On Thursday, a new reality show premieres on TBS, and it fills me with worry.

I am worried about the consequences for the nerd-adjacent geek subcultures, which are, as you might have gathered, near and dear to my heart.

While the distinctions between “nerd” and “geek” can be blurry from the outside, there are important distinctions. These are not important for understanding my concerns, in fact, the tendency for people to confuse the two is at the root of my anxiety.

Back to the show. It’s called “The King of the Nerds,” and sets a group of self-identified nerd types against each other to compete for this title, which, I’m not certain is an honor.

The contestants seem to fit the worst notions of nerd-kind. They are socially awkward and interested in obscure and easily ridiculed hobbies.

Like the not-so-real housewives, or the unfortunate Boo Boo, this show’s entire premise is built around the audience feeling superior to the collection of oddities parading in front of them, like caged creatures at the zoo. This attitude sustains the images of the geek (or nerd) as circus sideshow act, biting heads off of live chickens or displaying atypical anatomical characteristics. It’s time to bury those connotations.

Sure, I like to gawk at car crashes as much as the next person, but, I am far too committed to the cause of geek-rights to see this contest as a positive step for geek/non-geek relations.

There have been great strides over the last few years. Superhero movies have become decidedly mainstream, as have vampires and hobbits. This thawing of cold-war hostilities between the once constantly ridiculed fans of board games, or comic books, or fantasy and science fiction has made me feel hope that one day, all the geek flavors will be able to live in harmony not just with each other, but, with the people whose pastimes and affinities don’t earn them so much as a raised eyebrow when mentioned in public places.

This new show looks to be a one-way ticket back to the bad old days when the geeks and the nerds suffered for their unorthodox affinities. With each promo, the nerds of the competition are profiled, and my heart hurts for these people who seem unaware of how awkward they appear, or how the show is playing that for laughs.

In addition to the title, there is a cash prize of $100,000.  Is that worth trading your dignity and the rising acceptance of nerd-kind in the wider world?  Shouldn’t we demand more from those with whom we share a common bond of odd hobbies and public humiliation? Shouldn’t we expect each other to have our collective backs, and not try and compete amongst ourselves?

Is this a bad time for me to point out that winning a contest with such a small nerd sampling hardly qualifies the winner as King (or possibly Queen) of anything? For the title to mean anything, it should be much more rigorous than that. Will the non-contestant nerds acknowledge the title as valid?  Does pointing out these flaws move me from the ranks of geek to the crowds of nerds?

It’s probably a bad sign that I’m really starting to be tempted by that $100,000 prize.  And with only 11 contestants, the odds are pretty good.

I really need to stop thinking about this.

I don’t know about you, but now that the holidays are over, I’m suffering from a bit of post-apocalypse letdown.

Once the initial disappointment faded, I was seized with the realization that I no longer had the end of the world to blame for my failure to get my Christmas shopping completed. The blinding panic of trying to get everything done in a few short days  meant I was suitably distracted from the weight of the soul-crushing calamity of the continuation of the status-quo.

After the flurry of last-minute shopping and task completion stopped, it was the holiday itself. Work was forgotten, and I settled in for a few days of navigating the nuances of family dynamics, and the overly stimulating cacophony of sugar, expectations (some exceeded, others falling short), and underwhelming nostalgia.

And then, I didn’t quite know what to do with myself, and the enormity of the sad continuation of the world fell onto my all-too-squishy head.

I had planned to be happily occupied with re-building society, or securing sources of food and water, and suddenly my schedule was free of patrolling and food collection duties. It was strange and confusing, and required me to completely shift focus.

It is much harder to prioritize your daily tasks when you aren’t starving or freezing from the standard end-of-the world utility loss.

I contemplated the notion of putting together a to-do list for my time away from the office. I am an inveterate creator of lists. My lists have lists. I once listed myself on an informal list of those most likely to make a list, and then made a list of all the rich and famous people who made lists, and wondered if I’d ever be able to put myself on that list.

Legitimately on the list that is. I could easily cheat, and on write my name on there, but, it loses some appeal as a list if it’s not authentic.

While I was contemplating the listing of lists, I sorta dozed off. When I woke in surprise, I sheepishly decided to put “take a nap” on my to-do list.

The to-do list got very long, which is pretty typical for me. I just stared at it. The words looked something like hieroglyphics, and upon reviewing it, they conveyed no meaning to my brain.

Ironically, later, I realized one of the items on the list was “learn hieroglyphics.”

Admittedly, I didn’t get very far on that list. As soon as work started again, I pulled out the list. It no longer looked like the walls of an Egyptian tomb, but it led me to an attack of panic again. It was clear that I was in exactly the same predicament as I was following the failed apocalypse. I was without an excuse for falling painfully, woefully, behind.

