Doing My Part To Reinforce Stereotypes

 
To All My Fellow Awkwardians, I Bid Thee Hello!

They say that if you haven't used or looked at something in over a year then you should probably get rid of it.  If that's the case then I really need to get rid of a lot of crap.

Unwilling to immerse myself in the spiritual nadir of a flea market or a swap meet setting, I decided to post some of my loose detritus on Kijiji.  So far, this has been a tremendous success.  In selling some of my unwanted crap I've made enough money to purchase a new board game and procured the budget to acquire each new ship in the ever-expanding X-Wing fleet.   

One of the things I put up for sale was my Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition Player's Handbook and the intro module Keep on the Shadowfell.  This is no big loss since I've wanted to turf this stuff ever since I cracked the cover of the Type-Four Player's Handbook.  At the risk of inflaming the Edition Wars: Fourth Edition sucks Herculean amounts of ass.

Actually before I get a bunch of geek-rage-marinated posts and emails sent to me, let me qualify that statement just a little bit.  Fourth Edition would actually be a tremendous system for, say, a superhero role-playing game.  But, for me, the Fourth Edition ruleset is about as good a match for D&D as raisins are to...well, just about anything.  Seriously, why ruin a perfectly good dessert by including something that has the consistency of a cured booger?

Heh.  If you didn't agree with my militant anti-raisin stance before, then I bet you do after reading that last line, huh?  One of us!!!  One of us!!!    

Anyway, Monday night I got an email from a nice lady who expressed an interest in buying the Player's Handbook and the aforementioned module.  Here's how the email trail went down:

HER:  I would like to buy the books!
ME:  Sure!  I'm at _____________.  TEL ________.  I'll be around anytime tomorrow if you want to pick it up.
HER:  Can I come by around 330/400?  Also do you have a DM guide?

To this I thought: 'Wow, she actually knows enough about the game to inquire as to whether or not I have a matching Dungeon Master's Guide.  I wonder if she's getting it for herself?'

This is what I wrote back:

"That time is okay for me!  I'm afraid that I don't have a DMG.  Sorry (insert lame sad smiley emoticon thingie).  Having said that, between the Player's Manual and the 'Quick Start Rules' included in Keep on the Shadowfell, you should be able to get started at least.

"Hope to see you later.  Take care and have a great day!"  

With these arrangements made, I promptly went to work editing the audio for our latest entertainment-related podcast.  Now, I tend to get pretty engrossed in what I'm working on, especially if it's something that I'm really invested in.  This seems to happen to the detriment of everything else, including arrangements I've made hours ago for someone to come by and pick up an item that I no longer care about.

Oh, and just a quick word about working from home.  Since, as a boss, I'm kind of a slave-driver I like to give myself a bit of leniency when it comes to the dress code.  Now, please don't think for a moment that I don't wear pants when I'm working.  I usually wear pants.  Usually.      

What I'm trying to say is: I have a tendency to let personal hygiene lapse a bit when I'm working from home.  Not for days mind you.  I brush my teeth twice daily and floss every morning lie a good little obsessive-compulsive.  But since I really sincerely believe that daily maintenance is actually kinda bad for you, I sometimes go a day without washing my hair.  This usually necessitates wearing a scruffy-looking Guinness baseball cap that my beloved wife brought back for me from Las Vegas in 2007.  As you can well imagine, after wearing this hat every other day for the past seven years, it's starting to look a tad threadbare. 

"Why don't you get rid of that ratty old thing?" she'll ask occasionally, sounding slightly cross.  "One of these days you're gonna put it on and require a tetanus shot."

In response to this I usually remind her about my odd-shaped cranium and how difficult it is to find a hat that doesn't make me look like a pinhead ("One of us!!!"  "One of us!!!").  As such, I'm probably destined to wear this hat until it looses structural integrity and disintegrates like an over-chewed stick of Beeman's gum.

Shaving's is also a bit of a bugaboo for me.  In fact, this clip from The Simpsons nicely illustrates the futility of shaving for me: 

So, this was me last Tuesday afternoon: a day's worth of Unibomber-ish beard growth and my unkempt hair concealed by a hat clearly liberated from Dublin's dodgiest Value Village.  Given my own draconian work ethic, my personal appearance was pretty much the last thing on my mind that day.  The only thing I cared about was reviewing, editing and then writing the accompanying post for an entry that I was hell-bent to complete by day's end.   

While feverishly hammering away at this, I caught myself scrubbing away at an itchy spot just underneath my nose.  Suddenly, from out of nowhere, a giant gout of warm liquid sprang from my nose and started streaming down my top lip.  I reflexively dabbed a fingertip there and it came away scarlet red. 

'Fiddle dee dee,' I thought to myself.  'I appear to be bleeding.  A lot.'

I rushed to the washroom, trying not to drip gore everywhere.  I looked in the mirror, took my hand away and was immediately shocked as a veritable geyser of blood left from my face like Regan's spinal tap pre-op scene in The Exorcist.  I quickly put pressure on the area with a piece of tissue paper and then promptly began the process of wondering what the f#@k had just happened.    

