Am I a Nerdfighter?

Hank and John Green, aka Vlogbrothers

For those of you non-geeky, non-nerdy people out there (Who am I kidding? Why would you be reading my posts if you were one of those?), Nerdfighters, or, collectively, Nerdfighteria, are the dedicated followers of the Vlogbrothers, otherwise known as John and Hank Green, who started this whole enterprise on a dare in 2007, when one of them challenged the other to communicate solely by alternately posting video logs on YouTube to each other every day. The experiment, dubbed "Brotherhood 2.0," lasted a year, but by the end of that year they had gathered so many followers that they kept it up, though they now only post twice weekly, on Tuesdays and Fridays. Today they have over a million followers.

At this point, the Vlogbrothers are so well-known that John Green was picked to be one of the panelists at a Google+ "fireside hangout" with President Obama this past February. During that time, he asked the President about the future of the penny, how one could implement government policies on global warming, and what he should name his soon-to-be-born daughter. John Green is also a well-known New York Times bestseller list writer of young adult fiction. His brother Hank has several YouTube channels, including one that teaches science to laypersons; he is the founder of DFTBA Records, a recording label for YouTube musicians; he is the producer of a wildly popular YouTube channel "The Lizzie Bennet Diaries," a modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice in vlog form; he is the founder of VidCon; and he is the composer and singer of the unforgettable "Accio Deathly Hallows" song.

click here to hear Hank Green sing and play "Accio Deathly Hallows"

Okay, I said it was unforgettable; I didn't say I loved it. Still, made you smile, didn't it? Didn't it?

Well, so what is my point? I love the offbeat humor, the quick intelligence, and the nervous energy of these two young men, as well as their passion, their generosity, and their willingness to parlay their success into social action. In December of 2007 they started The Project for Awesome (P4A), in which YouTubers make videos and raise money promoting their favorite charities, and they have continued this tradition every subsequent December. The December 2012 P4A fundraiser was held in Carnegie Hall and raised $483,296 for five different charities.

The Vlogbrothers also sponsor interest-free microloans through Kiva, an online charitable lending organization. I think part of what inspired me to write this particular entry was that I just received an e-mail notice that the second payment of $2.08 toward the $25 loan I made to Faez in Iraq to help improve his auto parts store has been repaid on time. Even though I will never meet Faez or his wife and three children, it makes me happy to think I'm helping him out halfway across the world. Would I have done this without the encouragement of the Vlogbrothers? Perhaps, but probably not as soon. They make giving to charity and helping others seem natural, urgent, and overwhelmingly pleasurable. And, since recent research on happiness (Can you believe it's now a subject of research?) has found that one's happiness increases much more as a function of helping others than of buying things for oneself, I'm glad to think I spent my $25 on Faez and family than on acquiring, say, a new shirt.

Okay, back to the original question posed in my title: am I a Nerdfighter? In her March 13, 2013 blog for The New Yorker, Michelle Dean writes that the term nerdfighter "identifies the teen-ager in question as a follower of John Green." This statement is odd on three counts: one, John Green is not the only Vlogbrother; two, not all Nerdfighters are teenagers; and three, who the hell still hyphenates the word teenager? On the WikiHow of "How to Be a Nerdfighter," the authors claim that merely wanting to be a Nerdfighter makes you one. So why do I hesitate to call myself one?

I am a fan of  John and Hank Green and what they do, no question. I watch their weekly videos avidly, I get interested in their causes, I get caught up in their enthusiasms, and I laugh at their jokes. Because of them, I follow two British vlogs as well, charlieissocoollike and ninebrassmonkeys, both posted by young men in their twenties. Still, it feels odd to call myself a Nerdfighter, as I'm a middle-aged woman who's quite Internet- and social media- illiterate (I don't have a Facebook page or a Twitter account!) and who doesn't really share the same life experiences as young men born in the '80s, '90s, and '00s (bonus points if you can tell me how to pronounce that last one). I realize that there are quite a few female Nerdfighters; in fact, according to John Green, they outnumber the male ones, but it still feels odd to refer to myself as a Nerdfighter. So I don't. This is not intended as a slight to the sincere and charming Green brothers, but because I just don't like classing myself as part of a group. In other words, it's not you, it's me.

