Reasons You're a Nerd

Google defines nerd as "A foolish or contemptible person who lacks social skills or is boringly studious," and in the same breath, "an intelligent, single-minded expert in a particular technical discipline or profession." Now, one of those sounds pretty attractive to the general public. You can guess which one.

I'm a nerd. I definitely lack social skills, and I search "define [word]" at least once an hour every hour. But I have had a problem with the word and the way people use it, because being a nerd is explicitly different from being a dork or a geek. Or a hipster. The problem I have is with the second definition up there. That, my dear readers, is the clear definition of a geek, not a nerd. A geek, if you must know, is a person that is interested, perhaps even obsessed with one particular hobby or 'technical discipline.' A geek is a high school trombone player that practices constantly because he loves it.

And a nerd is not "one who wears thick, black-rimmed glasses." A nerd is not cool. Nerd does not equal cool. At least not in the dictionary definition of the two words.

The point of this post is to discuss how I can't stand certain misuse of words, like "jealousy" instead of "envy." Jealousy is the fear of losing someone to another that you think is better than you. Envy is the feeling of wanting what another has. But "I'm so jealous" is so much easier to say than "I'm so envious." Doesn't quite roll off the tongue.

Anyway, back to nerdiness. Thanks to hipsters and their opposite-equals (fashion-following preps/jocks), being a nerd has become strangely cool. Revenge of the Nerds is no longer a study in weird, but something that almost everyone can relate to. When did being weird and nerdy become everybody's dream? It seems to be that being intelligent no longer exists. Being a nerd is now cool because being intelligent equals being a nerd now to the mainstream. Because you aren't a moron, you are now a nerd. You read books? Nerd. You don't party, but instead write articles? Nerd. You don't constantly have a beer bong shoved down your throat? Fuck, man, I must be a nerd.

Ugh, I have no points left to make. I'm going to go play Empire Earth. I'm done being a nerd now.

Une Exhibition Sexuelle

You probably won't finish this article if you are against women going topless in public. But I don't care. As long as folks pass religious laws, nobody is going to be able to make decisions for themselves on how they should be able to live their own lives. Just because you think something is sinful doesn't mean it is harmful to others. And passing laws against things like exhibitionism and drinking and smoking certain things is only going to make people more apt to do them out of rebellion.

There are only three states that have explicitly made going topless illegal for women, citing it as lewd and unlawful: Indiana, Tennessee, and Utah. But in many states, you may still be arrested for 'disorderly conduct' just for taking your fucking shirt off. Cool. So I was born without clothes, but Jesus hates seeing tits touched by sunlight. Makes sense.

Tits, whether you like them or not, are just part of a woman's anatomy, and in many cases, part of a man's anatomy as well. Men, fat or skinny, are allowed to run on public streets without shirts and in tight, bulge-hugging shorts, boobs bouncing in the sun, and nobody thinks twice. Sure, they may laugh at the tit-man, but he is not a study in lewdness. He's just a fat running guy. But what's the difference? Women use their breasts to feed babies? God forbid anybody see that.

It's weird how religious folks think that God constructed these beings but expects them to cover up his hard work. If it is a sin to show one's breasts in public, would God have created them? Wouldn't it be much more likely that the Devil created tits to lure men to him? Pretty easy job, as it would turn out.

By making boobs taboo, you have created a market for those topless snapshots that you consider so wrong. So much over-sexualization simply because it is something you can't see every day.

Now, don't be stupid and start believing that it was the Devil that created tits and clits. I just want you to understand that the female figure is beautiful, not sinful. And you should be working to make being topless legal instead of undermining your own equality by going all religious on us, ladies. Believe what you want, but it just doesn't make any sense to be a Christian and hate nudity.

Nudity is awesome. All-over tans and airing out parts that never get to be aired out. Your privates are stuck in half-dirty underwear all day long and you can't tell me it wouldn't be fantastic to walk outside without your heart beating like fucking crazy because you're streaking. Sweaty underwear isn't the only thing that makes nudity feel good. You are completely yourself, without some brand or style defining you.

What keeps you from enjoying nudity? The law. If there were no laws against public nudity, it would not be as big a deal. Yes, there are perverts. They can literally sexualize anything. But if people were desensitized to tits, it wouldn't foster pent-up rage about not being able to see tits. One less problem to worry about. Perverts are everywhere and you can't avoid them sometimes, but they don't attack women because they can see more skin. They'll target anyone because they are perverts, not because they see more skin. Perverts like the hunt, and aren't triggered simply by skin. There is more to it than that.

Boobs. Tits. Knockers. Breasts. Tits tits tits.

