Embracing the Inner-Dork

It’s one of my core convictions that everyone should be a dork for something. I despise people who go through life with a blasé indifference towards everything, who feel so above it all that they can’t dork out about something weird they love. Whether it’s art, fashion, sports, or Scrabble, everyone should love something so hard it makes other people think they’re crazy. Enter the convention.

Within as many weeks, I traveled to three cities for three conventions: Asheville, NC for a literary conference; Adelphi, MD for a horror convention; and Las Vegas for a insurance marketing convention. Excepting the first, these aren’t exactly my cup of tea. Quite the opposite, rather. I tiptoed into the horror convention to support my husband’s movie; I reluctantly registered for the marketing conference as a desperate plea for a promotion. But for each, I decided to truly be a part of them and not to just stand on the sidelines while disguising discomfort for aloof nonchalance.

Conferences and conventions intrigue me. It’s easy to stand at a distance and mock attendees, clad in name tags and sporting eerily similar clothes and hairstyles. Yet conferences allow people embrace their inner dork, providing a subculture with a place to share a common ground and lingua franca. Most interestingly, conferences skew the standard of “normal.” This was most evident at the horror convention, where attendees donning fangs and red contacts while shopping for movie props were just part of the crowd. Of course someone would have a need for an artificial-yet-lifelike severed arm. Duh. The same for the other two: the literary conference was full of book geeks who need fifty ways to analyze a text, and the marketing conference included a segment in which an actuary slayed the crowd with actuary jokes. I imagine he sat on those jokes for months, waiting for the glorious moment to be surrounded by people who would actually get them. Conferences allow people to find their team and get their geek on en masse.

I admit that I see footage of most conventions, with attendees dressed in Spock ears or something similarly odd, and laugh. To those of us on the outside, it looks weird, the people sound crazy, and—what we love most perhaps —we seem so cool in comparison. But then I look back on my previous three weeks—discussing a feminist/narrative analysis of Virginia Woolf with academics with very definite views on the subject; debating PC/Apple with a man dressed as Dracula, and joking about Flash-heavy sites with some conservative suits—and realize how dorky I would sound to others. But as I said before, dorkiness is precisely the point.

I’m pretty group-wary and still not the convention type. But for three weeks, it was a fun exercise in new experiences, allowing me to meet people who share my love of the inner-dork. And I realized that the groups that I am most wary of are not the kinds who go to horror conventions or business conventions, but the too-cool-for-school types who stand to the side and simply mock it all. To those, I say, Get over yourself, grab a set of fangs, and join your fellow dork. If only for a day.