Ultimately, it's all trivial

I know I say it often enough that it has lost whatever explanatory punch it may have once possessed, but this has been a bit of a week. Yesterday I had a doctor’s appointment which was just early enough in the afternoon that the earliest VRE homeward still would have gotten me there too late, so I rode the Metro, carpooling on 66 both ways with my wife. Of course we had to drop off the kids at daycare in the morning, whereas usually I get gone before they are ready to go (sometimes before they’re awake), and that delayed my arrival. Combined with early departure, that made for a pretty short day. The day before yesterday was my office holiday party, basically a three and a half hour lunch that abridged my daily desktime pretty significantly. The nights this week haven’t been incredibly out-of-control, but throw in some attempts at getting Christmas shopping done here and a bedtime tantrum there and, well, here we are.

But before we move on I do want to provide my annual report on the work party. It was in many ways virtually identical to last year’s; the price of admission had gone up a couple bucks, but the bar was still cash, and the yankee gift swap was still awkward enough that I was glad to have opted out, and otherwise the same obligatory level of merriment was had by all. I should note that one of the lamer gifts in the swap pile turned out to be a large bottle of Listerine, which is one of those things that makes you wonder if the responsible party was trying to be subversively hilarious or simply forgot about the gift swap until the morning of and ran down to the overpriced local convenience store intent on spending $10 as quickly as possible. In any case, Ms. Nonsense was the unlucky sap who unwrapped the Listerine, and although she tried (obnoxiously) to entice others to steal it from her of course she was stuck with it. I am a terrible person, and therefore this all amused me tremendously.

This year the mid-meal diversion was a trivia contest (along the lines of a pub challenge, with each table working as a team) and my table won, but the only prize for that was bragging rights. Presumably this was to avoid any acrimony over the fact that it would have been all too easy to cheat with smartphones and whatnot, although I assure you my table did no such thing. What I found most interesting was that the trivia questions were very much in line with the official DoD policy requiring our gathering to be a holiday party and not explicitly a Christmas party, and thus there were Hanukkah and Kwanzaa questions in the mix as well. Of course this was somewhat undermined by the fact that the member of the organizing committee who read the questions aloud was utterly incapable of pronouncing “dreidel” correctly, but as token efforts at diversity go, I suppose it could have been worse.

I ended up sitting at a table which was only half-full (yet all dudes), between a slightly-older-than-me co-worker whom I’ve known since I came onboard this contract, and who is a really nice guy (let’s call him Frank), and another co-worker (I dub him Melvin) who I guess is about my age but with whom I’ve never really interacted. And I doubt I will do so much by choice ever again. As always, life among the cubicles tends to represent the highest incidence of contact with annoying individuals, as we all have very little control over whom our co-workers may be and furthermore are likely to have little if anything in common with them beyond cashing paychecks with the same signature on them. But Melvin happens to represent one of my higher-ranking pet peeves: the nerd who is bad at being a nerd.

Since it’s Friday anyway, allow me to relate a Random Anecdote from my college days. Way back in my freshman year, the dorms were not wired for internet access (actually that was true for all four years I was there) and in order to check one’s school-assigned e-mail one had to go to a designated computer lab, where there were anywhere between eight and a couple dozen public terminals. One day I had gone to a lab and while I was there two other students struck up a conversation about (I know this sounds like something straight out of bad sitcom writing 101 but I swear to Lucas and Roddenberry it happened totally organically) Star Wars versus Star Trek space battles. And one of my fellow students kept repeating what he considered an important point about trans-spatial something-or-others but he was pronouncing it ‘SPAT-ee-ull’. And to give his interlocutor full credit, he nodded along the first few times but finally was compelled to say “You know it’s pronounced ‘spay-shull’, right?”

So here’s the thing: if you’re going to carry on long, loud, animated conversations in public about imaginary technology and cross-fictional hypothetical showdowns, you’re totally owning the fact that you’re a nerd. And, more likely than not, a nerd who is bad at fitting in to non-nerd situations, which is not all that uncommon. Perhaps due to that commonness, it’s also not that annoying (to me). But if you’re going to do all of the above and yet get things wrong, facts or definitions or basic pronunciations, then you are still very much a nerd but good grief, you are not even very good at that. And those kinds of nerds are rare, but they do in fact exist, and fnord help me but they test my patience.

