Great Hera!

Nerdlebrities in the Wild

How do you feel about approaching your favorite nerdlebrities when you see them, you know, in the wild? Like, not at a signing or a meet-and-greet or whatever. And not when you're in some sort of official capacity, as a journalist or some other media type person. You're just you, you're boppin' along and you spot whoever-it-is. What do you do?

I've written before about how decidedly NOT GOOD I am at this. I'm so NOT GOOD at it that I tend to avoid it at all costs. I settle for surreptitious gawking.

My friend Jenelle, however, is REALLY GOOD at the nerdlebrity approach. She does it with panache and without seeming creepy. One time, we saw Victor Garber strolling down Larchmont (in case you are wondering, Victor Garber does indeed always appear as if he is wearing a perfectly-pressed suit, even when he's wearing something else entirely). Had I been by myself, I probably would have hidden behind a magazine and observed him until he made a right turn into either Baskin Robbins or Pinkberry (which one would Victor Garber choose, one must wonder?!). But Jenelle was just like, "Oh, hello, Victor Garber, how are you today?" (It bears noting that she had interviewed him before, but to clarify my position on this: when I meet someone as a journalist, I'm fine, we do the interview, whatever. If I see them afterwards, in a civilian setting, I'm Just Me and therefore do not approach.) Another time, she encouraged me to do the approach along with her, and we ended up having an encounter with a certain nerdlebrity icon and I don't think I can mention here who it is or what transpired, but let's just say that it all ended with one of my idols yelling after me, in a belligerent-yet-loving tone, "HEY!! WHERE'S MY HUG?!"

(I'll tell you this story if we meet in person, with names named and everything. Promise.)

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. So because of all this, I'm starting to think of Jenelle as my nerdlebrity approach coach. She can show me the way. In fact, she pretty much did just that the other night, when we went to a screening of a film by a cool indie director who I interviewed earlier this year at a festival. There was a reception afterwards, and the director was there, soaking in the accolades of all in attendance. I was wearing these little bobby pins made out of old watchfaces in my hair (this will be important later).

"Hey," says Jenelle, "you should go say hi."

"Nah," I say.

"What?!" she says. "Why not?! You talked to her at the film festival." (Yes, I did. But remember my disclaimer before? I'm back to being Just Me, here.)

"She won't remember me," I demure. "I looked different. I was wearing a parka."

"You can remind her," she says. "She'll remember."

"No," I say. "Besides. She's busy talking to Cool People."

"Cool People? Cool People?! They're not Cool People!"

"Cooler than me, I think."

"DO THEY HAVE CLOCKS IN THEIR HAIR?!"

"Well, no..."

"EXACTLY. They are not the Cool People. You are the Cool People."

So we went.

Me: "Hi, Indie Filmmaker. I interviewed you at that film festival..."

Indie Filmmaker: "Oh! I remember you!"

Jenelle: "She thought you wouldn't want to talk to her because you were too busy talking to Cool People."

Indie Filmmaker (charmingly self-deprecating): "Ha ha ha! That's me."

So what do I tell myself in the future when I want to make the nerdlebrity approach and I'm freaking out and I can't do it, because it's Just Me? I'll let Jenelle's voice echo in my head, intoning one line and one line only...

"DO THEY HAVE CLOCKS IN THEIR HAIR?!"

No. Probably they don't.

The Joy of Seth(s)

I clicked over to Seth's site earlier today and noticed a little Amazon sidebar. At first I thought it was his Wish List, but actually I think it is an ad thingy that pulls up stuff with the word "Seth."

It bears noting, however, that for a split second, I thought he wanted this.

I bet he does, secretly.

It also bears noting that I used to own this book and that it is now apparently going for $140.

Regrets? Oh, sure. Tons.

Having a Moment

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about groups. Posses, if you will. I have a few of them. The online geek posse -- spread out geographically, connected by our nerdblogs and Twitchats. The day-to-day social circle -- workmates from different backgrounds who bond via in-jokes and shared circumstances and Taco Tuesday. The burgeoning local nerd gang -- brought together by a D&D game that will hopefully last more than one session.

One posse that I miss rather fiercely -- and unfortunately, we don't have a blog and I can't convince them all to get on Twitter and I doubt virtual D&D would work out too well -- is my college gang, a tight-knit group of gals of various nerdly stripes. I am probably the biggest geek of this particular group -- at least in the traditional Star Trekkie-comic book-y sense -- but we certainly share a core of dorkness that has kept the bond strong throughout the years.

We went to an all-women's college, which made for some unusual dating escapades (at least for the hetero amongst us, though now that I think about it, actually I don't even need that qualifier? There's a lot of drama going on, period, at such an institution. As you can probably imagine). There were male grad students, but a lot of them were, how do you say? Eccentric? Like, this one time, one of the posse was hanging out with a music grad in his dorm room. At some point, music grad decided that it was time to get, you know, romantic. So he went into the other room and slipped on his Winnie the Pooh costume and came back out and informed her that, oh, this costume? It's big enough for two, baby. If you know what I'm saying. She did know what he was saying, so she left.

Me, I basically stayed away from it entirely, even though I was a hardcore shipper at heart (Oh, Cyclops and Phoenix! Riker and Troi! Buffy and Angel!). I dreamed of true lohhhhhve, but put in very little effort.

When I did get a bit of attention, I didn't really know how to handle it. For example, at a party, this one guy tried to chat me up and one of his ice-breakers was a sort of standard "what kind of music are you into?" question (super extra important in the Bay Area, btw). I didn't really want to talk to him, so I said that I...wasn't into music. At all. What? In my defense, I'm pretty sure he was actually interested in my cuter, less bitchy friend, so I was just speeding him along toward his ultimate goal.