If you are still offended, you didn't understand my article. Visit/sign the petition at gotopless.org. Please stop being offended by tits, and don't start making fat dudes wear bras. Just get over yourselves already. Thanks.

Happy Thanksgiving and Such

Meanwhile, at TH Evan's, we're thankful for dick upstairs neighbors who stomp down the stairs and sound dumb, and the neighbors to our right who have a fucking nightmare child and slam lots of doors. Thanks for making us feel at home.

It's not bad living here, though. It's actually pretty great, save for those two annoyances. Quiet and pleasant and affordable and we can do what we want all the time. Pretty soon we'll do another podcast episode, but we've been busy playing computer games until I pass out, so give us a break.

Today is Thanksgiving, so no doubt you are reading this after hours, when things finally settle down and football game has been won. It's seventy degrees here and we're going to make cheeseburgers with real ground-up beef. No turkey, no stuffing, no holidays and no worries. After the weekend, I'm going to go to the gym right next to WalMart and inquire about my application, but we really aren't strapped for cash right now.

Thanksgiving has always been a weird time for me. I have no qualms about getting together with my family, but what are we really celebrating? Those jerk pilgrims who stole land and whose kids lied about it so they could eat a giant, hormonal turkey. Yum. And to top it all off, anybody in the family you're angry at is going to be there, including the assholes in the family who think they are better than everybody else and love to prove it and make people cry. That wasn't at my family's gathering, but at an ex's. So much fun. His sister cried and got drunk and the rest of the family got drunk and played annoying card games all night and drank Bud Light Lime. Gross.

I endured it, but help me if I didn't lie about needing to go home so I didn't have to come back the next morning. We luckily broke up before I could come to the Christmas party. Point is, holy shit, why? There is nothing less fun than going to a shitty family gathering where they have to warn you about a certain relative so you don't step on their toes later.

Lucky for me Brandon's family is awesome, but unlucky for anybody with a significant other whose family is shitty. You feel like a terrible person when you come back after an arduous meal with people you have no connection to. Aren't the holidays supposed to be cool, or does that die when Santa Claus dies?  Why do we keep up appearances when almost everybody hates the holidays? Or at least pretend Santa Claus exists.

Looks like the only way to enjoy the holidays is to be eight years old.

This is where we'll be spending the holidays. Hanging out with a microwave box we use as furniture, a console television, and plenty of computer games. And trying to tolerate the dicks upstairs.

Fancy Livin'

I wanted to save this next article for tomorrow, but we've got time to kill in the library, so I guess here we go! Yesterday, after a very extensive one-apartment complex scouring of the city, we got approved for a cheap as fuck one-bedroom place in Fayetteville, AR. Like the last place I expected to live, but it's great here so far. Tomorrow the apartment will be ready, so we're just wasting the day until we can start buying stuff to put in it.

No more van living after tomorrow, at least, not really for a full year. We don't have an endless supply of cash, so this is necessary or we will go broke and really be homeless. We already bought a coffee maker, but that's because it was three dollars and it could fit inside the van. I just applied to a gym for a part time job, only because I can leave the apartment and I'm already halfway to the building. It would be fantastic.

One of the many perks of the location is its proximity to everything we need, like a WalMart Neighborhood Market, a Walgreens, food stuffs, and a liquor store bigger than the Walgreens. I want to get a bonzai tree and try to keep it alive the whole year. And there's the UARK Bowl where they have open mic nights for the weirdos.

I guess after this, the blog posts won't be about me as much, but I'm pretty busy lately, so I'm trying to compensate I suppose.

Til the apartment living next time

Alexis

But...You Said Memphis

Some guy is pacing up and down the halls of this library and talking loudly on his phone. He is wearing dumb blue running clothes and most-likely fake thick-rimmed glasses, as hipsters are want to do. To you, Mr. Inconsiderate Dick: you're not important enough for anyone to even bother stopping you. They think, oh, he'll go away soon. Take my anonymous internet letter and shove it, you thick-necked, couldn't-be-a-jock-so-you-became-a-hipster jerk!

I'm going to go ahead and post that on the Craigslist Missed Connections here in Fayetteville, AR, where we arrived last night at two in the morning after a snap fuck-Memphis decision to leave.

That's right, Arkansas.

That state nobody thinks about ever. The crotch of the dude on the map made out of Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana. The state filled with obnoxious hills and the dumping ground for the Clintons.

We have more of a basis coming here, at least, than when we decided on Memphis. It's an artsy, college town. Yeah, Memphis has a university, too. Well, its main fucking factory just died (Hostess) and it's dirtier than Elvis's taint, so you can imagine our disdain after three days of camping out and apartment-searching. Last night, after some library time, Brandon pointed out that we should keep our options open for other places, and that's all it took.

