Nobel Prizes vs. Friends

“How can I be in the top 1%? I don't study that much. I mean, are the kids in Michigan schools that stupid?”

– Lindsay Weir, Freaks & Geeks episode 18, “Discos & Dragons”

“You're a good student, right? Do you ever think how powerful you could be if you never watched TV?”

– My friend Tyler

I always thought that one day someone would find me out. Surely my final high school exams would reveal the truth. University had to unmask me. At grad school they'd see right through me.

I'm starting to think they never will.

For as long as I can remember, people have been telling me I'm brainy. I vividly recall the other kids in kindergarten saying I should skip first grade (as it turned out, I skipped what would have been second grade). I topped the class throughout school, and over the years I've amassed a not inconsiderable collection of scholarships and academic prizes.

And the whole time I've been waiting, just waiting, for someone to point out the emperor's nudity. For me to max out my academic prowess. For my grades to reflect the amount of work I put in, not the vast ability to intellectually BS I was apparently born with.

I'm starting to think it will never happen.

I haven't always carried the guilt of the lazy A-student. As a prepubescent, I actually did work jolly hard. I consider my 13+ Common Entrance exams (which I took at 12, yada yada) to be the pinnacle of my academic career, because I studied hard and reaped my just reward. Everything since has felt unearned.

And yet the A grades and the accolades have kept coming, even as I've coasted through on the minimum of effort. I've mastered the art of working just hard enough to make people think I am very smart, and no harder. It does make me wonder, as Tyler said, what I could have accomplished if I'd kept on working as hard as I did when I was a preteen.

But I didn't; and actually TV's not to blame (I didn't start watching it until a few years later). The correlation I can pinpoint – the major factor that changed in my life at the same time that I started to coast academically – is that I started having friends.

Contrary to my prep school math teacher's predictions, I am never going to win the Nobel Prize for mathematics. But I am going to spend my leisure time with other humans who enjoy my company. My younger self might have been disappointed with my current self for making that choice, but I'd say it's a pretty fair tradeoff.

Of course, seeking validation through academic achievement is such a deeply ingrained part of my personality that if the tradeoff were, say, having friends but getting Bs, I'd be significantly more hesitant. But as long as the choice is Nobel Prizes or friends, I absolutely and without regret choose friends.

* * *

Having said all of which, grad school has just opened up a serious can of whoop on my ass, so if things are a little slow here at GCG over the next couple weeks, please bear with me. I'll be back on top of stuff just as soon as I can.

Awkwardness.

At the moment I can't cope with any of my feminine-coded clothes or accessories. I can't even carry a purse. I can't hack anything coded feminine. Everything I wear, I have to question whether it's coded feminine. Everything I carry, I have to question whether it's coded feminine. My slouch as I walk down the street, my stance as I stand on the BART platform, my body position as I sit watching movies beside a friend: is it coded feminine?

All the time – all the time – I am thinking this, and it's doing my head in. I'm worried that it's a manifestation of internalized misogyny that's making me reject “girl stuff”. I'm frustrated that all the subtle coding in the world won't stop me from being read on first sight as female (until I can get my hands on a binder, anyway). I'm despairing at the knowledge that one big bearded guy wearing a skirt is doing more to shatter the patriarchy than I'm doing with every aspect of this obsession that's consuming my waking life, because “person read as male choosing things that are coded feminine” is a billion times more transgressive than “person read as female choosing things that are coded masculine”.

I hate that gender performativity has us being read as one of two options, when I want to be read as something else. I hate that I can't stop thinking about it, no matter what I'm doing. I hate that “male” and “female” are still seen as important categorical distinctions, even as I find them increasingly arbitrary and irrelevant.

*

I can't stop overthinking my new friendships. When somebody says or does a certain thing, I find myself thinking: This is what a friend does, right? This person is doing friend stuff with me and considers me a friend. How long until I say something so irreparably stupid that I ruin it forever? Or have I finally got this friendship thing figured out?

Without wanting to speak too soon, I think I have a couple of pretty great new friendships going here in California. I've been here just over two months, and there are definitely a few people who seem to regard me as a full-blown friend. It's weird, though, that, at a time when I'm doing better than I've ever done at the friendship game, my tics and stims and awkwardness in casual interactions have gotten significantly worse.

Like, I went to a burger place where I'd never been before. That should be a simple interaction if ever there was one: you order your food, the cashier tells you how much it costs, you pay, the cashier hands you your food. And yet it was excruciatingly awkward. I just couldn't seem to do it right. When faced with conversational awkwardness, some people start babbling, but I BSOD – just freeze right up and forget how to make words with my mouth.