Part of the crowd?

In fact, I rather question the whole Nerdfighteria phenomenon. How can geeks, nerds, and social outcasts, people who by definition are on the outside of society, claim to belong to some monolithic group that all holds the same values? I thought the whole point of being offbeat and quirky is that one resisted definition, resisted being categorized. So, while I have no problem with the legions of fans who call themselves Nerdfighters, I do not consider myself one. I am GeekMom,  I contain multitudes.

Still....Don't Forget to be Awesome!

My Mother's Day Problem

Actually, I don't have a problem with Mother's Day itself. It's a lovely holiday, a little Hallmarky, perhaps, but it was invented in 1908 by Anna Jarvis of Grafton, West Virginia in honor of her mother, while the Hallmark card company wasn't founded until 1910. Jarvis lobbied to make it an official national holiday and achieved this goal by 1914. Later, she became so disgusted with the commercialization of the holiday, especially the widespread purchasing of preprinted greeting cards, that she was arrested for disturbing the peace while leading a protest against Mother's Day in 1948. She died within the year. Coincidence? Perhaps not.

Yet, as I said, a lovely holiday. I went out to brunch with my children today (the only day a year I eat brunch), and then took my daughter to see a delightful production of Stargirl, a play adapted by Y York from a young adult novel by Jerry Spinelli (There was no mother onstage, but evidence of a supportive, loving mother in the title character's backstory). My daughter gave me a homemade card and a little book she wrote on why I am a wonderful mother (despite my frequent bouts of yelling, which she also cited). My son gave me a hug and a kiss (this, from an undemonstrative teenage boy, is riches indeed). All in all, a splendid day.

Medea and child

No, what I have a problem with is the assumption that all mothers are equally worth celebrating, all equally wonderful, nurturing, and just plain maternal. They aren't. Just go to the tabloids to get examples of many horrendous mothers. Horrible mothers have existed down through the ages: think Medea, think Lady Capulet, think Hansel and Gretel's mother (yes, it was their mother, not their stepmother. Look at the original 1812 version of the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmaerchen--she wasn't changed to their stepmother until the 1819 version), think Joan Crawford. Ugh, no, don't think Joan Crawford. There were and are plenty of terrible mothers in the world. But, as this is my blog, I think I should reveal that I'm specifically talking about my own mother.

Joan Crawford and children

My mother grew up in Japan during the beginning of the Showa Period. She was one of five siblings in a close-knit family. Her mother, my Obaa-san, was affectionate and warm, as far as I could tell from the few times I met her and from seeing her interactions with her other children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren. I never knew from whence my mother's coldness and fury flowed, but what was certain was that she was almost never happy, almost always disappointed, enraged, or despondent. True, her adolescence was ruined by World War II, the Bomb, and the death of her beloved elder brother. Her career as a physicist never took off, and her subsequent career as a pioneering computer programmer never made her happy or fulfilled. My brother and I didn't turn out to be the children she wanted to have: brilliant, accomplished, celebrated. I believe she thought, like Leopold Mozart, that she could bully and berate us into becoming prodigies or geniuses. She was a Tiger Mother before the term existed.

My mother's own life hadn't turned out the way she wanted it to, which probably added to the hopes she placed on us, and thus to the sense of defeat she felt when she saw what we became. Not that we're criminals or layabouts or drug addicts or embezzlers: we're just slightly offbeat adults with somewhat dull lives. Seeing us must have been a harsh reminder of her failure, because she kept us at arm's length after we left home. In the last ten years or so of her life, before dementia hit, she tried to keep me and my brother away, with ever more far-fetched excuses. Not counting our visits to her deathbed, we each visited her precisely once after the births of our children. She was not interested in getting to know her grandchildren, or even in learning about their lives. We sent her packets of photographs of them, only to find them unopened in boxes after she died.

