Embrace your inner nerd!

Last week at the temple while we were waiting for the last session to finish, a group of us were standing around in the locker room talking about remembering things (names, numbers, etc.) by forming mental relationships. I liked that topic of conversation. I’m not very good at remembering names, but I do quite well with numbers if I have good reason to memorize them. “Yeah,” I piped in eagerly, “I remember all sorts of numbers that way,” and then I tried to explain. “I can remember, like, 2648, because twenty-six minus two is twenty-four and twenty-four times two is forty-eight.” Then I trailed off because I was getting some amazed stares. “Wow,” one of them said. “That’s twice as much to remember as the number itself.”

Fortunately the Thursday night temple workers already know that I am a math person, and so I feel comfortable with my math-geekiness. It just didn’t quite occur to me that the little arithmetic devices and numerical relationships that I use to memorize telephone numbers, my social security number, my credit card number, which freeway exit to take, how much to pay for rent, etc., etc., was really all that strange. I mean sure, when I rattle off my social security number now I am not consciously recalling how the numbers are all related to each other, what’s a multiple of what, whether the digits are even or odd, prime or divisible by the proceeding digit, and so on, but I don’t know how I would have been able to rattle off the number in the first place if I hadn’t had some way to see order in a string of nine otherwise meaningless numbers. And when I think “two-six-four-eight” I’m not thinking “well twenty-six minus two is twenty-four and twenty-four times two is forty-eight,” or at least not like that. The relationship is almost instantaneously apparent to me. I suspect that everyone must do this in some way or another—no one gets 2 mixed up with 9, and so they must be using some concept of two-ness and nine-ness to remember the number, right?

But I take some pride in my nerdiness, and I am delighted to find other people who do as well. In fact, I believe that everyone is nerdy in their own way, and the people who are most fun to be with are the people who are most secure with their nerdiness. And as it turns out, once you get past high school and the self-conscious sense that there is only one way to be cool, and enter the real world and realize what it really means to be a real person, it turns out that nerdiness is, well, kinda cool. You learn that there are the “cool” people (and no matter how nice they are, I often feel just a little uncomfortable around them because I am all too conscious of all the ways in which I am not “cool”), and then there are the rest of us, the actual cool people who memorize numbers using complex numerical relationships, or embroider the periodic table and are passionate about Boggle, or go through three bike helmets because they are the only cylcist in the state of Utah to think about whether their helmet matches their shoes and jersey and any possible potential future jersey, who sing to their dog when no one is listening (or, at least, when they think no one is listening), or collect stuffed hippos, spend their Friday evenings paper maché-ing balloons (and feet and hands), arrange their M&Ms in geometric patterns before eating them according to color, learn the dances in Newsies during their spare time, and name their pillow.

Yep, those are the people I hang out with. 'Cause life’s a lot more interesting that way.