this story originally appeared in the philippine daily inquirer on June 19, 2001.
I am not a nerd. No two ways about it. I have no idea what on earth Schrodinger’s equation is (until I looked it up) and neither is proving mathematical theorems a la Will Hunting my No. 1 preoccupation. The truth is, I never even wanted to touch a piece of chalk-but that’s another story.
For starters, I am not a “Star Trek” fan. But I know that there is more than one version of the original series, “New Generation,” and who knows why they called it “Deep Space Nine.” I didn’t beg my parents to buy me light sabers and never in my dreams did I get the urge to wear rubber ears in public a la Mr. Spock. But I have a propensity to blurt out answers aloud while watching TV game shows.
Does that make me a closet nerd? I’d like to think that I was always a diligent student. Not that I have the brains of a real genius, but I wanted to give my parents the least pain, knowing they were paying for my education, a responsibility that didn’t come cheap. My mother did her best not to make me forget how lucky I was to be in school, so the best I could do was avoid being asked to take any subject a second time or repeat an academic level. I had my close shaves but I fought through it. Besides, it was much easier on the eyes to see your folks fighting over whose genetic combination did the trick than seeing the kind of look that asks, “Where did I go wrong?” or “What do I have to do?”
Owing to childhood convulsions that could have easily fried my brain, I’ve heard my father once saying to a co-worker that I would either grow up to be really smart or really dumb. I wish I never heard him say that.
Being the youngest among three children, I wanted to prove that my parents finally got the genetic mix right. I just had to give my studies my best shot. Often, I would be spotted at the library longer than I needed to, one of the early telltale signs of a nerd in conception. Oh no.
I did scoff at my mother’s idea of a summer vacation, telling her that reading the encyclopedia was not as enjoyable as she made it sound. But wait! Did I really talk back like that to her? I think I actually read a few pages to find out for myself. I am now cringing to see my geek points rising.
So I know what the acronyms RAM, modem, CRT, DNA and laser stand for. That’s easy, compared to explaining the difference between vectors and scalars about which I profess complete ignorance. (I just pray that my former high school physics teacher is not reading this.)
Other signs that I could be a nerd in denial: Weren’t we all, at one point, mesmerized by Rubik’s cube, taking it apart and putting it back together again? What’s wrong with a pencil case, and taking notes using more than one color?
Much as I tried to keep a low profile back in school, word easily spread that I was the go-to girl when one missed an important lecture. The only reward I derived from that experience was not having to carry such a heavy school bag when exams were coming, unlike at the start of the term.
But the single most obvious sign that I could be a nerd has to be my ubiquitous pair of eyeglasses. For years and years, I never seriously thought that wearing glasses was what one got for being a voracious reader, though I would sometimes joke that I was using them as a prop to make me look smarter than I actually was.
Still the real reason my 20/20 vision got damaged was that I stayed too close to the television set when I was younger. It just wasn’t as much fun watching TV when you were six feet away, was it? I was convinced about this, until I read in a medical journal that watching too close to the TV set only gave you short-term eyestrain, nothing more.
I read so much that some people think I am joking when I tell them staying too close to the microwave oven is more dangerous. They probably think I am taking away the fun of watching food turn around like an old vinyl record.
Back in the 1980s there was a film called “Revenge of the Nerds.” I never felt like I was one of them, but I suppose seeing it more than once does count when you are weighing whether you unconsciously want to be one of them.
Which takes me to why I took a quiz appearing in another publication that was supposed to tell you whether you were a nerd or not just once but three times. The reason? The first time I took it, I got the jolting result that saying I was a closet nerd. But didn’t I begin this essay by categorically denying it?
So I took the test again, convinced that the result was a fluke. I could not possibly know that much. I cannot answer most of the questions asked on “Jeopardy.” I cannot tell a technical joke and open myself to ridicule by trying to explain it. I watch tennis and golf as forms of recreation than practical applications of geometric principles. And memorable as my high school biology class was, I swore that I would never dissect anything again.
On my second try, I got a less embarrassing but still a nerd rating. Maybe if I denied knowing some more, I said to myself, I would get to the lowest possible score.
Then it dawned one me: Just by taking the quiz, I was already making myself a nerd in training. I didn’t even have to earn a single point.
I took a deep breath and realized there was no way out. The final question couldn’t be any more accurate: After getting that far, I did not even have to look at my test score.
