The Bathtub: Nerdish Leanings: The Balticon

When I was a lad, most of my friends ended up going on some sort of family vacation or another on a somewhat regular basis. These ranged from the usual (visiting cousins in Ohio, the state where your cousins live) to the extravagant (a week in Hawaii every summer, to make your friends resent you). My family made an annual pilgrimage to Baltimore. To go to the Balticon. A science fiction convention. With young, impressionable children in tow.

I learned a host of valuable lessons from these little vacations.

1. You Can Hold It a Little Longer
The drive is just about two hours from Wilmington to Baltimore, which is just about exactly how long a child can sit in a car without urinating, defecating, or vomiting. It's just not quite long enough to justify a stop along the way, unless there is actually excrement coming out of your body in the car.

2. Big Cities are Bad News
"Charm City" was a perfect illustration for my parents' bias against cities. I was instilled with a fear of large cities from a young age. I didn't understand this for a while, but apparently Wilmington, DE had a bit of a crime problem in the 80's and early 90's. I personally think it would have been easier if my folks had just said "Wilmington is a boring, crappy city. Don't bother going there." I would have agreed, never setting foot in downtown Wilmington and thus avoiding being victimized by criminals or law-enforcement agents. When your only exposure to big cities is to go into them once a year in order to watch a crackhead piss all over themselves, it's going to make you think twice about sneaking out and going to Philadelphia in high school.

This NSFW (at all, even a little bit) video is basically what I thought cities were like until I was, oh, about 21.

3. Nerds Have Boobs, Too

Here is a sampling from the Balticon 41 schedule.

Belly Dancing 101
The Technology of Orgasm
NSFW- Hot Aural Pleasure! Sex in Podcasting
How to Get Laid at a Science Fiction Convention
Romance, Love, Sex, and Erotica
Sexy Vampires

...and so on.

Now, I'm not going to say that the Balticon was some kind of perverted sex festival. It wasn't. I'm sure that if I'd come looking for cartoons and stumbled into some sort of tentacle porn anime film, I would have been politely shown the door. But the fact of the matter remains: there are thousands of sexually frustrated nerds milling around, and they have to get from their hotel room to the erotic costume competition somehow. You're going to see something.

4. Your Parents Could be More Embarrassing, After All
It turns out that there are not just certain individuals that are more embarrassing than your parents. There are social circles, communities, and entire subcultures that are far more mortifying than your parents could ever hope to be.

Of course, if my mom's plan for us to dress as a "Nuclear Family" hadn't been shouted down in the minivan, I might never have learned this lesson.

Justin Douglas writes "Nerdish Leanings" for The Bathtub on Monday afternoons. You can e-mail him at j.d.bathtub@gmail.com.