Like, the other night (we'd been drinking), one of my new friends asked me, “What do you think will happen if you let go of your collar? Do you think you're going to float away?” Like, I was getting funny looks on BART yesterday because I couldn't stop stimming. Like, the other day someone unfamiliar with the guide to not touching jokingly grabbed me by the shirt, and thinking about it still gives me the heebie-jeebies.

*

Shit, I wish I could just switch off sometimes.

Happy Birthday GCG

HOLY MATZAH BALLS. Apparently I've managed to sustain this spewing-my-thoughts-on-the-internet malarkey for an entire orbit of the earth around the sun.

Knowing this, you might be tempted to go back and read some of the thoughts I first spewed here, back in the misty dawn of time. Don't do it. Seriously, those early posts stink.

(You're doing it, aren't you? *sigh* Take them with a pinch of salt, okay?)

What will, I think, be fun is to revisit some of the self-selected highlights of Gay Christian Geek's first year. First, though, don't you want to know some stats?

Five Most Popular Posts

Drinking Game Of Thrones

A Very Glee Blog Post

“Facebook-rape” No More!

The Theology of Broadway's The Book of Mormon Part Four – Jews, Christians, Mormons, & Everyone Else: “I Believe”

Disneyfail: Pocahontas vs The Princess and the Frog

Top Five Referring Sites

Feministe (hooray for Shameless Self-Promotion Sunday)

Google (cheating, I'm conflating .com and .co.uk)

The Deadly Doll's House of Horror Nonsense (thanks, Emily! FYI GleeKast is the main reason I'm still watching Glee, its brain-breaking terribleness notwithstanding)

Overthinking It (even unsolicited shameless self-promotion apparently works)

Shakesville (<3 <3 <3 <3 <3)

Proudest Blogging Moments

Being quoted at length in The Funny Feminist's review of The Book of Mormon (which she's actually seen).

Guest-posting at Canonball and Bitch Flicks.

Any time a friend has made it clear, during meat-conversation, that they do indeed read my spewings.

As vast an exercise in ego onanism (egonanism?) as this blogging enterprise is, the thing that elevates it above mere intellectual echo chamber is you, beloved reader. Thank you to everyone who's ever engaged with my ramblings, especially Sam and Shadsie. It's an honor to be read by you, and in GCG's second year I'll do my level best to be worthy of it. Upward and onward!

Five Things I Wrote That You Should Definitely (Re-)Read

Slow Down Your Neighbors: Universalism, Semiotics, and Rob Bell

The Theology of Broadway's The Book of Mormon (parts one, two, three, and four)

FUCK YOU, STRAIGHT PEOPLE

God of Speculative Fiction

Fictioneering #1: It Looked Like Spilt Milk

Who Is A Woman?

In which I explore some long-stewing thoughts on my gender identity in relation to a question feminism hasn't been asking for about thirty years.

Who is a woman?

I have never in my life felt identified with some grand worldwide sisterhood or vague abstract conception of womanhood (my mother says the only time she has was when giving birth).

Who is a woman?

In her book Bossypants, Tina Fey describes a group of women being asked “When did you first know you were a woman?” and nearly all of them responding with an incident of harassment from men. I realized... I don't have an answer for that question. I've never felt particularly like a woman. Recently I found a diary from when I was 10 or 11; the bulk of it is spent complaining about how I just don't understand girls. Not much changed in my teens.

Who is a woman?

In our culture, male is still coded as default (witness the recent study about gender coding in children's books). Maybe my identification as “female” is merely an identification as “other”.

Who is a woman?

When I was 16, I rocked this androgynous look that got me asked a number of times “are you a boy or a girl?”. I feigned outrage when bragging to my friends about these incidents, but secretly I was delighted. Lately I've been feeling an urge to recapture that ambiguity. I'm deconstructing my every pose, accessory, and article of clothing for its cultural coding as M or F. The other day, a security guard called me “sir” and I was chuffed to bits.

Who is a woman?

The more I think about it, the more important it seems to deconstruct the gender binary, quit defining “male” and “female” as discrete categories, and consistently take account of trans*, intersex, and genderqueer people. Paul wrote, “there is no male and female...in Christ Jesus”, and I think, with a prescience far beyond his own understanding, he's referring to a time when we no longer find it necessary to identify each other as such.

Who is a woman?

As a child, I often used to long to be a boy. Although I had long hair and was quite femmey (largely at my parents' behest), in the stories of my imagination I was often a boy. I can remember the thrill of stuffing all my hair up inside a baseball cap and pretending I was a boy. I can remember checking the authorship of all first-person novels I read to see if it was okay for a female writer to “pretend to be a boy” (Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing assured me it was). And I can remember feeling ashamed of this desire to experiment with my gender identity, feeling that I couldn't ask my parents for boy clothes and boy haircuts because those thing were For Boys and I was A Girl. (More on parental and societal gender policing in a few Fictioneerings' time.)