After she died, now over seven years ago, I found it easy to mourn the loss of a mother, but hard to mourn her specifically. Well-meaning people would come up to me and say, "Oh, losing your mother is the hardest thing in the world!" and I would nod politely and thank them for their kind thoughts while feeling like a fraud. Then came the time every year during the High Holy Days (yes, I'm Jewish--it's complicated) when I had to say a prayer for my mother during Yizkor services. For years, the prayer would stick in my throat. I did not want to follow my mother's example, or to say that I respected her, or to hope that her immortal soul would reside anywhere pleasant. So I was happy to find that the new edition of the High Holy Days machzor that we switched to a couple of years ago contained the following prayer:

Dear God, You know my heart. 

Indeed, You know me better than I know myself, so I turn to You before I rise for Kaddish. 

My emotions swirl as I say this prayer. The parent I remember was not kind to me. His/her death left me with a legacy of unhealed wounds, of anger and of dismay that a parent could hurt a child as I was hurt. 

I do not want to pretend to love, or to grief that I do not feel, but I do want to do what is right as a Jew and as a child.

Help me, O God, to subdue my bitter emotions that do me no good, and to find that place in myself where happier memories may lie hidden, and where grief for all that could have been, all that should have been, may be calmed by forgiveness, or at least soothed by the passage of time. 

I pray that You, who raise up slaves to freedom, will liberate me from the oppression of my hurt and anger, and that You will lead me from this desert to Your holy place. 

—Robert Saks

This little prayer, printed in the margin of the page for memorializing a mother during the Yizkor service, made such a huge difference to me. It was as though a crushing weight had been lifted from my chest, and I could breathe freely again. It made me understand, truly understand, that there was not a one-size-fits-all mold for motherhood, that it was all right to feel angry, hurt, betrayed by the mother who had not known how to love her children.

I continue to celebrate Mother's Day, now with my own children. I love them deeply as they are, and would not wish them to be otherwise. I practice a style of motherhood I call "Reactive Parenting": whenever I am confronted with a problem involving discipline or childrearing, I ponder carefully what my mother would have done in the same situation and do exactly the opposite. It's not failsafe, but it seems to work ninety percent of the time.

Happy Mother's Day, everyone!

Waiting for Star Trek Into Darkness

The next Star Trek movie is coming out very soon! I'm so excited! This is no doubt in part because, when I was a kid, I was an ardent Trekkie. "Was?" you ask. Yes. Sadly, I feel I am no longer so. Why? Well, let's back up a bit.

In fourth grade, my best friend Janice introduced me to the joys of Star Trek (in reruns, though I didn't know it at the time). My family did not own a television set, as my parents thought television (along with religion) was the opiate of the masses, and did not wish their children's minds to be perverted by it. The result was that my brother and I watched as much television as we could cram in at our babysitter's and at our friends' houses. So, if I happened to be at Janice's at the magical hour of 5 pm CST, I had the ineffable joy of following the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.

Since I could not realistically plan to be at Janice's house every day at 5pm, I missed a lot of episodes. This was where the double blessing of the Urbana Free Library and James Blish's novelizations of the series came into the picture. I read the story of every single episode (79!) over the course of a couple of years: the good, the bad, the appalling.

Why did I love Star Trek so much? Probably because I was a nerdy girl and it glorified the nerd. Sure, there was Captain Kirk with all his bluster and testosterone, bedding all the female aliens and crew members who crossed his path, but, for me, the main attraction was Spock. Never was intelligence so cool. I loved the tilt of his sceptical eyebrow, the pallor of his greenish skin, his high forehead pulsating with logic and knowledge. I also loved the rest of the crew (except for Kirk, who embodied all I loathed): Lt. Uhura, Chekov, Scotty, Dr. McCoy, and Sulu. Yes, there was actually a Japanese character! I am half Japanese, and could think of no other Asian characters in all of American media (except Charlie Chan and the evil Dr. Fu Manchu, who were both caricatures). Star Trek symbolized for me a future where people of all races and species could get along (except for Klingons and Romulans, of course) and work together for the betterment of the universe. And the Prime Directive! How amazing was that!

