[Nick Zwar]

It’s impressive that you’ve gone through your life without any disparaging remarks from others, Nick. Especially since you’re my age (a bit older, if memory serves) and was around when it was pretty much customary to look down on nerd interests — let’s say before the mid 2000s — especially, and including, film music. How does that happen?

That’s an interesting question, and, despite being oder than you are, I have not really pondered much yet.

When I’m asked in social gatherings where I’m from, I’m sometimes hesitant to reply, not because of coyness, but because I genuinely don’t quite know how to reply. One of my “standard” replies I resort to is that “I went through two kindergartens, three elementary schools, and four high schools”, so I let the others pick which one of these I should resort to as a reply.

But one thing happens, when you’re always the new kid on the block: you learn, with each new environment, how to be the new cool kid on the block, and so, with each new environment, I learned how to adapt and by the time I was actually becoming seriously interested in music and subjects like that mattered, I belonged to the more cool crowd and my nerd interests were not something to be ostracized but embraced. I don’t know, but maybe that’s what it was. I have never given this much thought, (but I’m currently in a period in my life where I give such things some thought… which is also why I could reflect at length about the AVATAR movies). I could also be quite aggressive intellectually and wasn’t afraid to attack, so I circumvented the “nerd ostracism” with well placed pre-emptive strikes against certain “other” schoolmates, by dishing out remarks against the “mainstream listeners” such as “you guys chase trends. I chase greatness. Beethoven doesn’t go out of style.” It was a pre-emptive defense of sort maybe, but I really said things like that, and I thought and felt I was right, so I said it with conviction. And it worked. Nobody picked on me for my music taste.