Who is a woman?

The other day I decided to fuck around with my gender presentation. I bound my breasts, wore a men's shirt and suspenders (that's braces for all of y'all Olde English linguistic imperialists), and drew on a 'stache. It made me feel empowered and sexy, with the thrill of transgression and queering. Am I maybe not a cis woman? Am I perhaps genderfluid, a little genderqueer?

Who is a woman?

I've always wondered how it is that trans* women know they're women. Of course I know they do know, but personally the only reason I know I'm a woman is because, when I was a child, I was told I was a girl (unlike my brothers, who were boys), and I got bigger. It doesn't seem like a very good reason.

Fictioneering #1: It Looked Like Spilt Milk

This is the book that made me a reader and a writer. Long before I learned to read, this was my favorite book and I knew it by heart. I'm going to spoil the shit out of it, so if you want to experience the finest picture book in the English language as it was meant to be experienced, hie thee to eBay, and don't read the rest of this post until you've enjoyed It Looked Like Spilt Milk in a pure, unsullied state.

So, let's talk spilt milk. The book, which I will describe in detail for those of you too Philistine or cash-strapped to follow my advice from the previous paragraph, is magnificent in its simplicity. On a uniform background of rich cyan blue appear white figures, alongside text that both identifies and unidentifies them: “Sometimes it looked like spilt milk. But it wasn't spilt milk.”

That's some proto-Magritte shit right there. If it looked like spilt milk, but it wasn't spilt milk, what the hell was it? A picture on the page, a shadow on the wall of the cave; ceci n'est pas un pipe (and, bearing in mind Freud's considerably greater credibility in literary theory than in psychoanalysis, does spilt milk not share the Freudian connotations of pipe?).

As the book progresses, the disorienting sense of deconstruction intensifies. The forms on the page shift – it looked like a rabbit, an ice cream cone, a great horned owl (my favorite, and my father still delights in mimicking my toddler's rendition of the words “great horned owl”) – but the unidentification remains constant: it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't, and before long the repetition, both verbal and visual, reduces all the forms to the abstract interplay of white on blue. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. (Following Iser's concept of blanks in the text allowing for reader-author interplay, it's particularly significant that it's the changing forms that are the white of the blank page whereas the unchanging background is inked-in blue.)

The book also provides an excellent introduction to the Derridean concept of différance (sorry, this is just getting Frencher and Frencher). In Derridean semiotics, to oversimplify appallingly, meaning lies in the relationship between signifier and signified; just so, in It Looked Like Spilt Milk, the story lies in the relationship between the signified (whatever it is that is the subject of the book, the repeatedly un-/misidentified “it”) and the assorted signifiers that are applied and then immediately disavowed.

In fact, as well as demonstrating the gulf between signifier and signified – between language and reality – the book can also be read as an affirmation of larger ineffables. What is “like” many things, but is not actually any of those things? Why, any great indescribable of human existence. Pictures, texts, music, art, creativity, love, very God.

In this instance, “It” is revealed as – have you guessed it? (if so, you're not a toddler) – “just a cloud in the sky”. From such mundanities comes the sublime: from words come texts, from ink come pictures, from a cloud come all the forms in this book. Free association with other things “in the sky” (pie, castles, Lucy) causes me to read the cloud as a symbol for the human imagination, and so to see the story as open-ended, inviting the reader to keep mutating the cloud, and thence the story, into every form ey can think of.

Furthermore, the book's title offers another affirmation of the human power of imagination. “Spilt Milk”, as well as being titular, is the only form to be repeated in the book, appearing both times in places of prominence as the first and last incarnations of the cloud. The trite lesson of “things aren't always what they seem” is deepened by the proverbial implications of “spilt milk”: what may initially appear disastrous may, with imagination, be construed as any number of exciting possibilities, and thus shouldn't be cried over. This story affirms not only the power of creativity but also the uniquely human concept of crisitunity.

“Amusing intellecrobatics,” you are perhaps thinking, “but it's still just a frickin' PICTURE BOOK.” Not so: it's a text that has been imprinted in my mind since before my skull was fully formed, and you can't carry that around without powerful ramifications. This, I insist with my tongue still half-out my cheek, is the book that first made me a fictioneer.

That's The Thing About Living In A Capitalist Kyriarchy

You have to participate.

Unless you're one of the lucky few with the ability and the spoons to opt out entirely (and probably even if you are; I've not visited any self-sufficient, totally egalitarian collectivist communes lately), you're not only psychologically tainted by the bullshit kyriarchal norms into which the culture has been indoctrinating you from the moment you left the womb/test-tube/mothership [delete as appropriate]; you also have to actively participate in oppressive systems. By which I mean, you need food and shelter and healthcare and entertainment; for which you need money; for which you need a job.

