Nerdly Advice: Love Will Tear Us Apart
Nov 12For the nerd, a stable and healthy relationship is a bit like Melville’s great white whale – nearly impossible to find and simultaneously the most desirable thing and the most destructive thing to its pursuer. The only way to survive its onslaught is to cling to Queequeg’s coffin and pray for the Rachel to happen by.
Whether you self-identify as a nerd, a geek or a dork, chances are you either lack the social acumen to sustain a good relationship or lack the perspective to realize that your relationship is more important than Shepherd Book’s mysterious backstory. There are few potential partners out there who are willing to always be second behind Batman.
Why do I bring this up? Two reasons. First, yet another anger-inspiring “how do I force my girlfriend to legitimize my manchild-hobby?” article (read: how can I get my s.o. to read comics?) making the rounds among our circle of Right-Thinking People, and a conversation I had with a friend about the sorts of partners we, as nerds and geeks and dorks, seek out and how we segment our lives. It was pretty heavy stuff, and why by God someone asked me about this shit I have no idea.
My own relationship history, stretching back to the 6th grade (when a cute girl named Florence left a get well card with an interior note reading “I like you,” in my desk while I was out sick for a week) – or even back to 2nd grade (when a friend matter-of-factly decided that we were boyfriend and girlfriend and that we would get married) – to the present is a mixed bag of nerds and non-nerds. The most notable thing about that is this: there was dysfunction, drama, infidelity and a slew of other problems in pretty much all of them, regardless of whether or not they had the same hobbies as I did.
What I’m saying here is that if you’re thinking to yourself, “Gee, my life would be so much better if I could meet a guy/girl who was really into Heroes For Hire just like I am,” you’re fooling yourself. Finding the mythical single and appealing nerd of the appropriate gender (S.A.N.A.G.) is not a guarantee of smooth sailing. Some of my most profound heartbreaks have come at the hands of those nerdy girls.
Something else that you need to think about – your friends. If your significant other has the exact same interests as you and your friends, that’s not going to end well. Who is the rest of your role-playing group going to side with when they find out the cleric dumped you for not being emotionally available? Hint: the person that can heal them. In college, my friend Nick’s girlfriend was part of our D&D game, and it was always Julie’s character that got the best magic items, struck the deathblow on the dragon and got treated like a demigoddess by the guileless farmers of the Forgotten Realms.
Why? Because it got him laid. If you think that your friendships can survive unscathed when directly challenged by the spectre of sex, you and your friends must have been through some horrible fucking trauma together.
I’m not saying that dating within your social ouerve is bad. It’s not. God, if I were, I’d be quite the hypocrite right now. I’m saying that love isn’t just who your favorite Doctor is.
Advice: if you consider yourself a reasonable adult, and you think that your relationship hinges on what your significant other thinks of Frostlops or 4th Edition or Goodbye Cruel World or whether the Droid is better than the iPhone, you are doing it wrong.
If that’s you, you’re actually in love with your hobby. You’re fetishizing your geek guy or nerd girl into a physical extension of that hobby that you can do filthy things to. Because you are actually in love with your hobby and are treating the person as an accessory to that hobby.
Ironically, as much as I hear my friends (male and female) gripe about how elusive the S.A.N.A.G. is, I think it’s much more difficult to find a ‘normal guy/girl’ in a lot of cases?
Why?
Think about who you hang out with. How many of those people are single, rational members of the opposite sex who don’t have any venning hobbies or interest with you? How many of those people do they hang out with? It looks bleak.
I guess what I’m saying is that neither is easy. And it’s about who your partner is, not what your partner is into. Even if they don’t like comics.
Which brings me to my next point: you can’t force your significant other to like comics. Trying is just going to make you single again more quickly.
I understand why people do this. It’s not always just to, as I snarked above, legitimize their hobby. Sometimes, when you’re passionate about something, you want to share that thing with someone you’re also passionate about. This is the main reason that people buy Angel on DVD.