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For the single person, New Year’s is the second most depressing holiday. The first, of course is Valentine’s Day, which is old news..

There’s much anticipation about having a kiss at midnight, to welcome in the New Year. I suspect that the champagne bottle is not an acceptable choice. It saddens me, because he’s always available, and looks good in black.

There’s also the part about midnight that’s daunting. You mean, I have to stay up until 12:00? They still have one of those in the middle of the night? Don’t they know I have to get up really early?

It seems like a young person’s idea of a perfect holiday, get dressed up, eat a bunch of almost-food that they will not have to worry about giving them any sort of digestive distress, drink until the lampshade looks like a hat, get sentimentally smoochie at midnight, which is still early, and then make a bunch of noise, light firecrackers, and then sleep the day away.

I vaguely remember the appeal of that.

Now, I’m thinking staying out of the cold, wearing my cozy pajamas, and going to bed at a reasonable hour sounds really nice. Having an array of special, festive snacky things might be okay, too. I could watch a movie. Aside from “special, festive” food choices, this is starting to sound like any Friday night.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I don’t snack too much on Friday nights, festive foods or not. Movies are not typical, either, unless you count having it on in the background while I stare at the computer. Yeah, me neither.

Maybe, I could go to bed at the usual time, and set an alarm for midnight so I can kiss the champagne bottle, and then, roll over and go back to sleep. That might work. I do get to sleep in the next day, after all.

It’s possible I’m getting too old for that, and it wouldn’t do to get stuck doing that again this year. I should mix it up a bit. Maybe find some other beverage to kiss, like maybe some diet soda. Fewer calories, and still bubbly. Cheaper, too. Certainly, something to consider.

Maybe I should be sociable. I could have some friends over, we could break out some board games. Sure, most of them have kids who they have to put in bed before midnight. That’s not a problem, we could have a sleep over! The kids can have sleeping bags in the office, and the parents can crash in my living room, and we’ll all bring in the New Year together!

Nope, not at all pathetic.

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I’m sure you’ve heard — the world is ending this week. Frankly, I am thrilled.

I really think that I’ll be awesome in the apocalypse, and should I survive the initial hulabaloo, I’d like you to consider this my application to be a key member of your spunky band of survivors.

Firstly, I have been carefully studying all sorts of end of the world scenarios since I was a small child. If this end date has to do with North Korean dictator and sexiest man alive Kim Jong Un sending an invasion force to Colorado, I’ve got tons of guerilla tactics memorized, and I will be a much better leader than either Patrick Swayze or Chris Hemsworth, even if they are both much prettier than me, because, frankly, I’ll have better writing.

If North Korea somehow launches a nuclear weapon, and the target is not Colorado, I have a coded book of contingency plans that I’ve hidden in a secure location, not to be casually revealed in this column.

Once chaos has been established, no one’s going to be particularly concerned with earning money or trying to collect it from me. That means survival becomes the primary occupation of whomever is remaining, and only those who are useful and good at lifting the spirits of those who have endured unspeakable horrors with amusing anecdotes will have a place. I can do both of those things.

Since it’s winter, I’ll start by recommending stockpiling of canned goods, while we build some greenhouses, secure sources of water, and create a strong, defensible fort, possibly at an abandoned prison site. I’ve started to learn archery and setting game traps through repeated screenings of “The Hunger Games,” so, the odds are likely to be ever in our favor. With secure living quarters and food supply, we’re going to be in good shape, and then it’ll be time  to put me in charge of everything.

Frankly, I have my sights set on being a benevolent, beloved, charismatic leader, who avoids the pitfalls of dictatorship by working along side the other survivors, developing a consensus of kindness and noble ideals to build our new utopia. If you think for one moment that the notion of a “kinder, gentler apocalypse” is ridiculous, naive, and laughter-inducing, well, let me tell you that outhouses are going to be needed, and I will tell you right now what job you chuckleheads are likely to be assigned.

That’s probably unfair. It’s awfully capricious of me to write something funny and then assign people who laughed to latrine duty. People who laugh at my jokes deserve better.

I don’t want to brag, but, I am excellent at assessing situations, seeing implications and making fair and sensible decisions. Did you see how I instantly  realized it’d be unfair to punish people for laughing at my jokes?  I mean, if I’m trying to win friends and influence survivors, I’ve got to be better at building alliances than that. I really want to be careful and not ruin anyone’s end of the world. After all, we’ve got to be able to work together to build a better, brighter world. Unless, of course, the end is actually an end. In that case, I’m not available.