There was this one night, though, where I decided to, like, try. Posse member Mary was invited to a birthday party populated almost exclusively by mod hipsters -- held in an offbeat little record store, natch. I borrowed a dress from our Vintage Shop Genius friend and let my hair out of its mangy bun-ponytail hybrid and left the glasses at home. We drove over the bridge, the gateway to glittery San Francisco dreams, which always felt like an adventure unto itself.

When we arrived, the shindig was totally overwhelming in its modness -- girls with gigantic pearls, boys in thrift store suits, the hipster environs cranked to 11. The tallest, nattiest suited guy was Jared, clearly the mod Alpha Male king. He smoldered, he brooded, he fake DJ-ed. The gigantic pearls-wearing girls swooned.

I enjoyed myself intermittently, but ultimately ended up retreating to my classic wallflower position for most of the night. Until the very last song. That's when Jared -- perhaps spotting the obvious vintage dress, perhaps mistaking me for a too-cool-for-school type of gal who listened to Modest Mouse and did not own a TV and would never dream of wearing cargo pants out in public -- took my hand and asked me to dance. He was cool, still so broody. Detached. I said yes.

He pulled me onto the dance floor and the song began, the distinctive opening squeaky wheel notes of "Bittersweet Symphony." And then...and then...

Jared went completely BATSHIT CRAZY.

I mean, not in an angry way. Not in an Elaine Benes kind of way. But it was like a switch was flipped and he went from being oh-so-cool, oh-so-detached, to being a total lov-ah. His eyes locked on me with the intensity of three million laser beams. He wrapped me in his hipster embrace and started, ahem, caressing like nobody's business (maybe he was just trying to feel up the fabric of my dress -- you know, to determine whether or not it was true vintage). He sang along with the song with way more raspy feeling than Richard Ashcroft ever managed. He was creating a Moment.

Mary -- dancing much more chastely with a platonic friend -- glanced over at some point. Her eyes bugged out of her head and she mouthed something along the lines of "HOLY SHIT."

I could not meet his eyes. I looked up at the ceiling, over at Mary. I scanned the racks of battered vinyl. I could not truly give myself over to this shipper moment. And I didn't have my glasses, so everything was all blurry anyway.

A couple weeks ago, Mary came to town for a visit. We went to a vintage shop packed with little mod dresses and suddenly-cool Mom jeans. We were separated at one point, when all of a sudden, that squeaky wheel sound drifted over the speakers. "Cause it's a bittersweet..."

I heard her from across the store: "OH MY GOD."

We found each other.

"JARED!"

"IT'S HIS SONG!"

"DANCE FLOOR MOLESTER!"

"JARED WOULD LOVE THIS STORE!"

We hummed along with the rest of it.

Moments like these make me miss that college posse all the more. They knew me when I was becoming who I would eventually be, when I wore nothing but cargo pants, when I claimed not to like music (at all!).

You know what, Jared? Life is a bittersweet symphony. Thanks for the dance.

A Bunch of Stuff, Plus Twitter

So I went on vacation. We drove through the mountains. We saw Wall-E and Wanted. I ate amazing burritos, gigantic donuts and a really weird plate of stuff from a spectacularly bad Chinese food buffet. I bought a lot of comics and was complimented on my Manhunter love by the nice fanboy at Excalibur. I did a bunch of writing, some of it in the back seat of a moving car. It was good.

So, a couple things. First off, I keep meaning to do a "This Week on Alert Nerd" post here, because we've been kicking some serious ass over there. And we've got Grok #2 coming up, which has some really great (and possibly embarrassing -- the theme is Secret Origins, after all) stuff within its glorious pages. Oh, and, and...did you see our new-ish Twitter widget? It's pretty neat, right? Chris designed it and somehow made us look like the very groovy cast of a painfully hip Brit-com. Well, that's what I think, anyway.

Enough with the bragging. I want to talk some more about Twitter. If you'll remember, I was skeptical, and then I kind of got into it. Well, now I'm completely addicted. I was struggling to put the why of my obsession into words this weekend, when the brain trust that is We Two Librarians jumped in and summed up rather nicely. Basically? Because Twitter is all about minutiae, it makes me feel closer to my friends who I don't get to see every day, particularly the ones who are geographically far away. I mean, if you're doing an email catch-up with said friends, you're gonna focus on the big stuff, right? Or you'll just sort of shrug and say there's nothing new, you're so BORING, etc. But on the Twit tip, it's all tiny little moments and tiny little feelings and those general bits and bobs that occur throughout the day. I love those. And sometimes, they lead to fairly high-larious conversations (shall we all talk about X-Men sex some more? How about Hulk penis spam? Haw haw!).

Twitter has also led me to some most excellent new-to-me blogs that are right up my alley, but that I would probably not have found otherwise. Oh! And it indirectly led to the creation of our sure-to-be-awesome D&D game, because if it weren't for Twitter, I wouldn't have known that Seth was obsessed with the new 4th edition rules and I wouldn't have referred him to my similarly-obsessed husband and then they both wouldn't have ganged up on me to play, too.

Of course, now I fear I'm starting to sound a little evangelical about the whole thing, since I just used all these same arguments in trying to convince Twit-resistant Chad to get on the thing. I'm still trying to avoid being the You Must Read/Watch/Listen To/Do This Geek, OK?