More and more, I'm convinced that capitalism as we know it is fundamentally not an okay system, and it's not just 'cause I'm lazy. (I am, but I have ideological objections too.) I'm still in the (probably lifelong) process of forming my exact political beliefs, so I'm not yet sure whether my objection is to capitalism as currently implemented – the “it's a good theory, but doesn't work in practice” line so often applied by left-leaning moderates to communism – or (hello, Karl) to the very theory and idea of capitalism itself. At this end, I suppose it doesn't matter terribly: either way, I'm compelled to participate in and contribute to a system I think is profoundly wrong.

What I want to do is establish a coherent ideology for myself, and seek ways to enact that ideology in the world. (Isn't that what we all want?) In order to do that, I'm going to grad school, which means I'm participating in and shoring up a classist and discriminatory system. (By “discriminatory”, of course, I don't mean the practice of discriminating between those with the aptitude for graduate study and those without; I mean the complex network of socioeconomic circumstances that contrive to deny aptitude its fulfilment.) In order to go to grad school, I need to save money, which is why I currently have a job.

Don't get me wrong: I quite like my job. I know, it weirds me out too, especially since my first experience working in the world of customer service was so completely disgusting – but that's a story for another day. My current job is pretty decent; but sometimes my ideals are clashing headlong with the requirements of my job.

I want to call out my 70-year-old coworker, of whom everyone – managers included – is a little afraid, when she's being racist. But I don't. I want to beg everyone that asks for a ticket to The Hangover Part II to reconsider this disastrous life choice and instead see a movie that isn't quite such a hatefully offensive piece of garbage. But I don't. I want to give servicemen and -women the same discount we give students, because having a student discount but no military discount strikes me as classist. But I don't. I need to keep this job, and I need a good reference when I leave, so I keep my mouth shut, I don't rock the boat, and I betray my beliefs so that I can continue to participate in a system that is also against my beliefs.

Is it craven? Undoubtedly. Is it pragmatic? Absolutely. It's compromise; it's jumping through hoops; it's a deal with the devil.

It's living in a capitalist kyriarchy. It's how it works.

Convicted of Sin(justice)

There's this churchspeak phrase, “to be convicted of sin”. Having heard it used mainly by the young conservative evangelicals who remain my primary experience of churchspeakers, I always assumed it meant some combination of low self-esteem and guilt over personal failure to conform to the exacting standards of “traditional morality” – that is to say, the sense of shame with which a religious upbringing garnishes a little alone time with safe search off and non-dominant hand doing the pointing and clicking. As a committed non-subscriber to “traditional morality”, I have devoted the last few years of my life to not experiencing this.

Now, though, I think I'm beginning to understand what it means to be convicted of sin, and it has nothing to do with Madam Palm and her five lovely daughters (or Lady Lilac and her two AA batteries). To understand it, I've had to reframe my entire conception of sin.

Believe it or not, the strict behavioral prescriptions laid down by traditional Christian moralists aren't a bit Christian. They aren't even Pauline, and we all know how much the conservatives love ole Saul of Tarsus and his Romans 1:26 (per their interpretation, the only explicit prohibition of lesbianism in the Bible, though I'm pretty sure it's not contrary to my nature). The current conservative pet causes of abortion and homosexuality are mentioned, respectively, 0 and 3 times in the whole Bible (and it's only that many if you're wearing your right-tinted spectacles when you read it). You know who doesn't think abortion and homosexuality are Very Important Issues For Every Christian? Jesus. You know what he does think is a Very Important Issue For Every Christian? Loving your neighbor.

Both Jesus and Paul make it abundantly clear that the whole entire deal with being a Christian is that you don't have strict behavioral prescriptions to follow. It's literally the central message of Christianity that you don't have a rulebook. You love and trust in God; because you love and trust in God, you spend time with God and with God's people; through these times of prayer and fellowship, your heart is transformed into a heart of love, which manifests itself as good works. I am convinced that these good works comprise one thing and one thing only: helping those in need.

I recently read The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne. It's an amazing book that I'd definitely recommend to anyone that doubts whether the mainstream church is doing it right (and anyone that doesn't; it might change your mind!). Shane chronicles his life as an “ordinary radical”, living a life of true Christian love and service in accordance with the teachings and example of Jesus himself. The people of his community have renounced the lip-service Christianity that conforms itself to the easy self-centered capitalist lifestyle; their love of neighbors doesn't give some money to charity and carry on as before, but transforms their lives into something that more closely resembles the passage in Acts so beloved of us leftists. Shane and his people are definitely doing Christianity right.