So, getting back to my unfortunate companion at the holiday party Melvin, for whom a certain social awkwardness and clueless arrogance were his long suits, while little things like accurate facts, correct definitions, and proper pronunciation were in shorter supply. Also, he was bad with names. Frank and I got to talking about movies at one point and that ended up being the focus of much of our conversation. Melvin participated in the conversation as well but inevitably lowered the discourse quite a bit. At one point Frank told a story about how recently he was talking to a much younger colleague and asked her if she knew who Cary Grant was, and she said “The British pop singer?” meaning of course Carrie Grant. The existence of the elder statesman of American cinema was not something of which the young lady was aware, and Frank and I chuckled a bit about kids today, and how they have these knowledge gaps concerning someone who was once considered one of the biggest leading man movie stars in the world. To which Melvin added, “And greatest dancers, ever!” which threw me and Frank for a loop until we realized he was thinking of Fred Astaire. That might have just rolled off my back except it was just the tip of the iceberg.

The crazy thing was that Frank really wanted to talk about the AFI Top 100 list of movies and how many movies that are considered classics were made back in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s and how few recent films are revered the same way. Of course after the year I’ve spent digging deep into the classic canon of cinema I was really in a good position to comment on just about any movie Frank might bring up, which just made Melvin’s off-point bloviating all the more painful. At one point Melvin asked if a certain director had made Reservoir Dogs - I wish I could remember who Melvin named, but obviously he did not come up with Quentin Tarantino. I admit I can be an arrogant nerd myself, and I’ve kind of been that way since I was about ten years old, but Melvin reminded me of why I am the way I am. I may rant and rave to excess, often about arcane stuff very few other people care about, but at least when I do so I get the details right. And that is not universally true of those who talk as much or as obscurely as I do.

At a certain point I stopped correcting Melvin when he would whiff on actor’s names or movie titles or whathaveyou, and left things in Frank’s hands, as he would either catch the gist and help Melvin get back on track, or shrug and move on. And then (possibly apropos of nothing as my mind was wandering) Melvin asked Frank if he had ever heard of “rickrolling”. I was dead certain that Frank was just old enough to be firmly outside the demographics who would possibly be familiar with the term, and I turned out to be right. So Melvin proceeded to explain it to him. Except …

OK, first of all, Melvin tried introducing the concept by saying it was a meme. BUT HE MISPRONOUNCED “MEME”. He pronounced it as if it were French. Hey, I took French in high school, too. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, non? I can see the source of confusion, but really it’s just a coincidence and how can you never have heard someone say “meem” out loud? So, strike one. Then, of course, he could not come up with Rick Astley’s name. At least he was paying enough attention to know that rickrolling must involve Rick somebody, and then Frank thought he meant Ric Ocasek, and Melvin said “Yes!” and Frank said “From The Cars!” and Melvin said “No!” while I sat between them and squeezed my eyes trying to make my head not explode. And then Melvin explained that Rick Whoever had once recorded a song with Eric Idle … no, hold on, Melvin corrected himself, it was Billy Idol (you guys, I SWEAR I am not embellishing this in the slightest) and so rickrolling was sharing this old video of the duet between Rick and Billy.

Rickrolling. From Wikipedia. Wherein you may see that there is both a little more to it than that, and that it in no way involves Billy Idol (or Eric Idle), a purely extraneous and bizarrely wrong addition on Melvin’s part. Maybe someday Frank will look it up for himself out of curiosity. Probably not. I also realized it was trivial enough to let it pass without comment at the time, although obviously it’s still a bit of a burr in my brain.

Plenty of things can set my eyes to rotating in deeply aggrieved orbits, but one thing I furiously loathe is anti-intellectualism, and anyone who thinks book learnin’ ain’t all that or similar. And I think that’s why nerds like Melvin get under my skin so, so badly: because they help to make the anti-intellectuals’ case. If all you ever do is read, with minimal social interaction and conversation, then yeah, maybe you have never heard another human being say “meme” out loud, and you have only your own narrow interpretations to go on, and when you do inevitable come in contact with fellow Earthlings it will be an uphill struggle to communicate and relate. I would never suggest that books can completely replace life experience, any more than I would suggest the opposite. They complement one another, and either in isolation has deficiencies. Everyone would be better off pursuing both the received wisdom of recorded knowledge and the unique sensations of first-hand perception as much as they possibly can. Even knowing that, I’m partial to the former and tend to struggle more with the latter, and I’m protective of the former as well. People who embody the worst aspects of the life of the mind, the failings without the redeeming qualities, they just give me more to be defensive about. I think the general holiday cheer helped me keep calm enough to spare Melvin a major bile-spitting “You are the worst!” tirade. Another Christmas miracle!

Then again, this year broke my door-prize winning streak at these office parties, so maybe karma had something to do with repaying my less-than-kind thoughts of indignant superiority, as well. It’s a mysterious universe we live in.