Saturday, April 16, 2011

Celebrate...not celibate. It's an important distinction.


I never wanted to be a celebrity.

Which isn’t to say I don’t want to be celebrated...who doesn’t want to be celebrated?


Obviously, I don’t mind love and admiration from others. I appreciate praise, even, theoretically, unending praise from scores of anonymous admirers. And, yes, I want lines of people, some of whom I know and some of whom I’d never met, to spend their time thinking about me, how fabulous I am, and how they could better emanate the awesomeness that is my very essence. And this admiration could, naturally, escalate, leading to expensive lines of highly-sought personalized perfumes with scents inspired by my person with names like “fabulous,” “awesometastic,” and “Donegalrific.”


And if every once in a while someone wanted to take my picture or ask for my autograph, I guess I wouldn’t mind that, too.

Does this make me a shallow, self-centred person, not unlike every wide-eyed, empty-souled teenager who has sought the fame and infamy in every venue imaginable, by every means imaginable, at the cost of anything and everything society holds dear?


...Yes, yes it does. Because I am not perfect.


Luckily for me, and for the world, my fantasies of celebrity are kept in check by the fact that there can only be one David Sedaris or Angelina Jolie.


(And if you don’t know who the amazingtastic memoir-writer David Sedaris is, you must correct this blasphemous crime against your person this very second. He is amazing.)


Like most other people will mild fantasies of mass-adoration, I’m simply not cut out for the job. I’m not horribly deformed or otherwise fun to stare at, and I don’t have any amazing talents worthy of exploiting. I’m mostly just normalish; sure, I'm unique and special, but in a way that’s not entirely unlike everybody else.


Which is why, instead of throngs of adoring fans, I have one. Maybe three. But I know about one. His is named Jesse. And I’ve never met him. And he goes to school in Waterloo, where he studies math, or physics, or something equally sciencey. This is all I know.


And to my fan, I wish you nothing but happy things, and I hope you may continue to bask in the radiance of my self-absorption for many months to come.

=)