Now I know that, for a lot of you out there, the inimitable words of one Ralph Wiggum have probably spring to mind:

"The doctor said I wouldn't have so many nosebleeds if I kept my finger out of there."  

Um, yeah, thanks.  

Like all classic geeks, I will admit to a history of nosebleeds.  In fact, I had so many of them as a kid that I daresay that only Eric Northman is more familiar with the taste of blood.  But between a strict regimen of using a vaporizer to soften the dry winter air and a strict regimen of...*a-hem*..."keeping my finger out of there", thank you very much, I haven't had one in at least five years.  

After taking a closer look I noticed that the blood wasn't even coming from my nose.  It was coming from just below it.  I've always had a predominant and oh-so-sexy red vein perched close to the skin just underneath my snout.  While rubbing it absently I must have brought it to the surface and caused a rupture.  

So there I was, frantically trying to stop the bleeding like Dan Aykroyd in his French Chef skit when, all of a sudden, the phone rang.  Then, and only then, did I remember that I'd made arrangement for some sweet anonymous lady to stop by and surrender her hard-earned cash for my unwanted D&D swag.

With a swiftly-saturating piece of toilet paper plastered onto my face I ran to the phone and picked it up.  Sure enough, it was my unsuspecting Kijiji customer.  My heart sank. 

"'Ullo?" I managed to grunt through my not-so Kleenex.

"Hi!  It's _____!  I'm here for the D&D books!"

"Oday, ahl be dowd in a minnud!" I managed in reply, knowing damned well that I wouldn't be down in anywhere close to a minute.  

I ducked back into the bathroom and tried some last minute Hail Mary / Florence Nightingale shit in a vain effort to impede the hemorrhaging.  No matter what I tried, nothing worked.  With a perforated vein as the culprit I just couldn't get it to stop.  All I could do was grab a relatively unsullied piece of paper towel, run downstairs and then hope to complete the transaction before I ended up looking like an extra in M.A.S.H.     

Now, what I've been describing thus far sounds awful, but as I opened the door to the lobby it actually got a lot worse.  As it turns out, the person with whom I'd been corresponding wasn't buying the books for themselves.  They were buying them for their kid.  The same kid who was standing expectantly in the foyer with his moms right now.  Honestly I have no idea how old the kid was, since I'm really a poor judge of this sort of thing.  Just suffice to say that he was very young.  Way too young to see me in the state I was in, that's for sure.

Both of them looked completely aghast as this bleeding, vaguely-transient-looking weirdo whipped open the door to the foyer and practically threw a bag filled with books at them.  Books, I will remind you, that help people pretend to be elves and wizards and instructs them on how to go about slaying orcs and dragons.

"T...thank you," stammered the mom.  "Um...okay, honey...go ahead and give the nice man his money."

I'm pretty sure that I heard her add a barely-audible 'BE CAREFUL' under her breath as the kid shuffled incrementally towards me.  Wearing a facial expression suggesting rigor mortis, the child shakily offered me a handful of bill, stretching out his arm to the full extent of his reach.  I immediately snatched the money out of his clenched paw and then quickly turned to leave.

"'Tank 'oo," I blurted out from behind my increasingly-scarlet gore-rag.  I heard the mother remotely parrot back the same statement as the front door clicked shut behind me.  I quickly ran back to my domicile, hoping and praying that I wouldn't run into and subsequently spook any of the easily-startled senior citizens in my building. 

The bathroom mirror confirmed the worst.  I cursed under my breath as I took stock of my frightful appearance.  I looked woefully at the ratty, dirt-smudged beer hat crammed atop my birch-broom mop.  I silently chided myself for the day's worth of beard growth that might as well represent a week.  I grimaced at the sight of my nose, upper lip and chin cleft painted with dried hemoglobin.

To my poor traumatized customers I have only these three humble things to say:

1. I'm sorry.
2. Mom, please don't think that playing Dungeons & Dragons necessitates your child participating in some sort of blood-drinking Satanic rituals.
3. I assure you that I'm not selling all of my stuff to support a raging cocaine habit.        

EPIC SKIT:

The French Chef by y10566

FAIL-ING THE PHYSICAL   See?!?  It's medical, dammit!!! 

How To Make A Nerd

Greetings Gangly Types!

As I detailed in my last post, up until I was about nine or ten years old I was an active kid who was always outside knocking around with my posse of friends.  But when we moved from Sydney, Cape Breton to Stephenville, Newfoundland around 1979, the transition really messed me up badly.

I had a devil of a time making new friends.  I hung out with a neighborhood kid named Brad for a bit until he moved across town and we lost track of one another.  Then I started to pal around with a guy named Glen until his dad moved the family all the way to St. John's.      

At that point in time it was almost as if I made a conscious decision not to make any new friends.  What was the point?  My half-baked brain told me that as soon as I met someone new, either I'd move, or they'd move or perhaps they'd spontaneously combust like a Spinal Tap drummer.  Why risk the grief?

It certainly didn't help that around this same time puberty decided to throw me a few curve balls.  Accent on the word balls there, BTW. 

