THE DORK FACTOR
I will admit that there is an inner dork in me…then again, isn’t there one in all of us? Go on, be a man/woman/dog, admit it! Even Brad Pitt must have those moments where he looks at himself in the mirror and thinks, ‘god I’m a total dweeb! Dorks use words like dweeb.
My inner dork wears things around the house that don’t match; I mean crazy, freaky colorful ensembles that make my partner’s eyebrows rise. He refers to them as my Carrie Bradshaw outfits (shows you that the clothes on that show were purely for the women viewers); my inner dork also watches Murder She Wrote and Diagnosis Murder (don’t mess with Dick Van Dyke when he’s on a case, he’s unstoppable), she is also a bookworm and she plays copious amounts of Scrabble on her iphone whilst eating kiddie biscuits – they have no sugar and they taste like cardboard and for some reason this speaks to me.
And when I’m in this mood to bust out my dork, feeling cool is the furthest thing from my mind. Who am I kidding, I’m a mother now, any remnant of cool I possessed just flew out the flipping window; although don’t you know that I am collating all photographic and written proof of my coolness to show the King when he is of the age to care, or roll his eyes at me in extreme doubt. It’s amazing when you look back on your life at those moments when being cool was tantamount, and you marvel at the amount of energy you spent trying to fit in, look a certain way, and feel like you were finally on the inside looking out, as opposed to the other way around. Cause being cool back then meant something; it meant that we had somewhere to hide our insecurities.
And then a funny thing happens. As you age, you suddenly stop caring about being cool, or frankly, being anything at all but on time, well slept, and employed…and loved, loved is always good. Fitting in is defined by if you pay your taxes and don’t live in a cardboard box, looking a certain way is simply looking good enough to attract a partner, and as for being on the inside, well as you age, you suddenly realize that the view from the outside of the box is much more entertaining.
And so one’s inner dork is allowed to emerge and strut itself proudly. Cause of course by this point you’ve found yourself a partner (hopefully), had a kid (or two), and have received guarantees from friends and family that unconditional love is part of the arrangement. So when I whip out my thick knee high socks and slippers, and throw on my long johns and mismatched t-shirt, and start yelling at my iphone cause it won’t let me use a certain word in Scrabble whilst Angela Lansbury is solving an epic mystery in the background, well, my beloved partner has to love me anyway, dork and all. And this dork just scored a 50-point masterpiece on a triple letter word starting with the letter Q. So cool kids, put that in your pipe and smoke it!