I've also just finished reading a commentary on the book of James. James is awesome. Whereas Paul, God love him, confuses everyone – not least the church leadership – with his philosophical waxings of an ex-Pharisee and his culturally-specific admonishments to an emerging church, James cuts to the practical chase. He has a lot of very strong words about the importance of helping those in need: without that, faith is literally worthless. First-world Christian communities like to make excuses when it comes to money, about which the Bible is far less equivocal than about (say) teh gays, but the vision I'm getting from my current reading and thinking is uncompromising: Christians get out there and forge human connections with those in need. Diggers dig, teachers teach, Christians hang out with needy people. If you ain't fulfilling the job description, you ain't a Christian, no matter what you call yourself.

And that's what I'm convicted of. I feel the call in my heart, stronger every day, to reject the comfort Christianity of the mainstream and to put myself out there where my fellow humans need me – on the fringes, where my lord Jesus Christ lived his life. Exactly what this will look like, I've yet to find out, but I'm certain that God has major upheavals in store for me – and a transatlantic move is only the beginning.

Coming Out

I don't talk about when I came out. That phrase makes it sound as though it were a simple, closed, one-off action, which couldn't be further from the truth. No, I talk about when I started coming out. You start coming out the day you admit to yourself (or to your diary, if you're an embarrassingly pretentious dork like me) that you're not the hetero you and everyone else always assumed you are; I'd venture to guess that you finish coming out the moment you shuffle off this mortal coil, though I suppose it's possible that the afterlife is also a stew of awkward assumptions and pronoun acrobatics.

It's a truism, but coming out really is a life-long process. And it's bloody difficult, especially for those of us with an inadequate grasp of conversational nuance. Every time you meet someone, you over-analyse and second-guess everything. Is ey assuming you're straight, or staying open-minded? If you drop a reference to a girlfriend past or present, does that constitute “rubbing your sexuality in eir face” (a phrase that always makes me giggle)? As a generally out gay person, how far into a new acquaintanceship should you explicitly let the other party know you're gay? Could this apparently reasonable and friendly human being transform into an ugly and violent homophobe at the first mention of Melissa Etheridge?

As a queer radical, I sometimes feel that I ought to be proclaiming my gayness at the top of my lungs every waking moment: I should get my hair buzzcut, my face pierced a few more times, and my neck tattooed “GRRL LOVER”, and I should greet everyone with, “Hi, I'm Anna and I am a big ole queer.” That, I suppose, would be the purest manifestation of my political ideology.

But I am not a pure manifestation of political ideology; I am a human being with multiple identities, a sense of discretion, and not inexhaustible reserves of mental strength. Queer is something I am, but it is not the totality of who I am, nor even the most important aspect. It's perhaps the most marginalized of my identities, which is why I feel the need to weaponize it; but I just don't have the wherewithal to be in such a constant state of frontline warfare with the dominant culture. Of course, I am in a constant state of warfare with the dominant culture, but most of that is mental: and, given how exhausting that is, I simply haven't the energy to bring it in a loud, visible fashion every day of the week.

Moreover, I'm afraid of retaliation. I admit it: when my political ideology clashes with my self-preservation instinct, not getting punched in the face dominates nine times out of ten.

(Plus, my hair is great. I love it and will not sacrifice it at the altar of extreme butchness.)

The people it's easiest to come out to as gay are often the hardest to come out to as Christian. (And vice versa, no doy.) In my experience, the communities least likely to make assumptions about your sexuality are the most likely to make assumptions about your secularity. It's deeply frustrating: if I can have a great conversation about Jesus with you, I'll be afraid to talk about Rachel Maddow with you; if we're having fun discussing queer theory or your palaeontology degree, I'm going to have a hard time bringing God into it.

And yet I know that there are many, perhaps even a majority of, individuals who are open to the idea of a queer theologian-to-be. My fear of coming out as gay, Christian, or a gay Christian is exactly what the kyriarchy wants. The compartmentalization and conflict of your different identities is one of the ways you're kept fighting yourself and your potential allies, instead of the actual oppressive forces.

We're all afraid to be judged, outcast, or even physically harmed for who we are. Sometimes this fear is reasonable, often it's not, but in the minefield of social interaction it can be hard to tell. However, I do know this: if you don't know about my very personal passion for social justice, or about my mad dorkiness, or about my love for the Big Guy upstairs, then you don't know me.

Everyday Queering

Have you noticed how everyone says QUILTBAG now? It's a quality acronym, obviously – if you're too lazy to click that link, it stands for:

Queer/Questioning

Undecided

Intersex

Lesbian

Trans*

Bisexual

Asexual

Gay/Genderqueer

Good, eh? More inclusive (and waaaaay more pronounceable) than LGBT.