Among the pitfalls of the holiday season is the waves of nostalgia that can come unexpectedly. They can be conjured from any Christmas of the past, whether or not these eras were personally experienced.  These little ghosts of Christmas past bring all sorts of baggage when they visit and they have a tendency to overstay their welcome. I had a few of these guys show up this week, and let me tell you, none of them brought presents I wanted to keep.

One of them was assigned to bring me oddly-timed Melancholia. He was from a time when the various maladies had quaint and curious names, like “Consumption” and “Vapors.” His arrival was triggered by a lovely compliment, and no one expects to wander into a tidal wave of tears because of a happy comment, but somehow, this Christmas past managed that feat.

I had no sooner kicked this unwelcome guest to the curb, then his younger brother showed up, reminding me that Christmas is really all about children, and seeing their faces light up with wonder and joy at the magic all around them.

This punk would’ve made fun of anyone who uses the term “Melancholia,” and yet, his little visit had much the same effect on me. You can imagine, I guess, what I think about spending another Christmas without kids.

The good news is that for these low-level battles with general sadness, I have a simple cure. I go to the nearest office supply place.

Weird, I know. You should no longer be surprised by the depths of the oddity that is me.

There’s just something about wandering around the shelves of unblemished paper, and the boxes of beautiful writing tools, and all the useful items for organizing and putting things in order that soothes my soul. I don’t even have to buy anything, I can wander for a few minutes, and all the potential solutions for very basic problems fill me with hope, and “the gloomies,” (cousins to the vapors) disappear.

There were three visits to office supply stores in the past week, which tells you that embracing the more cheery spirit of the season has been challenging. Maybe these three ghosts have been sent to me as a warning. They want to prevent me from falling into the trap of countless television writers, who’ve unabashedly mined in the caverns of “A Christmas Carol” for seventeen decades when they needed a holiday-themed story for their shows.

That’s it, isn’t it?

Too bad for you all that it took me 400 words to figure out their cryptic message. I just hope that is the message, and that they don’t decide to come back and force me to see the death of Tiny Tim, or the heavy chains I forged in life, or some other weighty metaphor. I promise I will go about with a “Merry Christmas” on my lips until the end of the year. That should keep them off my back and out of my dreams until next year.

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If you’d like to get Flying Solo, (and just Flying Solo) on Sundays via e-mail,  you can Subscribe to Flying Solo 

This is the 52^nd consecutive week I have sent out a column. If you’re one of those people who recall that there are 52 weeks in a year, you might’ve whispered a shocked, “Already?” to no one in particular.

Unbeknownst to anyone who isn’t me, I picked this week, a year ago, since it happened to be the week before my 38^th birthday. I was determined to start this project while I was still 37 since Erma Bombeck was 37 when she first published her column, and I was determined to take advantage of that particularly obscure bit of numerology.

It probably would’ve been more auspicious if it were the 1960s, and newspapers weren’t dying.

In the dark recesses of my mind, when I paused to consider this ridiculous scheme, there were shadowy figures of people lurking in alleys and doorways laughing their posteriors off at me for even attempting to do this when the content of newspapers has shrunk to the size of a lengthy pamphlet.

I just assumed that was my over active imagination feeding me fear to prevent me from trying anything.

Papers these days are little more than a handful of AP newswire releases which most people have read on the internet days before it appeared in print.

I might’ve been aggressively optimistic about my chances.

To my credit, this was before the Denver Post got rid of pretty much all of their full time beat reporters.  It’s a very small credit, but, when I’m scraping my dignity off the bottom of the barrel, any little bit helps.

Within a few months, I’d more or less abandoned the idea that this was going to turn into a lucrative venture. No newspapers were beating down my door with even a whiff of casual interest, much less, waiting with merry bushels of cash.

While that fantasy faded, I switched tactics, and invited people who were not newspaper editors to join me. That has been a much more successful gambit, and in the spirit of Thanksgiving, which, should be allowed to gestate past 8:00 PM on the fourth Thursday of November, I am grateful for each of you. You’re the reason I made it to week 52.

I had wanted to make this column extra special. I’ve been pondering it for so long that when it got here, I no longer had any sense of what to do with it, and the pressure I built around commemorating this event turned into, well, nothing remotely remarkable.

Remarkable or not, I’m celebrating the milestone.  There have been many nights before this one, where the fantasy was just to give up, and I didn’t. Every time that I didn’t just give up is a result of seeing the image of a different crowd of people who were cheering me on, expecting to see an e-mail from me.  I will do my best to avoid disappointing those faces.

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Why Weird is Relative

Every family has its own Thanksgiving traditions. For some it’s a weird gelatin with hot dogs and cabbage in it. These are the dishes that are made exactly once a year, the ones that half the family hates, but, no one can imagine having Thanksgiving without it sitting on the table.

