Dorky Is As Dorky Does

I had lunch today with mein schonen Junge eine. She went to Oktoberfest in Leavonworth this weekend past, and she was all a-twitter because she got hit on by a youngster! He was 21, she is 23. She's a dork.

After taking my seat, I casually placed my purse and a page from Maxim, a pic of Jim Parsons, on the table near the chips n' salsa; she glanced down and immediately began drooling in the bean dip. A geek/nerd will turn her head nearly as fast as a soccer/rugby hottie. If she could just get them all rolled into one...

The topic went from geeks and nerds to dorks. To review, geeks have mental prowess; nerds lack physical prowess. Geeks are intellectually superior beings created in a special, top-secret room by God himself; nerds are made from the bottom of the matter batter.

Dorkiness is different from both. It refers to aberrant behavior. A dork is someone who does funny/stupid stuff not giving a flying rat's ass what others think, and generally pulling it off as eye-rolling, but cute. A dork, in fact, is likely to have thrown the rat and shouted, "Hey, look! A flying rat's ass!"

Dealing with a dork is significantly easier than dealing with either a nerd or a geek. All you gotta do is say, "You're such a DORK." Generally, dorky behavior requires nothing from you except that simple acknowledgement. And since calling someone a dork is more a term of endearment than an insult, there are generally no hard feelings on either side. Dorks are socially tolerated if not fully accepted.

You'll not get off so lightly with a nerd or a geek. First, a nerd is rather like a wombat - shy, gawkish and, where a wombat has a backwards pouch, a nerd would totally wear a fanny pack. A nerd is socially unacceptable and likely aware of it; his/her ability to survive under such harsh conditions of rejection depends upon whether or not he/she cares. Once a nerd accepts his unacceptability, he becomes accepted in a circular logic sort of way.

Geeks present a more complex problem, which is funny because a geek lives to solve problems as complex as he/she presents. Again, circular logic - except a geek likely knows the exact circumfrence of the circular problem he presents. And hot geeks do not wear fanny packs.

Of the three, dorks appear to be the better-adjusted, being physically and mentally not that different from normal people. Geeks may look normal, but their neuroanatomical nucleus is actually just a giant monitor running a thousand lines of code written in a complex programming language. Nerds have no neuroanatomical nucleus, or underdeveloped ones at best.

Clearly, I spend way too much time at work thinking about geeks and nerds and dorks. Hm...I wonder why that is?