Cool is uncool

...or was it the other way around?  Timey wimey stuff, can't keep it straight in my head.

But in any case, what's that got to do with the price of sliced bread in 2014?  Not a whole lot, but it's got everything to do with my blog and why it and more popular blogs like it exist.  It is, in a way, a declaration of purpose, and it goes like this.

When I was an awkward pre-teen, more awkward than most believe me, I wore giant plastic librarian glasses that constantly slid down my nose, was good at science, and secretly loved science fiction and fantasy.   In other words, I was the absolute epitome of uncool.  But this isn't the story of the ugly duckling that became a swan: it's how the ugly duckling became the new swan.

It started with a scar.  "Who's Harry Potter?" I asked my cooler friends at the lunch table as they plopped down with their arms full of thick colorful hardback books.  All through middle school, I'd been the kid everybody bugged because of the thick hardcover book always in my possession.  All though high school, I'd struggled with contacts until my eyes wanted to tear themselves out of their sockets.  Now, through the medium of reading no less, Harry's iconic bespectacled face made it not only okay to wear glasses, but...wait, did that kid just cry about passing his eye exam?

And then there was the knitting.  Knitting???  My sister and I picked up knitting one summer out of boredom.  Possibly also out of solidarity for our college roommates.  There was something cozy and Anne-of-Green-Gables-esque about sitting around the "fireplace" with our various projects and gabbing about our invisible gentleman callers.  So imagine our surprise when hand-knit scarves would become all the rage, knitting websites and yarn shops popped up out of the woodwork, and the rest, as we say, is history.  Even better: my fellow knitters had a geek streak.  I'm sure there's some sort of social psychology explanation for this, but you'll have to ask my sister if you want it.

It's been the same in other areas too.  Since high school, I've seen the rise of the smart-is-sexy paradigm.  Where can we trace that, exactly?  I secretly watched Bill Nye the Science Guy during my summer vacations in middle school, yes, but that was hardly the norm.  Presidential selfies with astrophysicists would never have become an internet phenomenon.  Should we thank the internationalization of broadcast media?  The archetypal/universal appeal of the Whedonverse?  David Tennant's decidedly sexy smart Doctor Who?  Or the BBC's Sherlock, whose "brainy is the new sexy" practically became a battle cry?

My uncoolness, as it turns out, occupies similar space-time coordinates as the Eleventh Doctor's bow-ties, or the Drunk Giraffe.  And because the ugly duckling is the new swan, a geeky amateur knitter/baker can start a blog named after a sci-fi program and not be the only alien on the planet to do so.  That, my friends, is the coolest part of being cool.  Or...oh, never mind.