MikeyOpp.com

When I was a child, I wanted to grow up so that I could become famous. I thought that being famous was synonymous with being loved, and that to be loved meant guaranteed happiness. A lot has changed since then. Nowadays, when I pick up a newspaper, or see a Weblink that advertises a celebrity’s private life, I cringe with embarrassment at the fact that I actually once wanted to have that lifestyle. I think that some of the least happy people I see on a regular basis are the smiling faces of today’s celebrities. From Anna Nicole Smith to Paris Hilton, whenever I see a photograph of celebrity with a caption or headline about something that is none of my business, I feel sorry for these people, because I see poorly crafted masking smiles that fail to conceal obvious pain and misery.

When I was an adolescent, I wanted to grow up so that I could be wealthy. I thought that being wealthy was synonymous with being free, and that to be free meant guaranteed happiness. Every time I read an article about another wealthy person who has died from a drug overdose, alone, and without love in their lives, or about a wealthy person who has reenlisted in a drug rehabilitation program to ‘treat’ their addiction, I cringe at the fact that I once thought that an obscene amount of money would solve all of my woes.

I’m not stupid, however. I do realize that with celebrity status does come some extremely unique and enticing options to add to your life, just as I realize that wealth can be used as a tool to expand your free time and can bring you opportunities that only money can buy. But sometimes, it seems, too much free time and too much power can lead to bad habits and a wasted life.

“I love being the highest-paid player in the game. It’s pretty cool. I like making that money. You get crushed, but you know what? It’s pretty cool. I enjoy it. I was poor and broke when I grew up. I didn’t have that type of money to help out children. Now I get a chance to help out children. Whatever you say is important. People listen to you. That’s pretty cool. Nobody used to listen to me before.” These words were spoken on February 19th, 2008, by the highest paid player in the history of Major League Baseball, Alex Rodriguez of a certain nameless American League team that plays in the Bronx. Alex, or “A-Rod” as his fans like to call him, signed a ten-year contract for $252 million dollars in 2001, which remains to this date the ‘richest contract in the history of all sports.’ More often than not, when I see an interview with A-Rod, he doesn’t look too happy, and I think this testifies to the theory that no amount of money guarantees you happiness. But I think that A-Rod is right when he says that when you are rich “people listen to you.”

Why do people listen to celebrities? Why on Earth do we care what Barbara Walters or Wolf Blitzer thinks about current events? Why do we trust Larry King to interview people, and why do we even want to watch an interview with most of the guests that Larry King invites on his celebrity interview talk show? Some of the highest ratings are currently going towards celebrity-based TV programs in America. American Idol gives a lot of people the ‘lucky’ chance of winning a game show where the grand prize is…fame. People actually tune in on a weekly basis to watch celebrities cook, ice skate, dance, and wax intellectual on non-intellectual subjects. What possesses us to further accolade and heed attention to people who are famous for being famous, like Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole Smith, or Cato Caitlin? What is it about prestige and power that attracts us to celebrities? I have read several accounts from people who met or knew Bill Clinton that concur that when someone meets a man like Bill Clinton in person, no matter what they’ve thought about him or said about him in the past, they walk away feeling awed, a bit inferior and charmed and enamored with his natural charisma. And these are accounts from men who met Mr. Clinton, not just women with bad haircuts, hooked noses, or stains on their dress.

Hi, My name is Mike Oppenheim, and I have been writing this column for exactly one year now. You may be wondering what the hell this has to do with celebrity status, power, and prestige. Well, it doesn’t really, except that due to this semi-ominous personal milestone, I can’t stop thinking about why I force myself to write to an audience of 400 something readers, every week, even if I have nothing to say at all. If I don’t respect people who talk for the sake of talking, then how can I respect myself when I often write for the sake of writing? And furthermore, isn’t there something kind of celebrity-esque and narcissistic about writing a column every week? Especially when most of my readers rarely, if ever, respond to my weekly efforts and actually engage with me in an open dialogue? Come to think of it, writing a weekly column is less like being a celebrity and more like masturbation. I usually do it alone, in private, and I never actually know how long it’s going to take to achieve the final product, but it always feels good when the job is done. Get your mind out of the gutter; I’m referring to writing.

The personal anticipation that I have experienced in the weeks leading up to this week’s column has been excessive, to say the least. And that’s saying something, given how excessive a person I am; I mean, I have contingency plans based on contingency plans for contingent life threatening situations which have no realistic chance of ever actually happening to me (I’d have to classify my irrational fear of vacuum cleaners in this category). But I’m excited because this column marks the achievement of a goal.

Do you ever set goals for yourself? I do, I set goals so often I’m actually obsessive compulsive about goals. When I exercise I challenge myself to different goals so that I am enticed to compete against myself and exercise more efficiently. I apply the same strategy to eating, which is the perfect yin to the yang that is my exercise routine. So it’s no real surprise to myself, or any of my good friends that when I started writing this column, I set a goal. When I started writing this column for, oh I’d say about ten people, one year ago, the goal I had was to practice writing a column so that I could apply to write a ‘real one’ for a ‘real newspaper.’ I decided that in order to prove my reliability, I would have to write one column per week, for an entire year, with two weeks of vacation at my disposal. This added up to fifty columns in fifty-two weeks.