Honestly, I probably wouldn't have needed another town name to travel to at that point. I was getting kind of depressed about living in a city like that, where everyone is either racist or thinks that you are racist, so they give you the eye when you walk into a library and are the only white people in the place. It doesn't bother you, but everybody is waiting for you to leave so they can confirm their suspicions that you left because you were uncomfortable. When Brandon said Fayetteville, I looked at it for all of three minutes before I was convinced that we should go there.

So, here we are. Open mic nights still abound, but clean streets, clean air, and still plenty of cheap apartments everywhere. The land of the WalMart and the home of the brave hill-walkers. We can probably even pass for college students while we're here, if it comes to it. For now, it's onto the apartment search, which even though we have to start over, feels more promising than the previous search.

Food and More Apartment Junk

I'm having better luck with apartment searching today, but it's still hard to know which places are lying. At least now that we've been all throughout the city, up and down Poplar and down side streets, I know the roads enough to tell which apartment buildings are going to be bad living. They always manage to hire a top-notch photographer for the main pictures, but if the photos of the inside apartments are done at bad angles, you know they're trying to hide something.

Last night, we got to walk around on Beale Street, passing by the huge crowd of dummies waiting for the Blue Man Group in the cold. We found cheap parking: another perk of a laid-back city, and we got to sit down in a restaurant without a wait after the cook talked to us outside about what we should eat. We had chicken and waffles for the first time and walked down the 'mall' strip where a black feral kitty rubbed its nose on my finger for a second before hissing at me. Everybody is fairly nice here. A little too nice, but oh well. Can't complain.

Some broke guy walked with us on Beale for a minute and talked in some weird dialect, using words like 'finna' and 'sat' (for Saturday), and when he realized we were broke and moving here from Indiana, he asked us for spare change and went on his merry way. It seemed like everyone we walked by had something to say about one of the restaurants, as if they all had pimps stationed at intersections to attract people to eat at their place.

Oh, we ate at Miss Polly's Soul City Cafe. The food was tasty, but holy shit, was it filling. We only ate one meal yesterday. That's all we can really manage down here.

The sun sets here at an ungodly early time. It's five o'clock here, and already, I can't see the sun behind the horizon. We have been confused about what to do because of it. After the library closes, all we have to do is walk around in the dark and go back to West Memphis to hang out in the WalMart parking lot until we get sleepy. When we get a place, we'll be able to leave the van in the apartment lot and go to music venues, but for now, we have no place to park to do so. Music supposedly plays in Midtown every night. There's some bluegrass band I want to see coming soon, but who knows where we'll be next week. We might not spend Thanksgiving in a building! Oh, no! Not [holiday]!

Oh, and side note, we don't have TV. Is there a war going on or something? I thought I heard something about it, but it was in between top news stories about the newly single Justin Bieber.

Well, hopefully next time I write something, it'll be in an apartment. Didn't I write that last time? Hmm. I guess I'll listen to Switchfoot's Only Hope and keep on hoping, you guys. Have a number one a-okay rest of the day!

Apartments in Memphis

We're hanging out in Memphis but still haven't found a particular apartment we could really love. At least, for the price. Midtown is where we are looking, but when we've told people we just up and moved here, the main response was, "To Memphis?" I guess it's surprising. But we've come to the conclusion that it'll be good even if we don't like it, simply because being in a place we hate will help facilitate creativity.

Our main difficulty now will be creating jobs for ourselves to show that we totally haven't been bumming around the country for four months. Then, we have to get real jobs. But having a job will be difficult without having an apartment to shower in and get ready beforehand. Most apartment places don't like for you to not have a job when you move in, though. Complications galore.

We spent last night in West Memphis, AK. The truck stop of America. Beautiful place for nothing to happen, complete with waving light-up Santa for the holidays. Their claim to fame was that Elvis stopped by once on his way back to real Memphis.

There are a lot of nice people here, so that's cool, at least. The biggest problem is that the roads are shitty. The shittiest of all shitty roads, I think. Other problems include confusing diagonal roads, two city loops, and questionable streets. And Kroger made Memphis its fucking bitch. There is a Kroger on every goddamn street corner. Good things include a big music scene and pictures of Elvis everywhere. Lots of small businesses as well, with their claim to fame being that Elvis stopped by on his way back to Graceland.

I wonder if there is a restaurant that claims that its chili dog was the last one Elvis--well, you get it.

Hopefully the next time I write, I have better news, but for now, we'll be staying in a WalMart parking lot for another night. A good Southern day to you, ma'am/sir.