If you find yourself feeling lonely, it is the perfect time to find yourself. Loneliness is the basic suffering of life. It is the fundamental discomfort of being alone with yourself. It is confronting your core discontent. Friends and lovers can’t rescue you from loneliness. They can only distract you. Loneliness will continue to seek you out until you make friends with it.
To make friends with loneliness, you have to welcome the feeling. Although it is an uncomfortable feeling, it is there to show you something wonderful about yourself. When you notice loneliness, you can neither give in to it, nor run away from it. You have to confront it. If you give in to it, you will feel miserable and imagine a long sad life ahead of you. You will imagine that you have personal deficits that make loneliness inevitable for you.
If you run away from it, you will do all kinds of frivolous things to keep yourself busy and distracted. You can develop all kinds of habits to keep loneliness at bay, but the feeling will wait for you. It will be there for you until you face it and find out that wonderful thing about yourself.
To find that wonderful thing, you have to ask your loneliness what is so wonderful about you. Then make a list. If the loneliness remains, add to your list. Keep adding to your list until you find that specific wonderful thing that the loneliness is trying to tell you about. Don’t doubt for a second that you will find it, but be patient. Every time you feel lonely, look again. Soon you will find yourself and you will have your loneliness to thank. Your loneliness will be gone, but you will have parted as friends.
Pervocracy: How to not be Creepy I especially appreciate this one because A. It comes from a woman's perspective, because ladies can be creepy too, and B. It talks specifically about coming on too strong sexually and how that can make EVERYONE around you uncomfortable.
Made of Fail Episode 23: FACE PUNCH!! Which is mostly Twilight Snark but does include a good conversation on how to interact with people you admire without them filing a restraining order.
Did I forget anything? I probably forgot something.
Also I'm not dead, yay! I just went on vacation and then got post-vacation busy/poor/sad. Whatevs, I'm pushing through it and feel like MAKING THINGS. LIKE THIS SHOW. There's also some discussion to be had about being WEIRD. Ohhh yeah.
Episode 2.4: BURN IT. (or, more politely, Things To Maybe Avoid)
Tuesday night I filmed the last segment of this "Shower and Don't Dress Like an Idiot" epic, which I thought would have a "harsh truths" tone but still come off with the good intentions that lie beneath it.
Then I watched it and the whole thing came off as mean-spirited, which obviously is not what I'm trying for at all. Hell, the whole mission statement of this blog-series-thing was "I’m your friend, and I love you and want you to be happy. So let’s talk this out." Being bitchy about people's fashion choices is NOWHERE in that statement.
So, instead, I'm going to try to do a text post where I talk about why certain clothes and accessories popular in nerd culture are generally unflattering while employing minimal snark. Well, as minimal as I can get. I am composed of 90% snark, the rest is coffee and bits of string.
This also gives me a chance to use visual aides! Which is beyond my video-edit-fu thusfar. Enjoy!
FEDORAS
I think the online backlash to fedoras is already going strong, but let's talk about them anyway.
Why do we, as nerdfolk, find fedoras to be the dashingest of hats? Probably, it has a lot to do with guys like these:
Look at these dapper motherfuckers right here. I think subconsciously we all imagine that when a fedora is placed on our heads we are MAGICALLY FANCY. But I'm afraid that's confusing correlation with causality. What might go wrong here?
Sometimes fedoras just don't suit a particular person. I don't pull off hats very well myself unless they are of the cowboy variety. The rest seems to come down to not commiting to the fedora.
Notice that in addition to a hat, all of the GQMFs above are dressed in some pretty formal shit. While I am occasionaly fond of mixing the fancy and the casual, like high heels with jeans or a pearl-snap shirt with a t-shirt peeking out from underneath, fedoras don't work that way. I largely see fedoras in the wild atop men in t-shirts and jeans and it's just confusing and unflattering. Example: The most modern of the above GQMFs combining fedora and casual wear:
See the difference? That is a deeply handsome man but that outfit is balls. So yeah, if you're going out in a fedora, I strongly encourage you to go full-fancy and wear a shirt with buttons and all that jazz. Besides, dressing fancy is fun sometimes and I don't know about you guys but I loves me a man in a suit.
ANIMAL PARTS
You know what I mean here. Hats with ears. Those fox tails that clip to the back of your pants. This is where I think I got kinda mean in the video so I'll just leave it at this: Personally, I think this stuff looks redonk on anyone old enough to vote, but some people seem to really like it. Maybe it's a good way for those people to find each other and be happy together and it's not for me to like.
