Nerd Alert...

So I got on the bus this morning and I sat down next to what I think most people would constitute as a male nerd. I know the distinction has gotten a bit muddled with the emergence of the hipster culture, but this guy wasn't trying to be a nerd. He just was a nerd.

He had a Napoleon Dynamite type shirt on tucked in to his pants of course. He was futzing at first with his iphone, which I caveat is not nerdy, but then started awkwardly bobbing his head to music I couldn't quite make out. Actually bobbing isn't the correct word. It was more a seizure like motion with his head and a weird Hitch like containment with the rest of his body. Then he took of his head phones, took his out his glasses case and put on his 'four eyes'. Again, nothing against glasses, I wear them in fact, but it added to his overall Urkelness. He proceeded to pull out his ipad, again not nerdy, and began playing some sort of Grand Theft Auto like game but with way more parochial graphics. Grand Theft Auto is probably not nerdy, but on this guy, this game more than even his weird gesticulations made me really uncomfortable. His appearance alone made me assume he was not exactly bursting at the seams with social skills. That mixed with the fact that he was playing an unbelievably violent video game made me really uncomfortable. Even after I got off the bus I couldn't stop thinking about it.

I am not sure if news stories of men like George Sodini, or names like Dylan Clybold are the reason I had such a negative reaction to this guy and his video game but it got me to thinking. Maybe something other than his appearance gave me an uneasy feeling. Or perhaps the nerd factor lead me to think about the loner factor, and that made me uneasy. I don't know what it was. I mean he left me alone, he didn't leer. He was just doing his thing. However, in that short amount of time he got me to thinking. Historically, there aren't a lot of infamous females that have blown up buildings, convinced people to drink kool-aid, shot up their high schools and college campuses or randomly open fired in a female dominated gym. I am sure there are a few, but movie Monster was such a big deal because it was a case of an out of the ordinary serial killer. The out of the ordinary part is the fact that the killer was female. I don't know if it society, socialization or Malcolm Galdwell's exploration of contagious and infectious behavior that kept my mind running in circles. I obviously haven't done any reading on the subject, this is just how my mind was working that day.

There really is no point to this post, other than the fact that for a morning I was completely preoccupied with a stranger on the bus and a trend that has spanned news coverage for decades.