So I&#039ve been thinking about being famous. There are lots of ways to be famous, and I don&#039t want most any of them. Btw, before y&#039all get started on this rant, it&#039s really long, so maybe you should go get a snack or take a nap or shoot up some heroin before continuing and numbing yourself to my mindless drivvel. Just a warning.

You couldn&#039t make me president of the country if you black-mailed/paid me billions/forced me with a cattle prod and a ball-gag. There&#039s far too much mud-slinging, too much pressure, and fuck, what do I know about politics anyway? I&#039m not even voting in this election because I don&#039t know anything about the candidates other than their names. I&#039m not even sure I could give you an accurate description of what any of them look like let alone what they stand for. Being the president or high-ranking politician seems to require far too much pain and suffering while trying to help people, and all this pain and suffering is televised 24/7/365 whether you want it to be or not. No, no being president for Erin. There are prices to fame and success, and there&#039s just no way I&#039d take that route…ever.

There&#039s no way I&#039d want to be an actor either. One, while I&#039m really skilled at pretending I&#039m a normal, happy human worm baby for the masses, I&#039m not good enough to want to have this skill warped on TV or the big screen for more people than my friends and family to see. There are also lots of physical problems I would have with acting such as the fact that I&#039m overweight, my teeth are crooked, and I have a dent in my forehead. I also think that I&#039m boring. I&#039m sure I&#039ve probably already lost one or two of the three or four who come here either through my long sentences or inane prattling without having yet come to a point. See what I mean? Acting/singing/playing an instrument/anything that involves performance in front of a live studio audience is right out. Besides, it&#039s weird enough being the sexual fantasy of some of my friends; I can&#039t imagine how weird it&#039d be to have teenage boys photoshopping my head onto porn stars&#039 bodies so they can jerk off to it and where my family can find it on-line. Silver or golden screen, it ain&#039t for me.

So I spend some time looking at what it means to be famous and decide, &#034Hey, I don&#039t want to be famous. I just want to do something I like, be with the poeple I love, and life will be just fine. Most people aren&#039t famous, so why would I feel like I have to be?&#034 And right about here is when my rational though processes shut down and I have to seriously consider this whole &#034to be famous or not to be famous&#034 stuff. There&#039s only so much of my life that I can easily explain away, trying to make the things I do seem less like a cry for recognition and more like the hobbies they actually are. Since my self-esteem and its constant impersonation as a roller coaster ride are tied in with this, I&#039ll try to take it into consideration as I explicate my desire for some degree of stardom.

Let&#039s start with art. I&#039ve always loved drawing, but I&#039ve never considered myself all that good at it. I can&#039t draw things that look realistic, and everything I draw comes out looking very abstract and cartoonish (i.e., dumb). I would enter art contests or take extra art classes, but all for naught &#039cause I never won anything (unlike the husband who has won for his tremendously cool artwork), and I never seemed to get much better in my pursuit of realistic-looking artwork. So I gave up on being an artist until recently when my meager art skills have been the main focus of the project that Macheak and I are working on for the presentation in Indy. In just two weeks, my artwork is going to be presented to dozens of foreign language high school teachers from all over the state. It&#039s going to be made public, more public than just being passed around the LLL department and being giggled over by my friends. Macheak and I are talking about making this into a book of worksheets and transparencies after the presentation is over and I get the chance to create more comics for the rest of the sounds. For years I&#039ve been thinking that all my doodling and begging the husband to help me learn to draw better has been wasted, but now, the possibility of having my art become useful is almost an imminent reality. How scary is that? And a book, even, with my name on the cover! It just leads into the next stage of my desire for recognition: my writing.

I&#039ve been writing poetry (badly) since the third grade, and I&#039ve been writing decent poetry since starting college. I have some poems up on the page, but I have over three hundred poems just lying around doing nothing because they&#039re either not very good (i.e., dumb depressed high school rants about breaking up with someone or wanting to kill myself) or they&#039re far too personal to me to put up (i.e., dealing with my grandmother&#039s death in 1995). I would submit my crappy poetry to contests, even getting an honorable mention here and there, but I never saw it as going anywhere. I wasn&#039t good enough, I wasn&#039t poetic enough, and what was the point of sharing my poetry anyway? It was for me, written to vent my emotions and to get a rabid ape-monkey off my back so I could survive through high school with emotional scars only, not physical ones. (The latter fade more easily, btw.) It wasn&#039t until I submitted poetry to the university&#039s creative writing magazine that I realized anyone would take notice. A few of my poems appeared on dorm room doors, and I began to realize that people actually do like my poems, and that little boost of confidence helped me to write more, write better, be more willing to get my poetry out there for people to see and hear. I&#039ve since done several poetry readings, and I&#039ve had lots of poeple tell me how much they love my work. Maybe my poetry&#039s not such a failure like I was in high school. It gives me hope for my other writing ventures, namely, my novels.

