Nerd Prom! Or: Why I Love Ignite

Yesterday a reporter called me. He’d heard through a mutual friend that I was presenting at Ignite Phoenix 6.

First question: “Why are you doing this?”

And I had absolutely no idea. I had just remembered sitting in the audience at Ignite Phoenix 3 thinking, I could do that. And then I did Ignite Phoenix 4. And suddenly it’s almost a year later and I still have no idea why I’m doing any of it, but I need to give the reporter an answer. So as usual my mouth opens and I say something tactless:

“It’s like nerd prom!”

And then I wonder in my head if I should backpeddle — nerd is a pretty harsh thing to call a fairly cool group of people. But my rationale is like this: It doesn’t take much to be a nerd, all you need is a deep interest in something other than an Approved Normal People Topic of Conversation™. Which is more or less limited to the following:

  • The experience of being So Drunk
  • Buying things
  • Your children and the things they do
  • TV, and the people on it
  • How About Those [$sports-team]
  • Dieting and Working Out

If you have a deep interest in other stuff, you learn not to share it with the world, because the world still loves to piss on The Different.

Ignite plays a very important role, here: This is where The Different are allowed to come out of the closet in an eyeroll-free environment and use big words and technical terms and Twitter while people are talking. To me it’s not about passion, it’s about being allowed to be you for five minutes of your life.

That’s the nerd part. Now the prom part. I told the reporter that I found a new dress and some shiny yellow shoes, and it had been years since I’d had a reason to purchase something just to feel good about wearing it. You get to dress in your favorite version of yourself, and socialize with hundreds of people, and get really liquored up afterwards. That’s prom, right?

Plus it feels great to be on a stage, knowing that for once you’re not competing with 67 cute blondes who take singing lessons. In high school, I tried out for musicals, and it was always Get The Hell Off My Stage, You Dance Like a Clydesdale. (Not really. It was more like, “Ooh, Stacy, you should be in the pit orchestra! Go downstairs with the other homely children, please.”)

So  I guess to answer your question, Mr. Reporter, I do Ignite because these are my people, and I like having epic fun with them.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 30th, 2010 at 1:35 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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