First off, my eyesight decided to konk out.  The first time I can remember experiencing a vision problem was when I was sitting in the car at the Sydney Shopping Center and I couldn't read the KFC sign from the far end of the parking lot.  Actually, in my defense, that wasn't as easy as it sounds since it was actually called "Kentucky Fried Chicken" back then.

To this day, I have no idea why my eyesight went south since both of my parents were blessed with  20/20 vision.  My mom suspects that it had something to do with a near-lethal fever that I sustained when I was about seven or eight.  Hey, kids, guess what one of the side effects of measles can be?

Just after the move to Stephenville, I started to have a hard time reading the chalkboard in school from my preferred vantage point (I.E. the back of  the class) and my mom resolved to get me into a pair of glasses post haste.  I don't know if you're old enough to remember this, Dear Reader, but glasses back then looked like salvaged portholes from the goddamned Lusitania.

Then things got worse.  As if to signal the end of the 70's, my perfectly straight helmet of Shaun Cassidy hair went dark and curly, almost overnight.  From that point on I couldn't do a damned thing with it.  I vainly tried to straighten it, but every time I did it looked as if I had a crow's wing stapled to the front of my head.  

Finally, a crooked dentist in Stephenville managed to convince my Dad that if I didn't get a set of braces pronto I'd end up looking like Lisa Simpson sans orthodontic intervention:

Too bad this guy was a greedy con artist who just wanted to deck his house out in my Dad's artwork, which he graciously offered to take in lieu of cash.  Sonovabitch put braces on me even before my teeth stopped moving around.  Thanks for exploiting my parent's fear and ruining my delicate formative years, you asshole.  I hope you die in a fire.

So there I was: coke-bottle glasses, greasy black shock of Hitler hair and olde skool braces that would make members of the Spanish Inquisition wince.  I used to joke with my parents and tell them: "Why don't you just finish me off with some orthopedic shoes and a hearing aid?"  What an awesome time to be the new kid in class!

As you can well imagine the parade of kids hammering down my door asking to be my friend was incessant.  It's a wonder my parents didn't have to move again just to get away from the constant harassment.

I became increasingly paranoid about my appearance.  I was rake-thin with prematurely wrinkly-looking hands, chronic dry skin and bullet-deflecting knees.  Even during the hottest days of the summer I'd always wear long sleeve shirts and avoid shorts like the plague.

In Elementary School they made us take mandatory swimming lessons.  I was so terrified of changing in front of people that I begged my parents to give me an exemption.  Well, I didn't get that free pass, just some sage advice from my Dad:

"Fer Crissakes, just wrap a friggin' towel around yer middle bits, whip yer drawers off, pull yer swimtrunks on and then take the towel off.  Or leave the towel on, what odds?"

I followed his advice and this seemed to work pretty well until it came time to reverse the process.  Since I was too scared to take a shower, I spent the rest of the day reeking of chlorine.  On more then one afternoon, I squirmed in my seat as the harsh chemicals slowly ate away at my already-dehydrated flesh.

Class Picture of Me in Grade Six.

      
I became increasingly insular, shy and withdrawn, like a tween-aged Howard Hugues but without the Kleenex boxes for shoes.  If anyone said anything to me that could vaguely be interpreted as an insult, I'd be traumatized for days.  If not for various types of games (video, RPG, board) I would have spent my early teens living like a hermit.  Thank Nyarlathotep that the lure to play with other equally awkward kids gave me some semblance of a social life back then.

When it came time to go to university I was still paralysed by my crippling fear of strangers.  But after taking a year off and slowly going mad from boredom, I decided to attempt a form of shock therapy and move into residence at Saint Mary's.  Despite how effective this was in staving off my social retardation, it did precious little for my confidence.      
   
For that, I have to credit my amazing wife.  Bless her heart, she saw something in me that I always knew was there but I rarely had an opportunity to exhibit.  Thanks to her, all of my awkwardness, anxiety and self-doubt finally melted away.  In fact, nowadays she'd probably argue that I've gone too far in the opposite direction and don't give a damn about what people think of me at all.

If anyone out there reads this and is currently struggling with self-esteem issues, I apologise for not sounding more self-reliant.  Despite a constant diet of positive affirmation from my doting parents (and nominally, myself), I found it virtually impossible to crawl out of my spider hole of self hatred all alone.  Sometimes it takes a certain person to validate what you've been trying to tell yourself all along.

Now I'm not saying that every nerd you encounter deserves sympathy.  I've met some dorky, socially maladjusted human beings who are also mean, spiteful, nasty creatures who legitimately deserve to be shunned.  But more often then not, that shy person who barely speaks above a whisper and sometimes says odd things in a misguided effort to fit in might be the product of a vicious circle of perceived (or sometimes real) physical awkwardness, self-loathing and isolation.

To these sad, lonely, desperate souls I can only say: trust me, it will get better.   

EPIC  Yep, I totally woulda done her...

FAIL  Although I've destroyed most of the photographic evidence of myself at that awkward age, some records still exist.  For example, here's my own deceptively angelic before pic...

And here I am after the ravages of puberty.  Cripes, dude, eat a friggin' sammich already...