Personally, though, I like to use “queer” as my umbrella term for all that stuff. I know some people have problems with the q-word – mainly older LGB folks to whom it still carries the resonance of a slur – but even academia has reclaimed it.

The reason I like “queer”, though, is that it's a verb as well as an adjective and noun: it's not just something you are, it's something you can do. Cis, het, monogamous people with 2.4 kids in the suburbs aren't a part of the QUILTBAG community, but they're still capable of queering.

What do I mean by queering? Anything that challenges normative behaviors or attitudes around sex and gender. Anything that critiques the dominant, heteronormative culture. Anything that might introduce somebody to the concept of deconstructing their identities.

Even the tiniest actions matter. These parents are queering radically (and I think they are awesome), but not everybody needs to do what they're doing. Even the humblest challenges to the kyriarchy can open that crucial door in somebody's mind.

Buying pink booties for your cousin's newborn son: that's queering.

Teaching your young kids that trans*, intersex, and genderqueer people exist: that's queering.

Not correcting the shopkeeper who took you for the opposite sex: that's queering.

Reminding the right-wing Christian who's always talking “family values” that Jesus not only was unmarried (celibate; perhaps asexual?), but also rejected his biological family in favor of his friends (OMG JUST LIKE ON BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER)? Queering.

Using Spivak pronouns in everyday speech? Queering.

Sometimes I feel sorry for cis heteros, because they have to try that much harder if they want to challenge the kyriarchy. We QUILTBAG types queer the place up just by existing, but y'all have to do something. And that's also why I appreciate you queering non-queers so much.

Geek Identity

“What are you doing this weekend?” my coworker asked, as she wiped down the bar.

“My Dungeons & Dragons group is meeting for the first time in ages,” I replied – whereupon she collapsed into a fit of laughter that lasted for about five solid minutes. Each time the giggles seemed likely to dry up, she would take another glance at me, patiently waiting for her to finish, and a fresh wave of uncontrollable mirth would strike. Eventually, staggering upright, wiping away the tears, she hiccuped out,

“I suppose – you still have – a few more years...”

Most of the people I regularly spend time with, online or in real life, are, like me, nerds. The ones who aren't tolerate my nerdiness, to the point that they don't tend to laugh uncontrollably at me (to my face, anyway). I had forgotten that the world is full of people who react to forthright declarations of geekery the way my coworker did.

If geek culture – as signified by markers like Dungeons & Dragons, devotion to cult TV series, paperback doorstoppers with dragons on the covers – is an adolescent pursuit we should all outgrow by our mid-twenties, what does that say about those of us who are lifelong geeks?

You're never supposed to admit this, but I haven't always been devoted to Firefly and Mystery Science Theater 3000 and China Miéville. These things are merely the current trappings of geekdom. Being a geek is a lot like being gay: anybody can latch onto the external behaviors and signifiers of the subculture, but externals do not a geek make. Geek is something you always have been and always will be, whether you like Star Trek or not.

Geekdom is the eight-year-old who sneaks away from the birthday party to spend the afternoon hiding in a closet with a book. It's the kid who works so hard in school that even the teachers write “Swotticus mingicus” on her report card (that's neo-British-East-African for “Dorkus malorkus”). It's the teenager who enjoys exams and spends her free time writing a novel.

Geeks are, I think, almost all introverts. It's not that we're friendless social misfits, though many of us have been at some point in our lives, but we thrive on our own company. The defining characteristic of geekdom is a love of minutiae and depth – the enjoyment of overthinking for its own sake – and that necessarily entails time spent alone with one's interests.

That's why we're all internet-diagnosed aspies (I score 34 on the AQ Test, yo), and that's why we all love Dr. Sheldon Cooper. The Big Bang Theory is probably the most popular mainstream representation of geek culture, and Sheldon is its best character by a parsec *audience laughs because I geekified a common idiom*. The other characters engage in the recognized cultural currency of geekdom – they read comic books, play videogames, watch sci-fi shows – but none of them displays that single-mindedness that is the hallmark of being a geek.

I realize that watching people be introverted would make for terrible TV, but there's no indication that Leonard or Howard or Raj gives to anything the time and attention that Sheldon gives to his work and his fandoms. Of course, in his single-minded devotion to his own interests, Sheldon frequently misses social cues and acts like an ass to people, but we like him because we wish we could do that too.

The Big Bang Theory, for all its claims to be representative of geeks and geek culture, buys into the idea that geekery is adolescent. Although lately it's improved its portrayal of women, adding several strong (and geeky!) female characters to the regular cast, the show is still beholden to its initial premise of laughing at the geeks' failures to interact with the pretty normie girl. Just last week, Priya (the other pretty normie girl) spoke disparagingly of her brother's nerdy hobby from when he was little, “but not as little as you'd want him to be.”