Furries. I mean furries. MOVING ON.
CARGO PANTS
We all gotta carry shit. Especially those folks in the IT field. And cargo pants do seem to be the best solution for all those cables and dongles and thumb drives and such. But all that weight in pants pockets tends to mean either your belt has to be cinched so tight it's a little uncomfortable or you are going to spend all day hitching your pants to avoid showing Dave in HR your buttcrack as you crouch to discover that his monitor is unplugged and that's probably why it's not working.
Also those bulgy pockets on the outside of thighs and calves are just dang unflattering unless you're into Leifield Legs:
So what's the answer? A bag. A good ol' cross shoulder bag that can hold a lot of stuff. There's $15 medic bags at most army surplus stores, or the awesome thinkgeek bag of holding on the pricier end, or maybe something a little classy if you have an awesome-paying IT gig. What I'm saying is find a bag you like to hold your shit. You'll thank me.
And hey, if you like your cargo pants for work, wear the things. A lot of us have to wear unflattering clothes to work, and as long as you're comfortable, keep on keeping on. Just, y'know, think about changing into jeans before you hit the town.
DRIVING/FINGERLESS GLOVES
I think this comes from anime. Yes, those gloves look good on the long, slender fingers of your average anime character, but on the normal, stubby fingers of us mortals, the cool is lost. And much like other things that look cool in anime, they're also a bit over the top for everyday wear in the outside world. Exception: Knit fingerless gloves and armwarmers when it is actually cold outside. Those are still pretty rad.
LENNON GLASSES
A full list of people who look good in John Lennon Glasses:
1. John Lennon.
In short, Lennon had a long, narrow face and wide-set eyes. Without those features, these frames just fight whatever face they rest on, making even the loveliest folks look round-headed and cross-eyed.
FINAL THOUGHTS
All of this comes with a caveat: These are a few things I've noticed that seem to get over- or mis- used in nerd fashion, as it were. Just one little bear's opinion.
At the end of the day, do what makes you the most comfortable and the most confident. If something I've listed here is that one thing that makes you feel like a fabulous badass when you're out and about, by all means, ignore me.
"Don't Dress Like an Idiot!" has arrived at long last! With a guest appearance by Sofia, who wants you all to lose the Cat Game.
I've got a few stealth nerd recommendations in the show notes for this ep, check it out!
Sorry about the audio being so out of sync, I have no idea how to fix this. It's not an issue in the original file, but when I drop it into youtube it just goes all to crap. Feel free to open it in another tab and just listen to the audio.
Threadless has a lot of wink-and-nudge nerd shirts, which are often "stealth" for copyright reasons if we're being honest. Check out their "comics" category and beyond for some good nerd stealth. I have one of their shirts based on the Neil Gaiman poem "The Day The Saucers Came" and it is my favorite.
And possibly the stealthiest of Nerd Stealth accessories? PERFUME. Black Phoenix Alcehmy Lab is a California-based company that makes a wide range of perfume, with scents based on literary characters, comics, and a whole line dedicated to RPG classes, races, and alignments.
Just so we're on the same page, no one is paying me to hawk this stuff. It's just things I dig that I think fall under the heading of "Nerd Stealth."
Editing "Don't dress like an idiot!" tonight, hopefully it will be up tomorrow morning. Apologies for the long time between even these mini episodes, life has been...life.
Oh, and as usual, I beg you to ASK ME STUFF. ASK YOUR FRIENDS TO ASK ME STUFF. Lay your troubles at my feet so I may hem and haw and hopefully help.
This article is more autobio than advice, but I can not emphasize enough how important it is to be your own ideal boyfriend/girlfriend/partner. Take yourself out to a nice dinner or a show or drinks at a classy cocktail bar from time to time. Buy yourself little gifts just because it makes you smile. When you know you've had a bad day, draw yourself a bubble bath with candles and make yourself some tea to drink when you get out. When you need it, give yourself some time alone. In being your own best partner, you might discover attributes that you didn't even know you wanted/needed/loved in a partner. And in the meantime, you're just plain talking good care of yourself.
Okay, that point where I say I "don't feel like getting into" a gender binary discussion? That is a lie. I love love love talking about gender and gender roles and feminism sometimes. What I really meant was that Laci Green already did it way better than I could. Warning: Laci's videos are fun and informative and all about s-e-x. They are not safe for work. They are, however, an endless font of SEXY KNOWLEDGE and I wholeheartedly recommend watching a few. Just not at work.
Posted this before, but Wil's article from TCG tactics is relevant to this episode.