Advice: Giving people homework is not the ideal way to say, “I love you.”
You aren’t going to make people like stuff they aren’t inclined to like by constructing this Phantom-of-the-Opera-chandelier-reveal-esque moment where you go, “A HA! COMICS, GENTLEMEN!” That’s not how people work.
I don’t like mushrooms, and there was a point in time where my ex-wife would try to sneak mushrooms into food she was cooking so that she could be all, “How does that taste? Good? Because there are mushrooms in there!” It rarely worked, because I’d typically go, “Hey, did you put mushrooms in here?” That’s how these things typically go. Trying to make your s.o. play Mega Man 9 because they like Wii Fit falls into the same category – Wii Fit is an act of torture that just happens to occur on a video game console. Besides, if your significant other likes a computer that preys on their body image issues, you might want to consider counseling.
“But Jeff,” you’re telling me, “I gave my girlfriend all of Y The Last Man and she loved it!” Are you really selling her on comics, or on one comic that is extraordinarily good? As I said on Twitter yesterday, loaning someone Battlestar Galactica on DVD doesn’t mean I’ve made her a convert to television. ‘Comics’ isn’t a homogeneous entity. Hell, I love them, and there are still whole types of comics that I don’t get or creators that I plain can’t stand.
Just because you self-identify as a comics fan doesn’t meant that you need everyone around you to know what Vril Dox’s first appearance was. If that’s something you think that you need from your partner, it’s worth asking why you need it. I wrote a thing in the first issue of Grok about the clashes I had with my ex about my geekdom, and the takeaway was ‘respect the differences.’ Despite that I made that essay a bit more sunny than reality would have reflected, that advice stands. Sure, commonality brings a lot of couples together, but individuality keeps them interesting.
Checking It Twice
Oct 29So, here’s the thing about event fatigue.
It’s not that there are annual events. It’s not that they take most of a year to get finished. It’s that – at least for me – they don’t do anything. Nothing has huge consequences anymore. I don’t know if they ever did, but there was a point where it felt like they did. The last two events that I really got behind were Infinite Crisis and Civil War. As literature, they aren’t the best, but shit happpens in them – an embarrassment of shit happening, in fact. For everything that I loved about Final Crisis, all of its toys went right back into the box when they were done with the sole exception of Batman, who DC flat-out told us would be back.  Messiah CompleX, which I actually did like a lot, killed off Caliban and Deathstrike, both of whom have had significant appearances this year, and then shunted its MacGuffin into the future where it could be patly ignored most of the time.
Which is the main reason why I can get behind Marvel’s Dark Reign: The List one-shots. I’ve read all of them except for the Hulk one – which I just haven’t been able to track down yet – and most of them have been important in establishing new status quos for the characters – whether it’s Bullseye finally erasing the last of Matt Murdock’s reluctance about leading The Hand, Namor facing down his wife Marrina, Ronin’s one-man assault on Avengers Tower, or the fight between Daken and the Punisher. They’ve all felt like they’ve meant something big for those characters. That it has consequences for the universe.
And man, that Punisher one-shot. I spent most of the issue saying “They didn’t just do that,” to myself. And, of course, they did just do that. Over and over. And I loved every second of it.
And yet I haven’t heard a lot of chatter online about these books. Mainly because I’m avoiding a lot of comic communities for my sanity’s sake these days, maybe. Have you been reading them, and if so, what do you think?
The Critical Recuperation of Anthony Stark
Oct 22[This post discusses Matt Fraction’s Invincible Iron Man, including the most recent issue #19. It contains spoilers and should be avoided if you wish to read #19 without foreknowledge of that issue’s events. ]
Near the end of the most recent installment of Sober House, Andy Dick confronts his longtime friend and fellow comic Kathleen Madigan to apologize for the myriad ways in which Dick’s rampant alcoholism and natural dickishness (no pun intended) have inadvertantly damaged her life. It may be the only time I have ever or will ever be moved by Andy Dick.