But then something weird happened, after half a year, my subscription list had jumped from the original ten people to somewhere around four hundred. All I can say about this is that I’m flattered that so many people are willing to let me email them a weekly email that they can delete without reading, but have the option of reading if they are bored. And while that sounds pretty unemotional and perhaps even negative; I am actually suffocating in the personal ecstasy of the narcissistic knowledge that so many prospective people may be reading my inner thoughts each week. Even if only about one quarter of my list habitually reads my column, which is probably a pretty accurate figure, I can definitely say that it’s a fun trip to know that one hundred people are reading your thoughts each week. No, seriously, I’m freaking bloated with all this power, I tell you, I’m rolling around in the oversized, lush padded ego that my column has helped me to develop, and I am laughing all the way to the bank of self-esteem, reveling in a gluttonous lust-filled personal paradise fueled by the printed words from my own mind.

Okay, wait, that wasn’t me…that was actually the transcript of Alex Rodriguez’s quote from the fourth paragraph of this column. What, you didn’t get that same reading? Did you remember to use your official Mike Oppenheim Celebrity Bull Shit Decoder Ring? You know what? I think if I were as rich and powerful as A-Rod, I’d probably think and then say something idiotic like “Whatever [I] say is important.” I mean, if you put people on a pedestal, and dote them with affection and attention, how can they not think that everything they say and do is important? If you create a position of power, and then give someone the keys to that position, how are they not supposed to become addicted to their new powers? Currently, I have no real money, no real power, and no fame. I don’t desire any of these three things anymore, but at one point in my life, I surely did. Instead of thinking about what I want in the future, I tend now to think a lot about serviceable skills I may currently possess which could be traded in for just a bit more money, so that I can maximize my personal happiness by working hard at something I love.

So far, the only thing I can come up with is that I’m good at seeing a lot of inter-connections in our so-called reality. I don’t know how or when I started honing this skill, but for me, this skill has enabled me to talk endlessly, meet and make some of the most incredible friends I could ever wish for, and currently, it’s what enables me to write a weekly column about whatever is on my mind. This is what this column experiment has been all about; trying to connect the dots for my readers to see if they can see the same mosaic of our reality that I see. I want to know how many or few people share with me the version of reality that I experience. And this brings me back to celebrities—our love hate relationship with celebrities is our collective society’s way of doing the same thing. By creating and then observing a celebrity’s life, we get to publicly test the social fabric of our collective morals. Whenever a celebrity does something that someone in the press considers amoral, we get to talk about the act, and then express our opinion on the act. If enough talking heads agree that the act actually wasn’t that bad, then whatever the act was, it loses its ‘social taboo factor’, and society moves on to testing a different issue, with a different celebrity. And nowadays, even politicians are celebrities, so we get to discuss Kennedy’s infidelities, as well as Bush’s former cocaine and drinking habits.

So celebrity status or not, I’ve accomplished a goal, and written a weekly column for a year. A lot of my friends have asked me the following three questions: One: Am I proud of myself for accomplishing my own goal? A bit, but not nearly as proud as I was the first three times I successfully quit smoking cigarettes. Two: Did I at any point regret this self-made assignment? I did during certain weeks, but never two weeks in a row, and never enough to warrant quitting in the middle of it all. And finally: Am I going to continue to write a weekly column? Damn it! Why do they always have to ask me that question? I mean, I’m a man of my word, and obsessed with goals, so if I say yes, then the vicious cycle of column writing will continue indefinitely. But I also suffer from most of the seven deadly sins, one of which is pride, and so if I say no, then I wound my own pride by not raising myself to the task of accomplishing another goal! So I pledge the following: I have most of my readers on an email list, and I will not delete this list. Instead of writing every single week, I will now proceed to send out a column whenever I feel like it. I can assure you that it will never be more often than once a week, and it will be as infrequent as my life dictates. But you’ll hear from me again. I promise.

So “It Sucks To Be You” is a year old, and the only way I see fit to celebrate it’s big B-day is by updating you on a very serious issue I addressed back in issue seven; my so-called irrational fear of vacuum cleaners, and the awful, tremendously invasive noises that they make. I wrote, at the time, that I was ‘almost as bad a dog’ when it came to my distaste for vacuum cleaners, but I need to amend that statement, for I recently found out that I am ‘worse than a dog’ when it comes to hating the noise of a vacuum cleaner. While staying at a friends’ house in December, this friend neglected to warn me before beginning to vacuum his living room, where I was napping on the couch. And so within two seconds of hearing the devilish whirling noise I leapt up in a fit of panic and rage heading for the nearest safe exit from the room. But I noticed, as I got up, that his pet dog curiously sniffed in the general direction of the machine and then trotted to another corner of the room to continue taking a nap. This means that I’m actually devolving as a human being, because even a dog is not as alarmed as I am by the chaotic symphony that is the sound of a vacuum cleaner! Do they have irrational fear rehab centers?