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Posts Tagged ‘nerds’

My Favorite-ish Things About Huntsville

Posted in Huntsville, tagged , , , , , , , on September 5, 2011| 3 Comments »

Asking me to name my favorite ANYTHING is a lesson in frustration.

Favorite color? Dark green. Or maybe light orange. Light green. Maybe the orange on my edition of The Chicago Manual of Style? Possibly peach.

Favorite song? Whatever I just listened to without skipping.

Favorite movie? Whatever I just watched without mockery.

Favorite TV show? Sons of Anarchy. Or Breaking Bad. Possibly Buffy the Vampire Slayer if we’re talking all-time favorites.

It depends.

Favorite part of Huntsville? Please. It SO depends.

But the Rocket City Bloggers want to know for their latest Blog Carnival, so here goes:

  • I love the fact that so many people in Huntsville get outside and exercise. Seriously, I moved up here one January when the temps were hovering in the upper teens, yet when I looked out my kitchen window every morning I saw JOGGERS. At 7 a.m. With DOGS.
  • SO many people are serious about food discussions here. I can chat about quinoa, cupcakes and pit barbecue without skipping a beat. People love to talk about what they’re cooking and what they’re planning to cook after that — it’s like Louisiana without Tabasco sauce. Except sometimes there IS Tabasco sauce. And restaurant rumors abound.
  • Ditto for cocktails. You folks know your brews and your liquors.
  • Huntsville’s nerdery knows no bounds. It’s not enough that the space program originated here. No. The first party the husband and I attended featured a Rubik’s Cube-solving contest. I can walk into any room and discuss the intricacies of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica or Jaws. Several people in any setting will understand one of these utterances: “10 points for Gryffindor” or “Roll for damage.”
  • There’s so much green space up here. And mountains. (Smallish mountains, but still.) And caves.

Now, I have some cooking to plan and a cocktail to make before I discuss my horrible movie-nerd crush on Duncan Jones. Who wants in on that?

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Finding your people with a roll of the dice

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 26, 2009| Leave a Comment »

A chapter in Benjamin Nugent’s American Nerd: The Story of My People describes the use of childhood nerdiness as an inner defense against a disordered home life. Nugent cites Dungeons and Dragons, a quite orderly role-playing game, as one of the tools used by a childhood friend to cope with the chaos of a dysfunctional family living in a cluttered home.

A chaotic home life wasn’t a prerequisite to D&D play among my small group of friends in the late 1980s, but an acute sense of “otherness” certainly seemed to be. Yeah, yeah, all teenagers get the feeling that they don’t “belong” at some point, but some of us really didn’t blend into our surroundings. Whereas our classmates were content with pegging their jeans and listening to love songs by Chicago, a few of us were striving for hair colors that didn’t exist in nature and digging around for older stuff from the Violent Femmes and the Sex Pistols.

That’s not to say we didn’t have our Bon Jovi moments, but we didn’t get stuck there. We went all out to discover exotic-to-us bands like Marillion, and a couple of us were even accused of being Satanists after choreographing a talent-show dance routine to a particularly dark Depeche Mode song. (Note to accusers: I bet you’re still cretins.)

Our home lives weren’t what you would call chaos, though some might be termed “loosely structured.”

We belonged in our D&D group, our fates determined by our imaginations and dice rolls. To our parents, it was a safe, acceptable weekend gathering (there was just a bit of intergroup dating, most of which ended amicably). It’s probably the No. 1 reason that I have more male friends than female friends to this day – I had so much fun with the boys (there were usually only two girls in the group) that the girl stuff held no appeal.

Not belonging stinks. But when you ultimately find your people, it’s a better feeling than pretending.

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Overheard in the Haggerty household

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 11, 2009| 5 Comments »

In a recent discussion of “Why doesn’t Chewbacca get a medal too?” my husband suggested that maybe Wookiees don’t like medals. I maintained that Chewbacca wouldn’t mind wearing a medal because he already wears a bandolier and is thus used to sporting a little bling. Now I’m having second thoughts, because the medal might smack against the bandolier, irritating the Wookiee and maybe even damaging his ammo. 

I hear some people discuss politics at dinner.

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