#95 Inner-Dork
It all started on a trip to visit my beloved college friends in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There were about twelve of us, and we were a few drinks into the night when we began to debate whom out of the twelve of us was the funniest.
Naturally, I assumed that everyone considered me to be among the funniest and most cool people in the room. It was therefore quite natural for me to announce that I considered myself the third or fourth to funniest person in our group. I mean, I know I’m not “out of this world” hilarious, and a few of my friends actually are, but I considered my patented wit and wisdom to carry me into the running for third or fourth place.
Apparently, this is not the case. And apparently, I have a very skewed perception of my reputation. I state this because after I announced my candidacy for “third or fourth to funniest member of my group of college friends,” I was subjected to a seemingly endless marathon of laughter, and by the end of it all, I could feel my cheeks burning.
What upset me was not really the fact that my friends did not consider me among the top “funniest people they know,” I mean, a sense of humor is relative, and relatively speaking, my sense of humor must be so amazing that few people can tap into its field of relativity. Einstein knows what I’m talking about. What upset me about this conversation, was that I am apparently, known for NOT being funny, and on top of that, I’m considered a total dork by all of my friends.
I felt slighted by my friends insistence of the fact that I am a total dork, so I did what any cool person would do in that situation; I attempted to argue that not only am I a very funny person, but that I am also very cool.
I guess you’re not cool, however, if you have to argue and prove that you are cool. I don’t think James Dean or Paul Newman ever did what I did next; which is to say that I announced an oral resume of my coolness, citing my history of forming rock bands, having sex with a few pretty girls, and I even dug deep and mentioned my extensive CD collection.
But my friends responded to my arsenal of coolness by saying that I’m the least cool musician anyone knows, that I’m obviously only lucky, and that some pretty girls just feel sorry for me, or find my dorkiness “cute”, and worst of all, my friends, apparently, think that my taste in music is “sub-par,” and I’m substituting that phrase for the truly mean, offensively articulate terms they actually used to describe my music taste.
So I returned home, and began to ask my friends in California, and in Oregon, what they thought about my sense of humor and my “cool factor.” Uh-oh, spaghetti-oh. It turns out that the Mike Oppenheim fan club, well, it doesn’t exist. All my friends, everywhere, from Ithaca, New York to Portland, Oregon they all think that…that…well, that I’m a total dork.
“Mikey, You dress like it is still 1991 and grunge is still cool.”
“Dude, You still listen to bands that no one even liked in the first place.”
“Mike, You actually own every album put out by Bush, Third Eye Blind, and Nada Surf…that’s not just dorky, it’s pathetic.”
“Are you serious? You look like a hobo. Seriously, you dress like you sleep on the streets. There’s nothing cool about that.”
“Mike, You’re a gimp. You have a broken hip and you’re only twenty seven. What’s cool about that? And then there’s that time you sprained your wrist for a month chasing a bouncy ball in the street…” (Look, I was really drunk, it had just rained for the first time so the streets were slick, wait, I don’t have to defend myself!)
Anyway, I could go on and on, but thinking about how many of my friends did not have to hesitate for even a moment before explaining precisely how I am a total dork kind of brings me down, and I’m in the phase of my life where being moody and sullen is no longer cool or rebellious. (Take that society (and Morissey)!) But the point remains. I am a total dork.
But you know what? I’m okay with that. I’m more than okay with it; I’m actually enamored by the concept of my own dorkiness. I have searched my soul, and the facts are in; I am, indeed, a total dork. And I am now embracing my own “inner-dork.”
I love playing trivia contests in bars. I think showing off my absurdly useless fountain of knowledge to total strangers while getting drunk is extremely fun.
I love to do karaoke, even though I can actually play real instruments and have been in real bands, I get a totally different rush when I sing Third Eye Blind or Nirvana on a stage in front of my friends and a slew of narcissistic alcoholics waiting for their turn to sing Journey songs.
My single greatest accomplishment in the year 2008 was winning first place in BOTH of my fantasy football leagues. Yes, I played in multiple leagues, and I actually spent enough time researching players and watching games to beat out twenty other fully grown men in an elite competition to prove who can best predict what real person is going to do really well in a sport that I don’t actually play.
I watch the television show Lost with a fervor normally saved for religious ceremonies and attending to dying relatives. And I get nervous when people ask me to do something on a Wednesday night because I’m not sure how to properly relate to them that the reason I’m perpetually “busy” each Wednesday night is because I am hopelessly addicted to the show.
The things in life that I am truly the most arrogant and cocky about are my absurdly impressive skills at ping pong, doing the crossword puzzle, and “rhyming on the spot.”
I am obsessed with eating shelled peanuts. I love shelling peanuts, because I am convinced that I can tell which kind of peanut belongs to which shell, based on the shell’s texture, color, and “firmness factor.” I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I’m fairly sure that if you cut me open, I bleed a strange concoction of peanuts, salsa, and whiskey.
I miss writing term papers and being a student. I call myself a novelist.
I love strange smells. Here’s an anecdote that will explain that statement: The main reason I didn’t want to vacate my old apartment in the industrial section of Portland was because it was really close to a bread factory, and I loved waking up and falling asleep to the occasional smell of burnt toast.
My favorite game show is “Deal or No Deal,” and this is because I think that I’d be “really good at it.” This is not only dorky, but it is pathetic as well, because the only skill you can bring to the show is the ability to stop gambling, and there’s really nothing impressive about not having a gambling problem. That’s actually normal, and therefore nothing worth being proud about.
And this brings me full circle to my analysis of inner-dorkiness. First of all, the fact that I’m analyzing dorkiness, and philosophizing on the subject is totally dorky, and therefore inherently ironic, and the fact that I’m elated by this situational irony, and proud of it, makes me even more dorky; it’s a cycle that never ends. And this is because what makes someone a dork is when they are proud of something that “normal” and “cool” people would never be proud of. I mention this, because I like for my readers to learn something from each of my columns.
So I want to end this short missive on what a dork I am (read: bad-ass, crossword filling, grunge trivia memorizing, peanut predicting novelist.) with my theory on Dorkiness. This way, you can begin to self-analyze your own inner-dork, and double check to see if you have a skewed perception of your own “cool/dork-factor,” like I once did. Because there is no worse feeling than finding out that all of your friends think that everything you take pride in is really pathetic, and, well, dorky.
I learned a lot this last month, as I explored the inner workings of my inner-dork, and the end result was an odd sense of self-pride and self-acceptance that most people pay a lot of money for professionals to help them discover…so I leave you with this MikeyOpp Aphorism: Dorkiness occurs when you take pride in something about yourself that gives no benefit to the human race. Dorkiness is the byproduct of a narcissistic obsession with something inane and irrelevant, and the more logical and relevant you think your obsession is, the more your friends probably assume that you are a total dork.
Personally, I still think that I’m totally cool, I just think I’m way ahead of my time, kind of like Bill Gates, whose dorky obsession with computer programming got him a boatload of money. Based on Bill Gates, I can only assume that someday I’ll win a reality show wherein contestants win money based on their ability to accurately guess the type of peanut hiding in a shell. You’ll see.
