grow up to be nerds
SFG wrote this in the comment section at Half Sigma. I thought it hilarious and worthy of being shared:
Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be geeks or nerds,
Don’t let ’em pick software and build their own OS
Make ’em be jockies and preppies, oh yes…
Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be geeks or nerds,
They’ll never leave home and they’re always alone,
And never find someone to love…
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11 Responses to Mama’s, Don’t Let Your Babies…
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I always figured the best I could do for baby Spungen is to provide him with the financial wherewithal to fulfill the legacy of his nerd genes to the fullest. Now I’ve got to make him cool? I’m not sure how to go about that
Didn’t you say you married an alpha-ish lawyer?
It’s hard. Your kids have to socialize enough to help their social skills but not enough that their grades go down and they can’t get into a good college. I would say you know they’ve crossed the line when they ask you to drive them to the scifi convention, or if you see dice in their room that don’t have six sides.
Also keep in mind you may be personally biased given that you’re a lawyer and a lot of law school admissions has to do with grades. I mean, c’mon, you’d like to see baby Spungen get As and go to law school where they drop their Rs, right?
I was just telling Hope to hide the Dungeon Master’s Guide when the kids get old enough to use it. If she has any boys, it’s going to be a little hard for him to realize there are few female nerds out there if he sees his mom reading Tolkien.
The large number of images in the original song actually lends itself well to parodies. And oddly enough, you don’t have to change all that much: isolation is a central theme of both original and parody.
Geeks ain’t easy to find love though they’re awful easy to hold,
And spend so much time coding that they forget you like gold,
Piles of old clothing and old faded Levi’s and each night stay up till the day…
You won’t understand him and he won’t die young
He’ll just forget you went away
CHORUS
Geeks like smelly basements and midnight code runs
Moldy Hush Puppies and sf and ten-sided dice
And them that don’t know him won’t like him
And them that do sometimes won’t know how to take him
He ain’t wrong, but he’s different,
and his mirror neurons don’t let him know how to be nice
CHORUSX2
CHORUS: Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be geeks or nerds,
Don’t let ‘em pick software and build their own OS
Make ‘em be jockies and preppies, oh yes…
Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be geeks or nerds,
They’ll never leave home and they’re always alone,
And never find someone to love…
Didn’t you say you married an alpha-ish lawyer?
Yeah, ’cause everyone knows alpha males tend to be libertarians and they love women who blog — especially at sites like Half Sigma. Sometimes you guys don’t think things through very well. 😉 And who do you think told me about 10-sided dice?
Love the line about how he won’t even remember you left.
SFG, if not for your admonishments, you’re the type of guy I’d have proffered as a role model. Here I am, finally, having struggled to achieve a position where my kid could do smart-people stuff and not get his ass kicked for it. Now I find out that may not be good enough. I grew up thinking that too much interest in sports was the path to loserdom, but outside Loserworld that’s completely wrong. I feel like Alice down the rabbit hole.
Yeah, ‘cause everyone knows alpha males tend to be libertarians and they love women who blog — especially at sites like Half Sigma. Sometimes you guys don’t think things through very well. 😉 And who do you think told me about 10-sided dice?
Whoops. I remember you talking about how your ideal guy would have been a liberal Catholic journalist, but you settled for a Republican.
SFG, if not for your admonishments, you’re the type of guy I’d have proffered as a role model.
I’m a lousy role model. Let’s just leave it at that.
Here I am, finally, having struggled to achieve a position where my kid could do smart-people stuff and not get his ass kicked for it. Now I find out that may not be good enough. I grew up thinking that too much interest in sports was the path to loserdom, but outside Loserworld that’s completely wrong.
I think it depends on what class you’re born into. If you’re middle class or lower, more nerdiness will keep you out of jail and get you into a reasonably good college. If you’re upper-middle-class or higher, you need charisma for BIGLAW or an investment bank. Each class has its own rules, and it especially confuses people trying to move from one class to another, because the traits that get you from class A to class B often keep you from getting from class B to class C. (This is intentional, BTW; one of the ways to establish your higher status is to differentiate yourself from the people below.)
I feel like Alice down the rabbit hole.
You know, that’s what I hate about the free market. First there are jobs in manufacturing. Then they send those overseas and we’re all supposed to be programmers. Then they send those overseas and we’re all supposed to be sales reps. WTF?
I was really hoping that at the very least outsourcing would take this libertarian disease out of nerddom, but the Half Sigma guys die hard. Read slashdot, though; the libertarians are way outnumbered by the liberals by now.
I grew up thinking that too much interest in sports was the path to loserdom, but outside Loserworld that’s completely wrong.
I think it depends on what class you’re born into.
I grew up with some boys whose fathers pushed them hard into sports, and it seemed as if one of two things would happen as each one got older: (a) he would be a devoted super-jock type, playing multiple sports in high school and possibly college; or (b) he would completely lose all interest in sports participation once he reached high school age. It’s quite possible that some of the boys in (b) ended up as nerds. If there’s a lesson in all this, it’s that pushing a boy into sports as a way of avoiding nerdiness is a risky venture. It’s probably a better strategy to ensure that you son is reasonably social and has well-adjusted friends. Easier said that done, of course. Parents of daughters have it better, needless to say, as nerdiness isn’t as big a deal with girls.
Incidentally, my father was a very good athlete in his younger days – captain of his college football team, tryouts with a couple of NFL teams – but never made any effort to push me into sports. When I tried out for my high school football team it was strictly my own choice and not due to any parental pressure. And, as I’ve related elsewhere, that was a total disaster, as I had to quit practices after less than two weeks because I was so woefully out of shape. Scarcely a day goes by that I don’t wonder how my life would’ve turned out differently had I been in good enough shape to have played sports in high school or college. Today I’m far more fit and well-conditioned, but as I’ve complained about, oh, ten thousand times or so, cartball-mania has killed off almost all adult participant sports activities.
He’s probably got the right idea. I was responding to one of Hope’s posts about feeling wonder while reading LOTR and was thinking, if she has any boys they are going to get beat up a lot. That’s all. It’s pretty reasonable to assume my dissatisfaction with my life is leading me to give advice that swings too far in the opposite direction.
Which is why I said I was a lousy role model. I just came around to finish the song for you 😉
I was really hoping that at the very least outsourcing would take this libertarian disease out of nerddom, but the Half Sigma guys die hard. Read slashdot, though; the libertarians are way outnumbered by the liberals by now.
Yeah, I think nerds used to see themselves as the next great entreprenuer, master of the universe fighting the mediocre minds that would hobble him through tax and regulation… and now see themselves as the next unemployed bum, loser outsourced by evil greedy rich people.
Outsourcing may not yet have reached the point at which it’s a serious threat to the stereotypical nerd lifestyle. The last I heard, maybe a year ago, only about 2% of job losses in the United States were attributable to outsourcing. And it’s a reasonable assumption that many of those lost jobs were lower-skill ones like those in call centers rather than the high-level IT jobs that nerds hold.
I personally don’t think that the outsourcing threat for IT is even close to manufacturing, but time will tell. What’s iumportant, though, is that nerds see it as a threat.
Hard to tell. It’s likely to hit real Asperger’s a lot harder than just run-of-the-mill nerds, who can usually hold down one of the local IT jobs that are slightly harder to outsource (someone has to be there at your local office to plug the machines in, install the software, and move the cables around when necessary). But, yeah, if it kills technolibertarianism, that’s another attack on America’s worship of unrestrained capitalism, and I’m all for that. The sooner people figure out Big Business ain’t their friend, the better.