Since this is the official beginning of a new blog, I decided I should start with a little something about myself. As such, I will try to answer the question I hear most often: Why are you so awesome?
The simple answer would be: I just am. However, that sort of simplistic answer is typically reserved for the especially awesome like Prince (he just is), or Jessica Biel’s body (it just is), or pizzelles (they just are).
Let’s try to attack this scientifically, via the argument of nature vs. nurture. The nurture argument would imply that the environment of my upbringing would have created the awesomeness that is me, but I don’t know that this is true. I grew up in a typical suburban neighborhood in Weymouth, a suburb of Boston. And while the street I lived on was decently pleasant and shaped as a circle, which did make it great for games of chase and bike races, it was not particularly awesome per say. Despite my youthful desires to discover a secret pirate hideout in the surrounding woods or to strike oil in my backyard, these things that would have allowed my neighborhood to leap into the realm of awesome never happened.
Another factor of nurture would of course be my family, specifically my parents. Of course my parents are awesome…now. However that is a status that parents only tend to acquire as you yourself grow older. Growing up, they tend to be not awesome, as they are the ones telling you what you can and, more importantly, cannot do. For example, not allowing their son to see Slayer at the Orpheum because of bad grades in algebra. Decidedly not awesome. (And wrongheaded, as I haven’t used algebra in about 15 years, yet I still listen to Slayer; obviously it was not my priorities that were out of whack.) Add to this other factors like their insistence that I finish meals lest I forgo dessert, or my mother’s determination that my paper route earnings be doled out to me at her tight-fisted discretion, or my dad’s penchant for yelling at me—which was admittedly a “-some” of a kind: fearsome—I must conclude that my own awesomeness sprang from another source.
And then there is the nature theory: I was born this way. It’s certainly possible. This coincides with another debate however. That of evolution versus creationism (or intelligent design). We’ve ascertained that my parents are not responsible for my awesomeness, at least not fully. But perhaps they had an evolutional hand in matters. I can’t fully discount that years of fortuitous breeding may have led to each subsequent generation of my family tree becoming more and more awesome until I finally arrived on the scene. The pinnacle, the Kwisatz Haderach, the creme motherfucker. This is no more or less plausible than the idea that a supreme being decided that this was who I was meant to be. Perhaps I am, as Tucker “Smitty” brown said in This Is Spinal Tap, “just as god made me, sir.” This, however, would put me at odds with my inherent agnosticism. Also, while it would be hard to debate a supreme being’s impeccable taste in creating me, I would have a hard time resolving that with a self-same supreme being who is also creating those who like to shuck on a pair of dynamite underwear and go blow some people up.
It would seem like the answer to the question of my awesomeness is not an easy one. Or, is it? Maybe it really is as simple as:
I just am.
It's Blog. 