life as understood

For quite a while now, possibly my entire life, I've been trying to be awesome. I mean, most of us have. We know the actually awesome people are the ones that don't have to try, but that doesn't stop us. It just forces us to be sneakier -- to cover our tracks so it doesn't look like we're trying so hard.

Since among my generation, Facebook is the ultimate medium by which awesomeness is not only conveyed, but oftentimes created (and destroyed), I have naturally spent careful hours over the past years tweaking my Facebook profile in calculated efforts to elevate my own stature. The ultimate goal of this, of course, is that in the event of a time warp in which we're all transplanted back to high school, I'll have a greater immunity from dorkitude than I did the first time around.

The Facebook profiles of awesome people are often characterized by extreme terseness -- they don't say much. One might conclude that this technique lends an air of mysteriousness to the subject, which we all know is attractive. More importantly, and not unrelated, is that the technique of virtual anti-verbosity lends the impression that one spends little time on Facebook, which is, of course, the equivalent of "not trying." See how this works? In the Facebook realm, as in literature, economy of words equals awesomeness. Ergo, my own profile tweakings almost always take the form of trimming the fat.

Trimming the fat used to be easy to do on the sly. Every so often, I'd log on, delete an unnecessary line or two, and the casual viewer was none the wiser. Much to my dismay, however, I discovered yesterday that Facebook has changed things up. Now not only does it publish on my wall every tweak I make, but it has removed the "remove" option, which means each tweak now enters permanent public record as a damning testament to my repeated attempts at awesomeness augmentation, a heinous crime.

In the context of the "wistful" or "pensive period" that has defined my recent thoughts, yesterday's debilitating revelation seemed destined to cast me deeper into the stagnant tidepool of unawesomeness. Then something else happened which may prove to reverse my fortunes entirely: I watched that shining beacon of modern cinema, 1985's Teen Wolf.

In the film, young Scott Howard seeks fervently after awesomeness, and due to an unexplained genetic anomaly, not only does he find it, but in his words, it "lands on [his] face." After the happy event, the remainder of the film is an unabashed chronicling of his awesomeness, as sampled in the following clip: here it is in Spanish (this level of awesomeness requires no translation).

The lesson here is clear. If an awesomeness of this gut-wrenching magnitude is achievable for one who wanted it as publicly as did Scott Howard, it might be achievable even for me. Not that he hasn't set the bar high. Until I'm doing backflips on top of a moving truck that bears my likeness, I may never know whether or not I've arrived at a commensurate level of awesome. I also have the added disadvantage of being subject to logical transitions, a backstory, and a plot without holes, none of which burdened young Scott.

More importantly, the wistful period is over. It may have made for more vogue, publishable memoir, but heaven knows that's not awesome.