This coding of geek activities as immature plays directly into the heteronormative patriarchy. Yeah, I just wrote that sentence, and I believe it. Because “you'll outgrow geek culture” sounds to me a lot like “you'll get broody before you're thirty”. It's a way of delegitimating non-mainstream identities and assuming every life has to follow the traditionalist model of “growing up” – leaving behind all your interests and ambitions in order to have a spouse and children and a house in the suburbs and Tupperware parties and a mortgage. Which is fine if you want it, but not everyone does.

People tell me that one day I'll want to “settle down” and bear children; people tell me I'll “outgrow” my geeky interests. I say: God, I hope not.

Existential Jesus

I’ve just finished reading a book called The Existential Jesus by John Carroll. It’s an existentialist interpretation of the Gospel of Mark, and it’s pretty much heresy from start to finish. Some of its assertions are plucked from thin air – when Carroll claims that Jesus’ closing of the Gethsemane prayer with the words “Nevertheless, not my will, but yours” is not a submission to God’s will but a meaningless formula appended out of habit, it is tempting to respond, with post-Wikipedia cynicism, “Citation needed” – and its individualist approach to Christ’s teachings often melts them into airy-fairy New Age spiritual gloop.

However, The Existential Jesus does two things rather well. One is applying the concept of midrash to the New Testament (which is something I find incredibly exciting, and which could well prove a road toward reconciling reception theory and hermeneutic realism). The other is portraying Christ’s humanity.

It is all too easy to forget that Jesus was a human being. Yes, we sing each Christmas of the little lord Jesus asleep on the hay; yes, we parrot glib churchspeak like “fully God and fully man”; but I for one tend to focus on his role as savior and messiah. Pace my favorite gospel, I meditate on the mystery: the Word, the truth, the light. At this point in my life, though, I find it all too easy to relate to the idea of a Jesus my age – a young man, living a perfectly ordinary life, who didn’t yet know all the answers, and perhaps wasn’t yet sure of his own identity and purpose on this earth.

Another book I’ve just finished is Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation, which has also been branded as heresy. It’s a novelization of the life of Christ, and it packs a bold Christological punch from the very first chapter, which depicts Jesus the carpenter’s son being jeered and vilified for building the cross on which a prophet-rebel is crucified. Kazantzakis’ Jesus has always been tormented by a sense of God’s presence, but it is only slowly and torturously that he works his way toward an understanding of his destiny.

Kazantzakis was (on and off) a practicing Christian, Carroll is not, but in this sense their works make interesting companion pieces. Both portray a Jesus who does not spring forth fully formed, knowing himself and his part from the off; both portray him as fully human, with the cloudy understanding that entails, seeing through a glass darkly and seeking his higher calling without a straightforward knowledge and understanding to guide him. It’s a compelling, revolutionary portrayal for us today, who have always known Jesus’ full story. I don’t know if it’s heresy to envision Jesus struggling to discover his identity and his destiny, but it thoroughly humanizes this figure who was, after all, thoroughly human – and it’s an enormous comfort, two millennia on, for an unemployed twenty-something unsure of her purpose on earth.

Who has principles these days anyway?

“I only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements…. Last movie I was able to see was Alien.”

-- Dykes to Watch Out For

“I used to love Tarantino movies, but now I’m a Christian I don’t watch them anymore.”

-- My friend Louis

My dad hates Rupert Murdoch. He doesn’t know him personally; he just thinks that – dubious business practices; admiration of Thatcher; The Sun – Murdoch is an odious human being. And so he doesn’t take a Murdoch-owned paper, and he doesn’t subscribe to Sky. The latter is tough for him, because he absolutely adores cricket; but he denies himself it, to avoid giving money to Murdoch.

Not many of us would make that kind of sacrifice. We say, It’s only a small thing so it’s not worth it; I’m only one person so I wouldn’t make a difference; I’ll just indulge myself. We believe stealing is wrong, but we get all of our music from Megaupload. We hurry past people on the street collecting for sick children, and spend £10 a week on comic books. We believe in feminist values, but we watch horribly misogynistic movies and TV.

I admire my dad a lot. Some people might think that it’s only cricket, a trifling entertainment, but that makes me admire him all the more because, when it comes to entertainment, I do not act on my principles.

For example: The Bechdel Test. I love the Bechdel Test. All feminists love the Bechdel Test. Every time I see a movie, I keep a watch out for female characters and conversations they may have. But one thing we never really talk about is that, in the original comic strip, the character refuses to see movies that don’t pass the test. Granted, in 1985 this might not have been very practicable, but nowadays there are ways of finding out in advance whether a movie passes. It would be perfectly possible to never see the many films that fail.

