The Gen-X Mensa group was meeting for dinner tonight, but I missed a change in the street address (Cleveland Avenue South instead of North). Consequently, I showed up at the restaurant a couple minutes late to find a pretty large group already sitting around the table.
“Shawn, we were just talking about you.” Normally, hearing that sentence would be a prelude to bad news—you’ve been fired, your parents found your stash of [insert illicit item(s) here], you’re the father. In this case, it was about Beauty and the Geek.
I’m not sure how I feel about the attention. Okay, that’s a lie—I enjoy the attention. (Part of the reason I ended up on the show in the first place was because I was on the outskirts of attention unless “we were just talking about you.”) I think it’s just because I’m unsure about the aftermath. Or the during-math, for that matter.
Garnering so much attention from others is like getting a massive dose of endorphins—SUPER EGO BOOST! (Technically, the endorphins create happy feelings more than anything else, but so do handjobs… hoo boy. Take that analogy in as many directions as far as they can go and you won’t be able to sleep tonight. Well, maybe the endorph—NEVER MIND!)
But my point was about SUPER EGO BOOST! I’m special, I’m important, yee-haw! And soon the show will play on the air. Will these happy feelings stick around or will my ego shrivel up like a prune? Will I still be pumped up or will it feel like someone slashed my emotional tires? What will “Shawn, we were just talking about you” mean? Just to be save, I better go hide my stash somewhere else…
