The other day I was doing some research on the Internet – and by “research” I mean I was trolling through Wikipedia’s approximately 2.3 quadrillion articles while waiting for my fantasy football stats to refresh – and I learned that the
series of large numbers that comes after trillion is quadrillion. I also learned that Kevin Federline, one-time back-up dancer and current husband of Britney Spears, is older than I am.
I’m not making that up. He turned 28 in March, and I turn 28 in November. That’s about as similar as we get, if you ignore the fact that I’m thinking about K-Fed RIGHT NOW, and he’s probably thinking about K-Fed right now as well. See, his image is different than mine. He has a scruffy beard, colossal diamond earrings, a hat turned sideways with a brim as straight as an ironing board, and an incessant compulsion to tug at his crotch as if he were suddenly afraid a Mickey Mouse Club reunion was about to take place in his
extra-baggy jeans.
Reading about K-Fed got me thinking about image and how people “perceive” others merely by looking at them and judging them solely by their dorkiness. And by “them” I mean me.
I thought about it for a few days, and at first I wasn’t so sure I needed an image makeover. I looked at the fashionable SKETCHERS shoes and Structure jeans that my wife bought me, and the Quiksilver sweater my mother gave me as a
back-to-school gift, and I said, “You don’t need to change your image because your image is fine.” Then the lady next to me on the bus said, “Shut up, freak,” and hit me with her book.
So I decided to at least look into what it would take to give the ol’ image a tweak.
At least I have hope. Federline turned his image around at about my same age and now he has his own MySpace account where you can listen
to his song “Americas Most Hated.” And see, because he has this image, nobody cares
that he forgot to put an apostrophe in the
song title!
So here’s my five-point plan in remaking myself so I can get my own MySpace page. And, really, it has absolutely nothing to do with the gray hair encroaching on my head like a raiding army, scaring the little brown civilian hairs into retreating from such small towns as Widow’s Peak, Noggin.
Step One: Get a nickname. Federline is K-Fed. Jennifer Lopez is J-Lo. Alex Trebek is Canadian. I’m going to be M-Tif. I wanted to see how this would work out, so I spent a day at the Emerald office answering the phone. Here is a sample call:
Me: Thank you for calling the Oregon Daily Emerald, M-Tif speaking, how may I be of assistance?
Caller: I’d like to place a classified ad.
Me: Um, OK, you’ll have to talk to the ad department, but I’m going to have to transfer you over there. And I’ve, uh… hold on. (Aside to my editor: Have you ever transferred a call before? You haven’t? How the heck did you get to be editor then?) Ma’am, are you there? Yeah, I’m going to try and transfer you to the ad department, but, ha ha, I’ve never, you know, transferred a call before, so I might accidentally kinda hang up on you. Uh, so I apologize in advance if I do.
Step Two: Gather an entourage. I’ll be having auditions in the residence halls tomorrow at 10 p.m. Ideal candidates have at least three years’ experience as members of someone’s crew, dress almost as well as I do and are proficient in Microsoft Office programs. Typing more than 40 wpm is a plus.
Step Three: Develop an alternate career that garners fame in case the budding career falters. OK, in addition to being a successful writer (I’m not making that
up), I need to do something else that will enable me to keep up the façade that convinces people that I’m not a poseur. Unlike singers who can act, actors who can sing, or football players who can perform armed robbery, I’m not really good at anything else. And, to be completely honest, I’m not the goodest at writing those thingies with letters and punkchuashion in them, so I may have to rethink this step.
Step Four: Write an infinite amount of rap lyrics (something is bound to come out sounding like platinum): My lyrics be blowin’ up like a Mars rocket / Stickin’ a plutonium hair pin in the light socket / Stop yo trippin’ kid, you ain’t the circuit breaker / I got two words if you step to me: meet your maker.
Step Five: Get a MySpace page. Argh! I tried everything! I typed MySpace into Google, but the only useful thing I could find was a Wikipedia article about it, and, to be honest, I was seduced by all those links, and before I knew it, I was reading about indeterminate growth, which refers to growth (especially in botany) that is not terminated, which is in contrast to determinate growth, which stops once a genetically pre-determined structure has completely formed. Guys like K-Fed have it so lucky: They get to be famous and have their own social networking site, where guys like me are stuck with a stupid biology lesson.
I guess I won’t be remaking my image after all. At least I figured out the lesson here: Stay away from Wikipedia until it has an article about M-Tif.
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