The entirety of Matt Fraction’s 19 issue (to date) run on Invincible Iron Man can perhaps be boiled down to that scene, just with more espionage, violence and explosions. “World’s Most Wanted,” the story that began with the end of Secret Invasion and just this week came to its conclusion with Norman Osborn pummeling a basically brain dead Tony Stark on live news. A pummeling that the reader watches with pity, wanting Tony to fight back but knowing that he won’t (in part because the audience suspects that Stark has a death wish, but chiefly because his brain has forgotten how to perform even basic instinctual reactions). Was it only three years ago that we all cheered when Cap clocked Iron Man in the face after shorting out his armor under a truce? I mean, I was appalled that Steve Rogers did it, but I was really glad at the same time. It was due. After a too-brief run where Warren Ellis gave us a Tony that was a limitless, wide-eyed futurist, Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Millar, Joe Straczynski and Daniel and Charles Knauf tweaked him into a controlling megalomaniac with a savior complex. I won’t take issue with that characterization; Tony is an addict, control is how he copes and the savior complex is intrinsic in his origin. I didn’t like Tony Stark, but I understood him, and that’s far more important than liking.
Post-Civil War, though, Stark had the rug pulled out from under him hard. He hit rock bottom and has been building himself up from that point. Invincible Iron Man has very much been a book about Iron Man rebuilding his relationships, personal and professional, as an externalization of that recuperation, a roadmap to him becoming a real hero again. He is penitent, he has feet of clay, and he is willing to basically place himself in a persistent vegetative state to do one last good act. It’s significant, in terms of absolution, that he’s taking that proverbial bullet to ensure that the Superhuman Registration Act database, the very thing that caused the massive rift among the Marvel Universe’s heroes, is destroyed. Fraction’s work on the title has deftly balanced clever humor, bombastic action and touching human drama in a way that few things can manage, resulting in the best long form superhero epic since Grant Morrison’s Justice League. He’s done the impossible: making us root for Tony Stark again.
Nerdly Advice Special: BATMANNERS
Oct 14[Nerds have questions, but nerds have to appear authoritative or risk losing their nerdy cred. In this case, people have questions for Emily Post’s Etiquette Daily that we have shamelessly borrowed, and they’re questions that only the Caped Crusader, the Dark Knight Detective, The Ebon Etiquetteer can handle.
That’s why, as a recurring feature on Alert Nerd, Jeff answers these conundrums anonymously. It’s like Ann Landers Miss Manners as written by Gorilla Grodd Batman. We call it Nerdly Advice BATMANNERS.]
The Language Of Logan
Oct 08Here at the Alert Nerd Sanitarium For People With English Degrees Institute for Language Studies, we like to stay on the cutting edge of the vernacular, such that we noun verbs, verb nouns and bandy about portmanteau words like ‘friendlationship’ with frightening* frequency.
Why? So that, on occasion, we can give you features like this, in which we will conjugate a pair of verbs that are sure to work their way into your geek vocab.
To Wolver
(To be the best there is at what one does**)
Rel. Wolverine – One who wolvers.
Present Tense:
I wolver
You wolver
He/She/It wolvers
We wolver
You wolver
They wolver
Preterite Tense:
I wolvered
You wolvered
He/She/It wolvered
We Wolvered
You wolvered
They wolvered
Participle – Wolvering (ex. future perfect participle – I/You/She/We/They will have been wolvering).
To Snikt (Irregular)
(1. To “pop one’s claws.” 2. To totally stab some guy.)
Present Tense:
I snikt
You snikt
He/She/It snikts
We snakt
You snikt
They snakt
Preterite Tense:
I snukt
You snukt
He/She/It snukt
We snukt
You snukt
They snukt
Use these words three times today, then they’re yours forever.
*to the layperson
** esp. if what one does is not very nice