And yet I keep going to see them. Movies that ignore women, made by studios whose policy is to ignore women: if I was serious about the Bechdel Test, wouldn’t I just stay at home?

It’s a sticky question, because I don’t know where to draw the line. When I was about 15, I bought a book by Orson Scott Card. Then I found out the man has some loathsome beliefs, and he does put his royalties where his mouth is. If you buy an Orson Scott Card book, you are contributing to the Mormon Church, and so you are funding things like the Yes on Prop 8 campaign. Does that make it wrong to read OSC books? I hope not; if someone had put a copy of Ender’s Game into my tragic 10-year-old mitts, I might have become a little less tragic, and it still resonated with me last year when I finally read it. My compromise here is to buy all my OSC second-hand, so he doesn’t actually get any of my flaming pink dollars.

But that doesn’t address the matter of content and subtext. One of the reasons we feminists rage so hard at things like the lack of minority representation in Hollywood is because we believe that people’s exposure to the undercurrents of popular culture affects them subconsciously from a very early age (“the ‘fat is bad’ stereotype…is evident in children as young as three”). And, if you’re not engaged in the exhausting work of constantly battling the messages of a messed-up culture – that you’re not complete unless you have a romantic partner, that you’ll be happy if you’re skinny and conventionally pretty, that if you’re not a straight white cis male you are Other and hence inferior – if you’re not fighting against these messages all the time, you’re implicitly accepting them.

That’s where my friend Louis comes in. Louis is a pretty cool guy. He’s another gay Christian with an enthusiasm for pop culture, and although we disagree on some major issues (such as whether a gay Christian should be celibate) I have a lot of respect for him. So it’s worth my while to think about why Louis believes that, as a Christian, he shouldn’t be watching Tarantino films.

Only the most narrow-minded people think they should never engage with anything that doesn’t jive 100% with their beliefs. Having your beliefs challenged is a vital way of ensuring you know why you hold those beliefs, and whether you even should be holding them. Personally, I don’t have a problem with Christians watching Tarantino films or feminists listening to Eminem, but you have to be intellectually honest about it. That involves admitting upfront that this material is problematic, and engaging with it critically throughout: analyzing what about it is problematic for you and why.

Of course, this means I have to admit – perhaps I’m deceiving myself; perhaps I’m simply justifying my own unpleasant, if not downright immoral, enthusiasm for violent movies and misogynistic rap music.

Twilight and the tale of a one-woman quest for pop-culture omniscience

I have a terrible addiction, and it is called Twilight.

It’s not the content of the books themselves that interests me – I’ve read all four, and they really are dreadful – but it’s the phenomenon I find so fascinating. I don’t always know what to do with pop-culture crazes that seem to sweep the world along. When the Harry Potter craze started, I embraced it; as it continued and I passed into my teens, I turned my back on it entirely.

Nowadays, I can look at the fads sweeping our nation’s youth with a more disinterested eye, and consider the question why? Why is this particular series capturing young people’s imagination?

I have read many, many, many, many, many webpages that analyze, spork, recap, parody, or edit the Twilight series. I have put way more thought into the subject than most fans, and probably more than the author herself. Now the craze is on the wane, with only two movies remaining, but I haven’t really figured it out, and I am not bored yet.

It’s probably because the whole environment of pop culture is still relatively new to me. I grew up in the third world, and as a child I took active pleasure in remaining ignorant of popular culture. I had never heard of Pop Idol or Jerry Springer; I couldn’t hum you a single Destiny’s Child song; I thought “the matrix” was a super-awesome topic in my math class (actually, I still prefer the mathematical matrix to the overrated movie).

Only in 2004/5ish did I start to realize that pop culture is both interesting and valuable. It’s the window into our society’s mores. “Television is America's cultural campfire, where we tell stories about ourselves” says Sarah Warn in this After Ellen article, but that’s also true of movies, the Internet, and popular YA book series. Without the creators of the material necessarily knowing it, they reveal a lot about the messages our society sends to individuals and the things we collectively believe. Wolfgang Iser believed that the blanks and negations in a text are at least as important as the things that are present, because they show us what an author (reader, society) takes for granted and because they allow for an interplay between the author and the reader.

That’s definitely a huge part of Twilight’s appeal. I’ve heard it described as a “first-person shooter” of a book: Bella’s life is deliberately left empty of hobbies and suchlike so that the reader can easily insert herself, filling in the blanks as it suits her.

Similarly, we expend so much virtual ink analyzing a book that was written as slight, thoughtless escapism because we want to find the values and messages that subconsciously pervade it, be they Mormon, misogynistic, or moral. If I study all pop culture, perhaps I can come to a thorough and complete understanding of not only my particular society, but also human nature itself.