Part I: In Which Rena Recounts Technical Difficulties
So my lovely, faithful computer had its (less lovely, less faithful) mouse frozen for around 2 days. I did nothing about it except intermittently for clicking/jiggling it impatiently and then forcing it back to sleep. Today I get the bright idea to turn the power strip-thing off and turn it on again (thus forcing the power to kind of restart itself, I don't know.), and it worked. This is, I am aware, standard troubleshooting procedure. Why I did not do this sooner, I do not know. It's weird how things I know so often become things I forget. In the Venn Diagram of My Life, those circles overlap with worrisome frequency.
Small inconveniences like this force me to put my life into perspective, in a way. "My computer won't work boo-hoo I can't waste time on Tumblr for today." is a class-A first world problem. In the meantime, though, I've done a lot of reading. (Two books--both about 250 pages in less than 48 hours. Both very good. Summary/rant below.) Which I've been meaning to do more of anyway.
PART II: In Which Rena Talks About Books
The books I read over my little woeful computerless time were Into the Wild Nerd Yonder and Don't Stop Now, both by Julie Halpern. Which I thoroughly enjoyed and you should read. (Think what would happen if John Green were a woman. And still a novelist and not, like, a supermodel or something.) Even though I enjoyed them, I have some criticisms.
The first is about this girl who, once her friends have turned into pseudo-punk rock hipsters, realizes they were terrible friends anyway and goes off in search of new friends. These friends happen to play Dungeons & Dragons. And throughout this whole thing her inner turmoil is if she should abandon her (also sort of punk) roots and cement herself as a D&D nerd because that's where she'll be happier, or if having nerdy friends makes her a nerd.* I (as a self-professed nerd and punk fan) took a mild amount of offense. Life isn't black and white, yo.** Nor is life a neatly-divided-cliques John Hughes movie. I've had heated-yet-well-argued debates regarding 10th vs. 11th Doctors, as well as The Clash vs. The Ramones.*** I'm just a complex person like that. Everyone is/has the right to be. Maybe I'm being overly judgmental and/or overly analytical. The book doesn't necessarily preach giving up one subculture for another, it just implies that if one group is where the hipster assholes reside, then you might want to distance yourself from it completely. Eh. Just read the book and decide for yourselves.
The second I have less criticisms of, but am only a little pouty about because it had almost the exact same plot as my (as-yet-unfinished) NaNoWriMo 2010 novel. Except the published one had a third party being faking her own kidnapping and a kind-of-platonic couple roadtripping to find her instead of the protagonist being fake-kidnapped by her kind-of-platonic friend and a roadtrip ensuing for the sake of the roadtrip. You should read it anyway. It's longer than mine.
Footnotes:
* This sounds really critical and is a pretty bad plot summary.
** I'm so gangster.
*** With the same person, nonetheless. We're bonded by a love of argument. (I was on the side of the latter in both cases, if you were wondering.)
1 comment:
You have way more resilience than me. When my computer dies I usually just look forlornly at my laptop and use my phone for no real purpose at all for 3 hours.
Girl, we need to talk about Doctor Who sometime. THOSE DEBATES ARE THE FUNSIEST.
Yaa, it's really annoying when nerd-lovers paint non-traditional-nerds as THE ENEMY. We're all a little bit nerdy, yeah? AND ALSO as you pointed out people are not so simplistic as to have only ONE sort of nerdy fetish. WE LOVE MANY THINGS YES YES
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