Yeah, I know that you&#039re all thinking (the one or two of you who are still reading, that is) that I haven&#039t added anything to my novel on-line recently, and to be honest, I haven&#039t added any new content to it off-line either, but school sure has that effect on my free time. The book series has been burning in my mind for years now, but the Solennelle series is just one of the latest series I&#039ve had in mind. I&#039ve been writing short stories since I was four or five, and when I was in middle school, I had enormous ideas for novels and series, and I would spend weeks just writing up the character&#039s backgrounds and appearances. I love to write (hence the copious amount of text you see before you), and my novels were what I always thought would make me famous, would make me known and recognized as a writer. I&#039ve secretly wanted to be a well-known author for well over a decade (going on a decade and a half, actually), but I&#039ve always believed that deep down, this could never happen. I&#039m not that good at writing, I&#039m not original enough, I&#039m not talented, blah blah; the usual runs through my head all the time, and so I tell people constantly that I write because I enjoy it (and I do) rather than I write because I really do want other people to read it. What&#039s the point of writing something down if no one&#039s ever going to read it? That&#039s one reason why I don&#039t tend to keep journals because I can just imagine my great-grandneice coming across a journal I kept in college reading about my sex life and about the silly dreams I have about doing something big with my life, and then imagining her laughing her ass off &#039cause that Great-great-aunt Erin sure was a silly old fart, wasn&#039t she? But my books really are important to me. It disappoints me when I think that they&#039ll never be read, which is a big reason why I&#039ve been putting them up for you all to read so that I can at least say that someone other than me has read them.

I am beginning to despair less that something I write will never be read. Though I am saddened to think that my book career may never take off, at least I have academics to fall back on. Here, at least, my creativity can run sort of rampant, and so long as I&#039m capable of doing the research, I&#039ll always have something to write about. Now it&#039s a matter of finding the time to do so… Macheak is always trying to keep me grounded by pointing out that there are a lot of steps between the idea &#034Hey! Let&#039s write a book about French metaphors and their categorization in their underlying forms!&#034 and the end product that scholars will read. The lastest project is French slurs, curse words, and insults, and while this is fascinating to only a scant few linguistic nuts out there, it&#039s more likely to get my name out and about than my novels, poetry, or artwork ever will. Here, at last, I may have found something that will make me feel like I haven&#039t been doing all this learning and studying and brainstorming for nothing beyond my own personal amusement. And while I have to admit that I like the idea of doing things for my own personal amusement, it also feels nice to share it with other people and have them appreciate my efforts as well.

See, this is where the self-esteem thing really kicks in more than the &#034I suck&#034 part ever did because if there&#039s one thing I know about being a middle child, it&#039s that you can&#039t ever seem to do anything first, and if you do end up doing it first, it&#039s just a cry for attention which makes you seem pretty selfish and childish regardless of the intent behind the action. I suppose I&#039m over-generalizing a lot, but I&#039ve heard more times than I want to count from the husband that my desire for recognition sounds an awful lot like middle-child-syndrome and that it&#039s not necessary that I be insanely awesome because everyone will love me anyway. Yeah, says the youngest. I figure that if I can&#039t want recognition simply because I want to prove that I have a brain and can do something with it that&#039s worthwhile, I may as well invoke the jealous-middle-child rights when I decide that I what I really want above and beyond doing what I enjoy is getting recognized for it. When I was a kid, my older sister used to have me play all the same games as her, do just about everything she did, and then she&#039d get annoyed when I copied her. Go figure, I think it&#039s an older sibling thing, but I have yet to prove it in an empirical study. So regardless of whether or not I actually did something better than the big sis, I always felt like I was playing second fiddle simply because she had done it first. Who cares if I graduated with a higher GPA in high school? She graduated first and laid the way for me by having all the teachers first so they&#039d like me in turn (provided they liked her in the first place). So what if I graduated college before her? She was going to a Catholic school and actually was majoring in something that&#039s useful. Most people can&#039t think of anything to do with French besides make fun of it. She&#039s had kids first, she moved out on her own first, she even has a weblog that&#039s among the top ten on Blogspot. She&#039s already gained notoriety for her writing, so if I turn around and do the same thing but with a different scope, am I still copying her? I think that sometimes one of the biggest reasons why I don&#039t get any recognition for what I do is because what I do (i.e., study languages) is so bizarre and esoteric that no one knows what to say to me about it, so they just say nothing at all or they just smile an nod blankly when I do say what I&#039m up to.

So you can see that I have a lot of issues with being famous. Sometimes I really want to be well-known because I think that I&#039ve worked hard and deserve a little recognition for what I&#039ve done even if it is for drawing comics about French pronunciation or linguistic anomalies. Sometimes I don&#039t want recognition at all because I don&#039t want to be called a copy-cat or a middle-child searching for recognition for all the wrong reasons even if my work is worth reading for its own merit. I don&#039t know. I really don&#039t. There&#039s no easy answer to this, and believe me, I&#039ve tried hard for the past fifteen years or so trying to find one to justify my desire for this recognition. I&#039d hate to think that I&#039m shallow or something, but what other explanation is there? It could be my self-esteem kicking in, forcing me to at least try to do something big if only to prove to myself that I&#039m not good enough when it doesn&#039t pan out. <Shrug> Hell, I don&#039t know. Right now I should be working on something much less grand such as grading papers, washing dishes, or writing lesson plans. Not much fame to be garnered there. Not much fame to be garnered whining about it on an on-line journal either, but, well, here you go. Sorry for being boring.

Posted: October 24, 2004 at half past noon.