by Liz Spencer

When most people think of nerd, they think of the stereotype: a pimple-faced teenager with braces dressed in a sweater vest and pocket protectors or an extremely smart person who happens to sit home on Friday nights and watch the latest episode of Star Trek or Doctor Who.

Well I am a nerd. A Fem-nerd or whatever you call a girl nerd. My face is not covered in a sea of pimples. I do have braces that I absolutely hate. I can’t stand wearing sweaters in general and don’t know where you can buy pocket protectors. Unlike my friends who watch Jersey Shore and Pretty Little Liars, I am sitting at home every Friday night with my little sister watching the Clone Wars.

Today the word nerd hasn’t been used to differentiate between people who are either very smart or are a huge Comic book fan. It really has to do with who is saying the word.

I am all right if people I know call me a nerd. If some random guy off the street called me a nerd, I think I would just walk away and think to myself, “The guy is missing out.” Nerd doesn’t affect me that much, not as much as freak. Freak to me is just even more insulting than nerd.

It was last Christmas when my stepdad’s sister and her daughters came over to celebrate the holidays with us. We were all sitting around the kitchen table just talking. I was mostly listening. One of her daughters was bragging about her job that she just got or something like that. I honestly didn’t care.

I forget how this was brought up, but his sister said something about how Star Wars fans were freaks. Everyone in my family knows how big of a Star Wars fan I am. I don’t hide it. My little brother and sister love Star Wars as much as I do, and they were sitting at the table. That was when I got up and left the table. I went into my room and just watched Star Wars until they left. It was kind of funny too because before vacation for HAS what we were going to do next was write This I Believe essays where we had to write what we believe in! I took a piece of paper out of my little sister’s princess journal that she got from Santa and just started to write about how Star Wars is the best movie ever.

No, I did not have a tirade about why Star Wars is the best movie ever. (Even though that is true. It is the best movie ever! I could have, but I didn’t.)I wrote about how it helped me out during ninth grade. Flashback time.

I was pretty much a loner in ninth grade. I mean yeah I would sit at empty tables, but something always nagged in the back of my mind that I was wasting a table. I hate being a waster of anything-  food, paper, anything that can be thrown away. So I decided to sit outside the office near the heaters and do Spanish homework because I never did my Spanish homework at home.

One day my uncle and I were watching Family Guy Blue Harvest where they were parodying Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. We were at the part where the main character of the episode got to his house that was on fire and his aunt and uncle were dead. I asked my uncle if in the real movie his aunt and uncle died. He said yeah they die.

After we watched the rest of the episode, we put in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. They were diving right into the Death Star Trench one by one, and they are getting blown up left to right when only Luke can destroy the Death Star.  That was when I knew that this was an awesome movie.

That’s what kept me going. Yeah it sounds weird saying that, but looking back on that, it’s true. I used to think that I was going to sit on that cold floor for the rest of high school, but after seeing Star Wars and its main character, who went from being a nobody back home to a somebody, I changed my mind. That’s what I learned from that movie. That’s what was keeping me going. To sum up the ending, a group of kids asked me to sit with them, and I have been ever since.

Being a nerd is awesome! The word nerd has evolved into being a term of cool. It’s great to be a nerd! There are conventions all year round where people can all come together without being judged. There’s going to be a huge one in August down in Florida called Celebration VI, a Star Wars convention. Many people travel all over to world to go down to Florida to spend four days surrounded by all things Star Wars. People dress up as their favorite characters, and they don’t have to get taunted by haters saying “Aren’t you a little too old to dress up?” Conventions are havens for fans and nerds alike. It’s a nerd paradise! People love to connect with their childhood, and they pass it on to their kids and they pass it on to their kids. The nerds will not die out.

I got a lot of comments on the surveys I handed out. Many of the comments were about misspelling the word “your.” My favorite comment was when the 10^th grader circled you’re and wrote on the top FAIL. I laughed out loud when I read that.

But there was one comment from a tenth grader that said, “I feel really bullied when someone called me nerd.” Well if I could say something to that tenth grader, I would say that it is ok to like something that some people consider to be “unacceptable” in society such as anime manga, or some science fiction movie. It doesn’t matter what the haters say as long as you like whatever it is. That’s what makes people unique. This world would be very boring if everyone liked the same thing.