I've known this not-so-secret fact about myself oh, for a long time. I am a nerd! I love Latin. I love learning odd-n-ends about a miscellany of topics. I find the following paragraph rather amusing . . .
"Robert Graves once said that he wrote novels for the money he needed to live so he could write poetry. His books, he said, were the show dogs he raised to support his cat. I guess a cat is sort of like a poem. A cat is relatively short. A cat is only subtly demonstrative. To be sure, you can curl up with a good cat, but that doesn't mean you understand the cat."
This excerpt came from a piece I had my developmental reading students read today. "Am I the only one that finds this last paragraph funny?" I asked to the chirping crickets. Ugh!
I come up with jokes that amuse only myself. Like the time I hit a spoon against the side of a large metal bowl. In the ensuing ring, I declare, "Hey, it's for whom the bowl tolls!" What's bad is not my coming up with that joke, but my subsequent call to my brother so that he can be included in my clever witiness. He wasn't a taker. I still get a good chuckle out of that line.
I get a butterfly-ish excitement in my stomach each day as I walk up the stairs to the building I teach in at Univ of North Texas. Oh, to have lived in monkish times when academics and berobed scholars hung out in such halls of learning and well, learned. I definitely would have been a cross-dresser so that I could be a scholar and learn all the things a scholar learns.
My list could go on and on. And you know what, I'm okay with my nerdishness. Because I can say "at least I'm not a geek." A geek is even worse than a nerd. A geek has no social skills, for one thing. Other than that, I can't elaborate further, except to say that you know a geek when you see one in the same way that you know a dog when you see one. The dog and cat might be described in similar manners, but you definitely know the difference between the two.
So, viva my nerdiness! Now, I'm off to curl up with a nice cat, I mean, poem.
