Nerdism is the province of the young, young males especially....right? Wrong!! Wrong by a mile. In three months I will reach my 76th birthday and I am a nerd, a life-long nerd. As long as I can remember I have been a nerd and I will die a nerd. Oh, to be sure I have picked up more than my share of social graces during my long life, overcome my pathological shyness and ceased sharing my more eccentric interests with everyone I meet, but I remain physically awkward, my sense of humor is sometimes far out in left field, and I cannot help but salt conversations with odd facts and little know trivialities the relevance of which is known only to myself. I have graduate degrees in zoology and anthropology and consuming interests in linguistics, philosophy and history. I live a large part of my life inside my head.
I am an elder nerd and that is not an easy thing to be. Nerdism , all forms of nerdism, hinges on a bigger than life intellect and thus, on an unusually agile brain and here is where the problem lies. As we know, the first signs of the ultimate descent into senility show up in early middle age, pointing the way to memory loss, absentmindedness, clouded thinking, compromised judgement, inability to multi-task and, to the most unfortunate - dementia. Being 75 years old is hard enough. Being a 75 year old nerd requires real effort. My short-term memory is in shreds. Never a wiz at financial affairs, I am now an unmitigated disaster. Multi-tasking is a dim memory. And it's all going to get worse. In my younger days, things like credit card numbers I committed to memory - ten digits no problem at all. Now, I have trouble with new phone numbers. If I could not write, were I not an individual who compulsively keeps lists, I would be totally adrift.
Surely there are 90 year old nerds but I wonder how they do it. How are all you unredeemed nerdy types handling a physical machine heading for the scrap heap? Golf? Bridge? Bingo? Surely, that is not our fate; we- a segment of the intellectual elite. For me, I want to go gently into that good night contemplating the beauty of the periodic table and puzzling over the difficulty taxonomies of various families of butterflies. Ladies and gentlemen, how do you do it?
Pathological shyness- you?!? I never would have guessed. And I didn't know about the zoology degree, either.
ReplyDeleteThe Nerd Quotient of the neighbourhood has taken a sad hit with your departure. We miss you.
Incidentally, it's been shown that people who use their brains (aka nerds) are less likely to succumb to Alzheimer's, even under the same physical conditions.
Nerds rule.