"As the right of each sentient species to live in accordance with its normal cultural evolution is considered sacred, no Star Fleet personnel may interfere with the normal and healthy development of alien life and culture. Such interference includes introducing superior knowledge, strength, or technology to a world whose society is incapable of handling such advantages wisely. Star Fleet personnel may not violate this Prime Directive, even to save their lives and/or their ship, unless they are acting to right an earlier violation or an accidental contamination of said culture. This directive takes precedence over any and all other considerations, and carries with it the highest moral obligation."

This Directive, the storylines it generated, and the way they tackled the big ethical questions were what I loved about this series. Take, for instance, the episode "Arena." It was based on the 1944 Fredric Brown short story of the same name that appeared in Astounding Science Fiction. Both the short story and the tv episode feature a winner-takes-all trial-by-combat scenario between the captains of opposing spaceships, one human, one of a reptilian species, engineered by a third, higher alien intelligence. Both are set on a barren planet with little cover or natural resources. Both involve the human captain figuring out a clever way to attack a seemingly stronger foe. The big difference is: in the short story, the human captain kills the reptilian captain and is restored to his ship while the opposing fleet is wiped out of space entirely, as though it had been erased. In the television series, however, Kirk asks Spock's advice, and determines that the reptilian (Gorn) captain may have been acting in perceived self-defense when he wiped out the Federation colony, so he declines to kill him. He also declines the offer by the higher intelligence (the Metrons) to destroy the Gorn ship. Kirk is rewarded for his mercy, which to the Metrons is proof that he belongs to more advanced race, and both captains are returned to their ships unharmed.

I read the science fiction story later, in junior high, when I was devouring Asimov and Heinlein and Herbert, and thought it not nearly as compelling as the Star Trek version. What higher intelligence would actually favor might over compassion, force over understanding? How ingenious to win the fight by rejecting the terms of the fight entirely! To force the would-be-winner to kick against the traces of the very authority he is trying to appease!

Later, when I was in grad school, Star Trek the Next Generation came out, and I loved it, too. The writing was better, the special effects were better, the computers were more in line with the actual evolution of computers. The cast, however, with the exception of Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Lt. Worf, were mostly tedious. Still, it kept trying to ask and answer the big questions. For instance, with the Borg, it explored why we value our individuality so much when it leads to so much conflict and unhappiness. With the character of the android Data, it explored what it meant to be sentient–he was the science fiction version of Pinocchio, the puppet who wanted to be a real boy.

By the time Deep Space Nine and Voyager came out, I was a bit weary of the whole enterprise (pun definitely intended). I half-heartedly watched a few episodes, but then gave up. My training as a literary critic caused me to dissect the new scripts mercilessly, and my love of theater made me wince with each burst of self-conscious histrionics. Even going back to watch old episodes (hurray for the advent of DVDs and streaming video!), I cringed and squirmed when Kirk adjusted his shirt and tossed his head and when Uhura made bambi eyes as she uttered the phrase, "Captain, I'm afraid." Slowly, I came to the startled conclusion that I had outgrown Star Trek.

Still, my heart beats a tiny bit faster when I think about the movie being released in two weeks. Call it nostalgia, call it a longing for lost innocence–those days when I thought all problems could be solved if we could all just sit down and talk about them–but I really want this movie to be good, to embody all that I loved about Star Trek.

I must admit, I do have qualms about the new movie. I didn't like the last one. It was full of fights, explosions, flashing lights, and shouting–all antithetical to the Star Trek I knew and loved. But it looks as though this one will be emphasizing the crew and their interactions with each other as they slowly become friends. From the trailer, I know there's a jump off a cliff (an homage to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? Why??), the Enterprise submerging in an ocean (Wouldn't the pressure tear it to pieces? It's meant to withstand the vacuum of space, not crushing gravity), and plenty more explosions, but I think it has the potential to fulfill my burning desire for intelligence, compassion, and friendship to win out over brutality, greed, and hatred. Plus, it features the amazing Benedict Cumberbatch (I'll write a future entry about the glories of Sherlock) as the archvillain Khan, so it's guaranteed to have both subtlety and dramatic flair. Let's hope it delivers.

Live Long and Prosper!