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By Root 690 0

from a place of “everyone is stupid but me.” This is shitty and wrong. It also leads to spontaneous emotional reactions to situations rather than calm, well-thought-out ones. Here’s a little trick to keep you from going from zero to yelly in 5.4 seconds: Whatever your first reaction is, make it your third. Look, if someone’s giving you the guff, you shouldn’t be afraid to stand up for yourself and tell them what’s what, but oftentimes this isn’t necessary right away. In Stephen R. Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People—a title that is so sterile I’m sure it was thought of in another language initially, then translated to English—one habit is “seek first to understand.” This is GOOD. Real power is controlling your emotions, not letting them launch whenever you get an urge. Your knee-jerk reaction is usually more about you than the situation at hand. Before leveling someone with your loudness and clever barbs, try to understand the issue FIRST and discuss what options might help you fix it. If that gets you nowhere, regroup and seek a levelheaded resolution a second time. If you’re STILL getting an unfair roadblock, then you can shoot your anger load all over everything as your THIRD REACTION (but not in a physical way, of course). If you can do this, you will cut down your outbursts by about 90 percent and in that gain real understanding and solutions rather than ignorance and enemies.

The Nerd mind is a powerful and complex machine. The fact that you have a lot of internal struggles is actually a gift because it means that you have more going on inside than most. You’re extra-special, and sometimes that’s hard. It’s the burden of being the smartman that you are. The good news for you is that BECAUSE you’re a smartman, you can—and oftentimes will have to—outsmart your brain. It might seem like a hassle, but Uncle Ben Parker was right on when he blabbed about great power & great responsibility. Enjoy the fact that you have both!

Congratulations for getting through the first section! Give yourself a whopping 50 XP in your Character Tome!

PART TWO

BODY

YOU START NOW

THE NERD PHYSIQUE

“Emptier than a hotel gym at Comic-Con” was a comparison I made about the Kardashians once. That’s a twofer, one of those analogies that’s mean to every referent it contains. Truthfully, I don’t know the Kardashians. They might be nice. They’re just an easy target and I was being a dicknose. Nerds and comic cons, however, I AM intimately familiar with, and many of them are not in awesome physical condition. I know! I get it! I was always picked last, too. And begrudgingly at that. In fact, when I was in eighth grade, they made me take gym with the fifth and sixth graders. (Awwwwwwwww.) It’s no wonder with this kind of youth-based failure that I would have had negative associations with fitness later in life.

The Nerd body isn’t necessarily one physical type. It can be large, small, fat, or freakishly skinny. The constant is that, by and large, Nerds do not feel comfortable or coordinated in their own skin (except the fingers, where the game controlling lives! UP-UP-DOWN-DOWN-LEFT-RIGHT-LEFT-RIGHT-B-A). How could I make a blanket statement like this? Am I just an arrogant D-pad? Possibly. But I’ve also lived with Nerds my whole life. I attend cons every year. I see different regional Nerd packs regularly, and I know this: Body language doesn’t lie. Nerds slouch, they won’t look you in the eye, they stare at the floor mostly, and they seem to be on a mission to wrap their entire bodies around the center of their chest. I think there are two forces at play here that contribute to this slouchtopia: (1) Humans who aren’t comfortable carry themselves in a very closed-off, protected manner that pulls their shoulders forward and their heads down, and (2) years and years of sitting at computers or in front of video games have created the standard binary slouch. In other words, any device that has a binary-based system will almost always make you hunch over to interface with it. When most of your time is spent slouching,