Confessions of a Failed Nerd

Patchwork Quilts and a Patchwork Career

I should have been a career nerd. I should have been someone who worked in science, or research, or medicine, or something scholarly. Instead, I ended up with a crazy patchwork “career”, doing mostly pointless tasks for pointless companies.

A quiet child with no siblings, I tended to invent my own entertainments. I liked to catalogue things — lists of books I had read or lists of characters I had created in my games. The latter list would contain things like name, age, height, weight, hair and eye colour, interests, education, occupation of each make-believe person, along with other trivia. These were my playmates, delicate paper dolls with intricate lives. I also created an entire community, complete with a street and relief map, of characters who appeared in a series of bedtime stories. I created the map based on clues in the stories, things like Mrs. Green lived next door to Sally, up the hill from Mr. Brown.

I had a board game called “Careers”, which, in today’s light is rather offensive. You rolled the dice and moved along the board while encountering the odd obstacle. There were two paths running in parallel along the board, one for boys and for the girls. The boys’ path showed careers like “pilot”, “doctor”, “executive”, “principal”, while the girls’ path provided parallel careers such as “stewardess”, “nurse”, “secretary”, “teacher” and so on. This was the 1960s version, before it was reviewed and updated. Such was that world at that time.

Ever the quiet rebel, I would play the game (by myself against myself) but in my mind I was a pilot, a doctor — firmly treading the boys’ path.

Monopoly was a game better played with others. Not content with the standard rules, I thought it would be better to define the meaning of “collect $200 when you pass GO”. I unilaterally decided that passing “GO” represented one month, and therefore one month’s salary, but at the same time would represent the interval needed to compound the interest on any mortgaged properties. I also kept a sheet tracking the return on investments, noting the cost of the property, costs of improvements (houses and hotels), any mortgages and so on, against the income collected from other players landing on one of my properties. I also insisted on being the banker. As one might imagine, I wasn’t a favourite companion for Monopoly play.

I had leaf collections, stone collections, little bits of nature-related detritus I had gathered here and there, with almost everything catalogued on index cards. And all the index cards were cross referenced! I had an inventory system indicating shelf locations for my books. I built pulleys and lever gizmos, generated electricity with potatoes, wound magnet motors, played around with vacuum tubes. My heroes were archeologists, deep sea divers, paleoanthropologists, biologists, but oddly never astronauts.

I also liked reading about prima ballerinas, not because I wanted to be a dancer, but because I admired their tenacity. I was particularly interested in Maria Tallchief, who overcame the prejudice of the time against Native Americans. Another dancer with whom I was darkly fascinated was Isadora Duncan who had been strangled by her own scarf whilst speeding down the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France. It seemed such an elegant and madcap ending. The books called it tragic, but to me it was glamorous and utterly glorious.

Children on the street used to call me the “walking and talking encyclopedia”. Many years later, in my bookshop, some referred to me as “The Oracle” (this was slightly prior to Google being the source for all arcane and common knowledge).

I took piano lessons, and painfully acquired a Grade 8 diploma and Grade 2 theory. I somewhat liked playing piano but hated the lessons and despised practicing. I took tap and ballet, but thankfully only for a season with each — my talents were obviously lacking. I taught myself guitar but was never particularly good at it. Like you often hear, I had “all the advantages” but never truly followed through.

I tried my hand at drawing and actually produced a few reasonably good charcoal portraits. From there I moved on to oil painting, where I created a small group of works — not wonderful but not awful.

Then came a period of embroidery. Some nice pieces, but it was a passing interest. Later in life I took on quilting and made a couple very large blankets.

Never one to take a well-trodden path, I would set crazy rules for things. Making the already difficult even more challenging, I decided that I could only use “vintage” scraps from fabrics that had been used in clothing prior to 1970. A silly choice, as many of the scraps, unbeknownst to me, were already beginning to disintegrate. Still, I persevered. The other rule was that every stitch had to be done by hand; no machine sewing for me. Not too onerous with small piecing and quilt stitching, but terribly tedious along the edges of the quilt, edges that seemed like endless miles of repetitive toil.

On and off throughout my life, I kept journals, diaries, “accounts”. I disliked the term “diary”, as it evoked in my mind sweaty pre-pubescent girls clutching little faux-leather diaries fastened by a cheap metal clasp, and who would wear the tiny key on a chain around pudgy necks. No, not a diary for me; a journal was more my idiom.

So now we’re onto blogging.

I recall a movie where a professor is being literally chased down by a blogger seeking an interview. The professor was not interested in sharing information, and I believe commented something along the lines of “… a blog? A blog is merely graffiti with punctuation”.

Can’t think of a better definition for this iteration of an old compulsion.