Secret Vanity

Some friends asked me to post what I read at the recent Read Lit District, so here it is.
My Secret Vanity


I'm a scruffy-looking guy. I wonder if it comes from wanting to emulate Harrison Ford as Han Solo (“Who are you calling scruffy-looking?”) or Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones (I did try wearing the Fedora, but I was much much too young then to grow stubble) or any of his numerous other scruffy-looking roles. Ford sports a disheveled yet dashing look that I wished I could emulate. My scruffy-lookingness sadly only gets it half right. I lack the dash; I just look really disheveled. And kind of fat. No, let's be honest. Not kind of fat. Fat. Really fat. Well, that's being a bit hard on myself, I'm not that fat. Just fat. So disheveled and fat.

I suppose the failure of a number of my relationships, and a reason for some romances never happening, is my apparent lack of grooming. Some of those girls could not bear my hair that hadn't felt the tug of brush or comb in years. When I get a haircut, I get my head shaved. Then I just kind of let it all hang out until it seems too long, or there's some occasion when I need to get a hair cut. Such occasions, like graduations, formal events, weddings, and the like are very rare in my life, and so the hair just kind of grows out about a year or two. I figure using shampoo and taking a towel to it are more than enough attention than my hair needs. It just kind of falls into place. I think.

My philosophy about shaving is similar to that for fixing my bed. When I wake up in the morning I leave the pillows and blanket in disarray. Why? Because when I get in bed later that night I'm going to mess it all up again anyway, so why fix it now? Similarly, it's going to grow back anyway, so why bother shaving? Again, a formal event may prompt me to put a razor to my face. Otherwise I take to my facial hair with a pair of scissors only when the hair gets so long that it interferes with my eating; I start feeling the mustache hair impeding the flow of food into my mouth.

When we move on to my fashion sense, or lack thereof, well, I've heard people say to me, “Hinahabol ka ng plantsa,” so often that those people get tired of saying it. I'm a T-Shirt and jeans guy, except when I teach which is when I'll maybe throw a collared button-down over that T-Shirt. I have a thing for flannel or plaid because my fashion sense is stuck emulating the Seattle-grunge look of the early 90s, but modified for the tropical clime (which means that the look looks terribly off). Sometimes I'll turn to the other fashion rage of my pre-teen youth and put on some big baggy clothes and look like a suburban hip-hopper mixed with punk from So-Cal. I really don't get how to dress up, and in the metro and post-metrosexual world my fashion sense is terribly dated, and grungy is the exact word for it.

So it's a wonder that I would be writing something about vanity. When I told my girlfriend that I was writing an essay about how vain I am she just replied with a grunt of disbelief. Then she fixed my hair a little bit.

My vanity though, is something that I share with many. It may not be as rampant as the droves of “vain pics” that you'll see on social networking sites, so proliferative that vain photography may become a classification title, but I think that a lot of us do it.

I like to Google my name.
Just an aside, isn't it interesting that Google has become a verb? Technically it's a noun, right? It's a website. But it can be used as a verb, and it's very cool that it's easy to make it past tense, “I Googled it.” Also, it doesn't sound so bad in Tagalog, “I-Google mo,” or “Na-Google ko na.”

I like to Google my name just to see if anyone's talking about me, to see if I'm getting any hits. I don't care what they say. I've seen the worst things written about my writing, but woohoo at least somebody wrote about me. Okay, so admittedly I wasn't happy that someone wrote something bad about me, but in the long run I'm happy that I am still worth writing about.

I have to run it through permutations of my name. First is Carl Javier. This just gets too many hits. Then I'll go with the publishing name Carljoe Javier. This shows up a good number of personal posts, along with reviews of things I wrote and the aforementioned negative writing. Sometimes I get surprised because people actually quote me. This is because I wouldn't quote myself. I'm often drunk or misled in thoughts. But I found out that there are some things that I do say that hold some value once they wind up on the internet. Just now I Googled my name and found that I have been listed in a number of blogs and personals as among these people's favorite writers.

It's also fun to be cross-posted. I once wrote an essay about the crazy things I'm tempted to do as a statement of my frustration with our government. It wound up on a gun enthusiast's site. I've also wound up on fan sites for various geekdoms which I belong to. They found my reviews and posted them on the sites.

Then there's the searching for what students say about me. High school teachers are especially susceptible to funny things. I've seen the worst pictures, like one where a teacher is in front of the class and everyone's sleeping. The “candid” pictures taken when a teacher flares up also make for good material on student pages. I've been lucky enough not to be caught, I think. Or at least I've been lucky enough not to see the bad shots of me that students have taken. There have been unusual blog entries expressing undying love, which I assume the writer thought I would never read.

It's all not worth much when you look at it. Mentions of my name in various articles, some references from friend's blogs, quotes from my class now and then, and the occasional picture that I was too drunk to remember I was in, the rare review of something I wrote, and some of the band's performances posted in youtube. And yet it all adds up to a lot of pages. From the first time I Googled my name and found three entries now I have to take about half an hour sifting through the pages seeing if there's anything new from me or about me online.

Is it something to do with my importance in this world? It's an attempt to leave behind some kind of mark, to matter in some way. I have to sit back and wonder why someone who is bored will hastily snap fifteen or twenty shots of herself, post them online, and then send out these announcements that she's got a new post and you should check it out when it's really inconsequential drivel.

Are she and I operating under the same motivations? Do we feel the need to be seen, to be heard in an exceedingly detached digital world? Face to face contact is mitigated these days by the online social network, and it seems that to be noticed online is just as important as it is to be nodded or smiled to when you run into someone you know in the hallway. We all want to be known, and to know and feel that we are known. I may not care about how I look, but I care that I am heard.