I’m a nerd of biblical proportions. I’ve suspected this for some time, but it became painfully apparent between November 16-19 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC—during the AAASS’s annual conference. The AAASS stands for the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. For four days, the Omni Shoreham’s conference rooms and hallways became a mini Nerdistan. My fellow Nerdistanis and I sat in panel discussions that discussed everything from “Building National Identity through Cultural Consumption: The Youth of Soviet and Post-Soviet Ukraine and Problems of Cultural Identification” to “Creating Autonomy in Contested Imperial Borderlands: Agency and Political Language among Cossacks, Crimean Tartars and North Caucasians, 1660-1860.” To some out there, these may seem like esoteric and abstract subjects, which, ostensibly, may be true, to some people at least. But what I want to know is who gets to decide what is abstract and what is mainstream.

Moreover, what is cool anyway? Coolness is such a relative thing. It often seems like that actively trying not to be cool is the new cool. We’re all nerds in our own way. Anyone who tries to tell you that they’re not a nerd, what they’re really saying that they don’t have any imperfections, which means there is a pretty good chance that they’re insufferably boring. Or maybe I’m just telling myself all this in a ham-fisted attempt to reconcile my own nerdiness. Nevertheless, to the kids at the lunch table who I used to make sarcastic remarks to while they played Dungeon and Dragons—sorry.