sitting reading the passage as we sat in a circle in my living room, God’s word came alive again. And even after a life lived following Christ, three years spent in seminary, hours spent teaching and leading discussion, and nights spent huddled with the scriptures, it’s nice to know that the double-edge of God’s word hasn’t dulled.

John 3:20-21 says: ²⁰ All those who do evil hate the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. ²¹ But those who live by the truth come into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God. When I first read this passage preparing for the study I focused quite a bit on darkness and light and how we could be children of the light. My thoughts wandered down the trail which led to removing dark deeds from our lives in order to live as children of the light. And while that trail is true and we should remove dark deeds from our lives, as I read the passage out loud to the group, the Holy Spirit struck me with more meaning to which I had been blinded.

Reading the passage out loud, I saw that John 3:21 wasn’t merely calling us to purge our lives of our dark deeds but to bring our dark deeds into the light. John 3:21 calls us to accountability, opening our lives and taking that which we long to keep in darkness and dragging it out into the light. Those who do evil and hate the light continue in the darkness because they fear that their deeds will be exposed; the only flaw in that logic is that all our deeds are already exposed to an omniscient, omnipresent God. So those who do evil remain in the darkness, deluding themselves into thinking that there is safety and anonymity within the dark. Children of the light, however, recognize that their deeds, no matter how dark, are always done in the sight of Holy God; this sobering truth pushes them to pull their dark deeds into the light within the safety of honest accountability. This passage challenges us not to simply stop doing dark deeds but, when we inevitably do, to bring those deeds from the darkness into the light. It is in the light that sin can be seen for what it is and it is within trustworthy accountability that we find the strength to kill the deed and purge the darkness.

But the dark can be comforting, like slipping on a pair of slippers that have perfectly formed to your feet. However, while the dark may hold an amount of comfort and safety, there is never any peace in the dark. In the dark we wonder who will find out, what they will think when they do and how that will affect our relationship with them. When we find those people, though, who love us and accept us not only for who we are but for who we aren’t, we decide when to bring the dark into the light and no longer have to live in fear of being discovered. So, how can you go from darkness to light and who will help bring you there?