Every Nerd Needs a Mentor

There is a recently-viral video of Wil Wheaton telling a girl who asked him a questions (I think he was on a panel at ComicCon) about what to do when someone called her a nerd. And Wil does a fabulous job telling her how to handle it and how to be confident in her own awesomeness.

But. I have to admit that I was a little perplexed about the whole thing because in my family? Being a nerd is cool. Nerd is not a dirty word, and we are ALL Geek Chic. Perhaps you’ll recall that we start our kids on the path to nerdery very young in this gene pool. We encourage and even expect that our children will be bona fide members (dare we say leaders?? One can only hope!) of the Nerd Herd.

In our family, amongst us adult and among all the nieces and nephews and cousins, we have band nerds, drama nerds, math nerds, science nerds, Star Wars nerds, sports nerds (yes there is such a thing) and we even have a WORLD CHAMPION RUBIK’S CUBE NERD – BOOM! Jealous?

When it comes to my own children, Joshua is embarking on the path to becoming a NEW kind of nerd in our family – a video game nerd. Joshua is pretty much obsessed with the WiiU – he loves Disney Infinity, LEGO Marvel, and a whole bunch of other games – those are the only two I can really deal with hearing about at this point.

My husband enjoys video games, but he is not a Certified Video Game Nerd, so although he’s been able to guide Joshua up to a certain point, our baby son is currently surpassing his dad’s capacity for video game nerdiness.

Luckily for us, though, Joshua has found an Ultimate Video Game (and comic book and a whole lot of other nerdy things) Nerd Mentor – our friend Corey. Although Corey is not a member of our family, he is a great guy and a certified Non-Creep.

Recently, Joshua had a question about his fave game for Nintendo WiiU – LEGO Marvel – and Corey is a huge Marvel nerd so of course he owns this game even though LEGOs are for children (ooh, come on LEGO nerds, don’t let me get away with that!), so he MADE A VIDEO of him playing the game to show Joshua how to open up a certain feature. So then Joshua made him a video back showing him how he had followed Corey’s advice…and because he is so cute and loves Corey so much, he asked for another video, and because Corey is a nice guy and excellent Nerd Mentor who works from home and has time to make videos of himself playing a video game because a 10-year-old asked him to, he sent one right back…and so on, and so forth. I think they are on like the 5th video now. Here’s one of Joshua’s; you don’t have to watch the whole thing to know that a) my son is well on his way to becoming a HUGE Video Game Nerd and b) Corey is a very patient Nerd Mentor who clearly has his eye on training Joshua up in the Way of the Nerd.

I’m very thankful for Corey’s friendship to Joshua (he married our babysitter Krisha so since she can’t be our sitter anymore, it’s nice that he’s at least contributing to our son’s nerdery) but I also really like to make fun of him for being such a giant nerd (and I quote: “When I found out Joss Whedon was going to direct the Avengers, my heart exploded.”) so this situation is a TOTAL win-win for me! Especially since Bobby records and sends Joshua’s videos for him so I don’t have to mess with THAT inconvenience. Whew!

Nerd Alert, people! My baby’s on his way!