I forgot to mention the last time I wrote about awesomosity the very important issue of the correlation between awesomeness and hotness. Can you believe it? Researchers have been working for years to determine what exactly the connections are, with very little success, Iām sorry on a personal level to report. People, we must get to the bottom of this.
Okay, letās think about this. On the one hand you have awesomeness, which for me involves Dancing, Kindness, Making Stuff, Food, and Fun. Close your eyes and think about all the awesome people you know who do most or all of those things. Are you thinking? Are you scrolling through your mental address book? Did you remember to include your grandmother, if she is awesome? How about your best friend from third grade, awesome? Online friends definitely count, in case you were wondering, even if you have only met them the one time at the hotel bar at JournalCon in 2003. I certainly hope your mom is on that list, young lady. As well as your best friend from now.
Okay, so now you are thinking of all the awesome people in your life. Isnāt it nice to think about them all at once like that, as a big group, a big stratum of the world? Wouldnāt it be so great to have a big cookout with every single awesome person you know or formerly knew or donāt really know yet but would like to get to know better? You could have gardenburgers or blue cheese burgers with pickles or hot dogs or shrimp kabobs with pineapple bits and then maybe some Italian cheesecake with strawberries for dessert. And there would be music (remember, Dancing!) and places to sit in the shade and a lot of freshly-made lemonade and maybe some people would bring their kids and some people would bring their dogs and you could either wear the new skirt you got on Saturday at twenty percent off if you are a person who likes to wear skirts, or maybe just some nice comfy pants that are broken in just right and look good with your cool red suede sneakers. Maybe someone will bring a guitar, to the cookout that consists of all the awesome people you know. Maybe someone will bring a kazoo. You better make sure to get a lot of ice because probably there would be a lot of people at this cookout. I hope itās sunny but not too sunny and that someone shows up with a croquet set or a pinata.
So. Now. Think about all the hot people at your cookout. I bet you can find something attractive and pretty, physically speaking, about every single person there, no exceptions, no matter what your own personal hotness barometer is. I bet your grandma has a well-turned ankle, and your mom has beautiful hazel eyes, and your best friend has gorgeous long curly hair and the best smile ever. Probably your friend from college has that cool calf dent from biking so much, and your friend from work with whom you snicker about all your other coworkers has the best dress sense you have ever seen. Thatās all fine and good, because I think that itās a truth universally acknowledged that awesome people are generally hot. How does it work? No one knows, but how happy for you that you have such hot, awesome friends.
But now, sadly, I must direct your attention to another, more sinister segment of the populationā¦one to be scrupulously avoided, in my experience. Iām referring to, of course, the Very Hot But Not Very Awesome. You know who these people are. That one guy at Home Depot yesterday who made a couple of keys for you because your car key finally gave up and totally broke off the plastic part for good, forcing you to hold it on to your keychain with a binder clipā¦whose stubble was just so and he had kind of a Gael Garcia Bernal thing happening if you could just look beyond his orange apron, which you totally can, because girrrrrrl. He was hot! But probably a jerk in real life. (Actually, I have no way of knowing this about this completely hypothetical key-maker Home Depot guyā¦and in fact I should say that he was lovely to me and smiled at me and everything and didnāt laugh too much about my attempt to salvage my key with office supplies. I was just mentioning him because I didnāt know how else to get him into this entry and I just wanted to think about that stubble again for a minute, which is weird, because normally I have a very strict no-facial-hair policy. I donāt know. Iām sorry, Hot Home Depot Key Maker Guy. You are awesome. I mean that.)
Okay, wait, what was I talking about? Yes. Okay, so hot people who are not awesome include, probably, many members of your eighth-grade class, that one cousin of yours, a lot of movie stars I bet, blond guys who wear a lot of Abercrombie and Fitch, and the wristband-wearing hipster at the independent movie theater who sneers at your shoes. I have noticed that there are some people who are just sort of preternaturally hot, you know, like their hotness has been measured with scientifically calibrated instruments and whether you like it or not, itās empirically proven that they are hot. I sort of feel this way about Jude Lawā¦his hotness just is, regardless of what I think about it. I think this is sort of unfair and not nearly as fun as the abovementioned hotness that combines awesomeness in your friends.
These people, I have found, are actually rather easy to spot and avoid because there really is something so intimidating about empirically hot people. All you have to do is cross to the other side of the street and probably they wonāt be too mean to you and wonāt let their non-awesomeness rub off on you at all. Thatās simple. Whatās hard is the reverseā¦people who are awesome and who have attractive aspects to their physical beings but for some reason areā¦justā¦notā¦hot.
I think I personally have fallen into this category for much of my short life, though I am pleased to report that for some reason, lately I have been believing in my own (possibly completely imaginary, but whatever) hotness. So I know the sting, trust me. Is it worse to \\be\\ that person, the awesome-but-somehow-not-hot, or to have to somehow deal with being liked by that person, where thereās no reason why you shouldnāt be attracted. You all know who Iām talking about, right? That one guy you went to college with who was the sweetest guy ever and he had a cute smile and nice eyes and you had a lot in common and he was very nice about taking you to the airport when you needed it and had good taste in music and listened thoughtfully to what you saidā¦see, see all these markers of Awesomeā¦and he kind of liked you and you kind of knew it and there was nothing you could do to make him register as hot in your brain, and it was awful and you hated yourself but there was nothing you could do. I guess it sort of stands to reason that since not all hot people are awesome, then not all awesome people are hot, but it still sucks.
What I need here is a good Venn diagram that can illustrate in a clear fashion just what the overlap between hotness and awesomeness are. I feel like there should be some unifying theory of some sort. Tell you whatā¦Iāll go to Chicago this weekend and do some research on some extremely amazing people who are both very hot and very awesomeā¦one of them, one of the ones who doesnāt have a journal, is so awesome that even though we have never met, she is picking me up at the airport tomorrow morning at **5:30** a.m. Anyway, I will spend some quality observational time with these women, and you go out this weekend and do the same with your hot and awesome friends, and weāll put all our data together and see what we find out, okay?