Ours is butterball and noodle soup, which is not at all weird.

Ok, maybe it is. But it’s our weird. We all prefer our own flavors of weird.

Butterball and noodle soup is one of those classic “leftover” meals our ancestors made to use every bit of the resources available on the farm. Dry bread, chicken stock, cream, butter and eggs. At one time, I suspect, (putting on my know-it-all hat to cover the fact that I’ve no actual evidence for these statements) my ancestors had this dish more than once a year, maybe even a couple of times a month!

Now we’re city folk, and the dish that came from things “on hand” is now a shopping trip, where we purchase bread to dry it, and we don’t know the cow(s) that provide the dairy, nor do we stick our hands under a chicken to get eggs. The noodles will also be purchased, not made.

The stock will be provided by the other star of Thanksgiving, the turkey.

All that’s left to do? Try and remember the recipe.

You see, like any good “family recipe” there are hundreds of variations. Most of them have the ingredients listed above. Some mention sweetened condensed milk (avoid those, you’ll thank me). Others, probably in a misguided attempt to “reduce the fat content,” substitute margarine and half and half for the butter and cream. WRONG. This is not just from a flavor standpoint. This is from a “do you want your butterballs to hold together, or do you want to eat watery mush?” perspective.

Getting the right ingredients is only part of the equation. They need to be prepared “just so.” If not, the butterballs will fall apart. And everyone knows (well, everyone who’s our flavor of weird knows) that the true test of any cook is: “Can you make butterballs that don’t fall apart?” The second test, is “Do the butterballs taste like Grandma Kathryn’s?”

Everyone agrees that my great-grandmother made it best. Her butterballs always stayed together and always tasted wonderful.

It has been 20 years since I was given the sacred duty of making the butterballs, a test of cookery and a rite of passage. It hardly mattered that I had never made them, or that I’d never tasted anything my great-grandmother had cooked, my mother was rumored to have therecipe.

Could I live up to my namesake?

My grandfather, who loved this soup but had struggled for decades to reclaim the food memory of eating the soup at grandma’s table, was so hopeful, he offered to make the breadcrumbs. No one remembered him ever doing that.

I was feeling the pressure.

After two days work, butterballs came out of the fridge and slid into the hot soup. When we sat down to eat, the balls were still intact, a hopeful sign. Grandpa took a bite, but held a poker face. Everyone watched him, not even breathing, waiting for his verdict.

“You done good, Katie,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye. And everyone set to eating it, and was thankful.

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Words Can’t Pay Our Debt

I’ve been thinking about what to say on this Veteran’s Day for a few weeks.  LikeMother’s Day, it’s a holiday requiring gratitude, humility and respect, hardly convenient for column comedy.

So why did I decide to make a Veterans Day the topic?

Naturally, I felt like I should say something, and I kept thinking of all the thoughts I had about veterans, and only one of them had the faintest whiff of having punch line potential. I kept telling myself that I could build on it, somehow turn it into something worth reading.

I didn’t want to just say the same old phrases, because, a) I hate sounding like someone else, b) it feels like lazy writing, and c) none of them conveyed all the things I wanted to say.

I thought about all the people I knew who had served in the military, of my relatives who spent time doing all manner of less-than-pleasant things so that the rest of us could do things like not vote, write a Facebook post about our dissatisfaction with lines at the DMV, or organize a protest against the consumption of shellfish.

Not one of those things comes without a cost, and we all owe much more than a few clichéd phrases to the ones who pay those prices for us. And before you decide to blame veterans for those long lines at the DMV, I want to be clear, they are not responsible for the length of the line.

Then I thought about the veterans that I wasn’t related to, and the first to pop into my brain were Sgt. Malcolm Reynolds and Cpl.  Zoe Alleyne, who fought with the Independents against the Alliance. The Firefly marathon today probably had nothing to do with this. Probably.

Anyway, when I thought of them, I recalled all of the soldiers who struggle to find a place in the world when the war is over. I thought of all those who came back with wounds that no one could see, and those who were unemployed or homeless after giving up so much on our behalf.

And I wondered how I could write about those sorts of things without being completely depressing. How could I possibly put them inside a column without them becoming trivialized as a set-up for a joke? And, worse, how do I have the audacity to spend a mere handful of words on these issues without sounding like a world-class hypocrite?

Setting aside the fact that part of me is tempted by the idea of finally becoming a world-class anything, the rest of me prevailed by telling that small part that we can do better than being known as a hypocrite.

I probably should’ve stuck with those well-worn phrases. Thank you, veterans. We owe you more than a day and words that fall short.

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