There’s too much acting-out going on.–Ed
It’s tough being who you really are.
Take Hollywood movie actors and actresses. You’d think they’d be happy making millions and being seen by millions. But no, they want to be rock-and-roll stars, too.
They can’t sing, they can’t play, they can’t write music? Details, details.
Look at Bill Gates. You’d think he’d be happy being the richest man in the world, but what does he do any chance he can get? He wants to act out, too. He isn’t exactly being led dragging and screaming to his Austin Powers routine.
If even the actors want to act out, and the Head Geek feels the same way, imagine how the little geeks feel.
Let’s face it, geeks don’t get good press. What movies do you find them in? “Revenge of the Nerds?”
So geeks feel real reason to act out. When they write geeky things like hardware reviews, a lot of them try not to sound like geeks. They’re rappers. Or pimps. Or professional wrestlers. Anything but geeks.
Seems to me these people are screaming, “Ignore all the damning evidence to the contrary! I’m cool, too!”
This reminds me of the old Monty Python skit about the chartered accountant who wanted to be a lion tamer.
I don’t know about you, but white boys trying to imitate gangstas looks like the same thing to me.
I’m beginning to suspect something even scarier. I’m beginning to think some of these folks aren’t imitating gangstas, but rather imitating some other white boy imitating a gangsta. At least get your imitations from the source!
Or we have those who must want to be pro wrestlers. Right now, the front page of one website currently has one webmaster responding to a few lines from another webmaster that could have at home in some wrestler’s TV interview. We get some more trash-talk, along with a promise to track the miscreant down at some computer show.
Can I sell tickets?
Role Models?
If you look at the preferred personas these people are adapting, there’s one common thread in all these professions: they’re usually if not entirely phonies.
I don’t think this is the impression you want to give when you’re running a review site. It’s like Superfly trying to sell you a computer.
Besides, just what do you call a copy of a fake act? Or a copy of a copy of a fake act?
Mass-Produced Coolness
Do you know what being truly cool is? Being an original just by being yourself.
Take two bands. One band is the original. The other band copies the first band. Would you ever, ever say the copy was as cool or cooler than the first?
It’s a lot harder being an original than a copy. So people who can’t be originals think that if they just copy all the external features of cool people, they’ll become cool, too.
Nope. You’ve just become a shallow human photocopy, another victim of the X(erox)-Files.
Now all the other shallow human photocopies around you will probably form a mutual photocopy admiration society, the Cookie Cutter Crew.
Coolness comes from within, and nowhere else. Sure, you can pick and choose certain traits from others and make them part of yourself, but make that a original combination, not an exact duplicate.
It’s tough not to be a Xerox. It won’t win you any popularity contests, especially when you’re young.
But what’s better, to be a copy, or be the one others copy?
There was somebody I knew a long time ago whom even the geekiest of geeks would call beyond the pale.
But do you know what? He was happy being what he was, and never gave a thought about being anything other than what he was. He was so uncool, he was cool. He was real, in the real sense of the word, and that was truly cool.
Be the first to comment