How To Be A Nerd

A Note From Our Editorial Lead: Issue 31

How To Be A Nerd

Take unashamed respite in scenes of great love.

Smile at teenagers in anime cosplay on the train to Town Hall.

Be brave.

Be wildly earnest, get tearstains on all your books, read smut in public because sex is a part of life, and give people sweaty hugs.

Be unconcerned with ‘cool’. Or if you can’t quite get to UNconcerned, at least acknowledge that coolness resides inside your heart, and people who judge you for that kind of stuff are pretty lame anyway.

Understand: sometimes we need to hide in free space. Doctor Who and birds and planes and furries. These are little pocket universes. Different ways to float away.

Take comfort in the endless desire to learn… to watch the world around you, to keep watching…

Read everything by Octavia E. Butler. As I am trying to, since Amelia keeps ordering me more of her books, and Kate got me comp tickets for an Octavia book club at the Opera House, and I learn more about a woman who died twenty years ago, by all accounts alone and yearning for companionship, but fuelled always by her desire to write, to write herself, a Black woman in the late twentieth century, into science fiction, to write her childhood imaginings, the dreams that let her float away…

Recite this every morning in the mirror before your daily cappuccino latte sugar frappuccino (not that chic magic ristretto bullshit). The more you read, the less you know. The more you ask, the less you know. The more you know, the less you know.

And remember! Nerd is love. And love is PULP.

Nerdily,

Annabelle