Go ahead, ask anyone. I'm a huge nerd. I’ve learned to accept this, but I will admit I did not start out one of those “Proud to be me, so screw you” types. I desperately wanted to be cool, but it just wasn’t in the cards.

First, I will lay some of the blame at the feet of my parents. They were strict with me—and by strict I mean they never allowed me to do or have cool things, which, in retrospect, was really brilliant. I was allotted 30 minutes of television a day until junior high and I wasn’t allowed to listen to “secular music”. I consider this the catalyst of my nerdish ways. If you can’t watch TV or play with the newest, most popular toy, what do you do? You read, you write, or pursue some other nerdish hobby. My lack of 80s pop culture knowledge still shocks and horrifies friends …I mean, I didn’t watch The Goonies until I was 25.

Part of it is simply my ethnicity, as politically incorrect as it may be to say. Asians are supposed to be smart and while it’s a stereotype, at least it’s a positive one. Being one of only a handful of Asian kids in my town, I think teachers and classmates just assumed that I was smart, whether or not they were right. So, I was treated as a nerd practically on first sight. And while my parents were by no means the strictest of the parents in our Chinese circle, my father certainly made it clear that academics were a top priority.

However, I can’t blame my parents or educators for all my nerdishness. Throughout high school and college, I began to embrace it and would happily admit to myself that I enjoyed tearing apart Shakespeare’s plays and eschewing the mainstream. This was after trying to be cool and pretending I liked the clothes, magazines, music and whatnot that my peers were into. But I found that I never really truly enjoyed any of it. And I’m pretty sure everyone saw right through me, which probably made me even nerdier in their eyes.

Now that I am (gasp!) an adult, I am proud to announce, via public radio, that, yes, I am a nerd, and I am proud of it. I don’t want to listen to pop music in my car—I’d rather listen to NPR and learn something of the world around me. I don’t subscribe to tabloid or “women’s interests” magazines—mainly because, as a nerd, I believe that it’s a waste of paper and harms the environment. That, and they don’t teach us much more than who is sleeping with whom and how to wear lipstick well. I will choose styles of clothing that I am comfortable in—not because they’re hip or in fashion. At any given moment, I have half a dozen Scrabble games going on my phone. I prefer thoughtful news and documentaries to trashy reality shows. I will constantly be in the middle of two or three books and stay up half the night reading them. I am never going to have a clue who the newest “it” actress is until she’s no longer “it”. None of this is going to change, and I accept my permanent nerd-card with pride.

In saying this, I don’t think that being a nerd is a bad thing. Some of my best friends are nerds. Actually all of them are.  They are intelligent, well-read, thoughtful, insightful people who know what’s up in the world. They have ideas, they create things, and they are more wrapped up in improving things than they are in themselves But, I consider all of these traits good things. So go ahead, embrace your inner nerd…it's the new cool.

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