If there’s one thing that’s sure to confuse me about my insecurities about my “career,” it’s being referred to by others as “an expert.” I found myself in that strange situation earlier this week, talking to Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider about the Disney/Marvel buyout, but it also happened when I talked to the New York Post about the Whiplash costume for Iron Man 2, or KPCC in Southern California about sci-fi books that’d blow your mind during San Diego (Click on that link for the photo and Douglas Wolk’s expression in particular), to mention the few that’ve happened in the last few months.
Don’t get me wrong; it’s flattering and almost enough to make me convince myself that I have, indeed, faked it until I maked it (Yeah, I know there’s no such word as “maked,” but it should rhyme, right?), but everytime it happens, I’m convinced that I am either (a) sounding like an asshole, (b) will be edited to sound like an asshole, or (c) am being spoken to purely because no-one else was available. I lack the gene that makes talking heads on TV so successful - Not confidence, and not anything to do with having a sense of authority, either, but something else; an ability to make others be too afraid to openly contradict you, perhaps.
Maybe it’s the kind of thing that I should practice in the comfort of my own home, in front of a mirror with countless grimaces and mock-appalled-are-you-really-interrupting-me faces; I wonder if there’re ways in which I could have all of those moves and still seem unrehearsed, unflappable and unbeatable, or whether they go against my basic nature. Maybe I’m too self-conscious, too nervous to convincingly be an expert, even in the nerd topics that people ask me about. Of course, that might be why I’m interviewed and referred to as an expert by others; my inherent agreeable meekness. After all, we’re supposed to inherit the world, right?
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Content © Graeme McMillan, 2008-2009.
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