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Shaw's Warring Personalities: A Happy Column!
10/28/05
by Shaw

Shaw has often been accused of having multiple personalities. Shaw used to disagree with people who say this. Then Shaw started paying attention and now he is starting to get it. Take a look at some of his more noticeable traits.

Stage Presence:

• A natural talent and love for public speaking, stage presence, and visible confidence and poise.
• A job in a math department where no one knows who he is except his boss and advisor.

In high school, Shaw was in the Model OAS (like Model UN but less diluted and took place in the real OAS building) and was elected President based on his speech; in college he and his friend Jason had a radio talk show; and two years ago he was teaching undergraduate classes. In the past two years he has spent all of his time holed up in an office with no interaction in the outside world at all.

Memory for faces and names:

• The uncanny ability to remember names and phone numbers and connect faces with names even after long periods of time.
• A completely unmemorable face and name.

Here are some examples of people (guys and girls) who Shaw remembered and has run into but who don't remember him, and in particular, look at him like he has a 3 pound goiter sticking out of his neck when he approaches¹.

1. Shaw's former students--people he taught for 5 months straight 4 hours per week. He remembers every student he ever had in every class he has ever taught. He doesn't think a single one of them recognizes him. If he sees a former student now he ducks his head and avoids looking at them so they don't see the spark of recognition in his eyes and get scared.
2. The girl who flirted with him for HALF an HOUR at the record store. He saw her one week later and when he smiled at her she visibly shrank in fear, picked up a fake call on her cell phone, and crossed the street.
3. Everyone he ever met at parties at GW. Every time he went to a party in college, he would meet someone and invariably run into them one or two days later. The reaction was usually a frightened, "sorry, who are you?" Once, however, the reaction was, "Wait, are you the guy that got trapped in the bathroom for 20 minutes and when you finally burst out you were covered in a sheen of sweat, your face was red, and you had a huge vein popping out on your forehead?" His response in that case was an unfortunate, "yes."

Strange attractiveness to women who have no interest in actually dating him:

• About 1000 women have said, "Shaw, there are so many women who would be lucky to have you!"
• Zero women have actually personally felt lucky to have him.

This is pretty self-explanatory. Once he was told by a girl that he was friends with, "Shaw, if I didn't have a boyfriend I would so date you!" Ironically, this girl had actually gone on one date with him before and had rejected him for a second one. When he pointed out this inconsistency to her he was met with sheepish silence and an offer (which he accepted) to go get him another beer.

Sports skills:

• He has good catch-up speed and can usually get open for a long ball, he has a fast tennis serve, and he can keep up in a distance run.
• He hate running, doesn't have any friends that play football anymore, and his only access to tennis courts is in College Park, where the only tennis-playing friend he has plays in tournaments with former pros so they cannot be on the same court.

Music interests:

• 1000 albums and time to go to tons of concerts.
• Friends that never want to go to concerts with him or listen to his music in a car ride.

Since he has a 60GB iPod he is a natural choice for default music provider on long car trips. However on long car trips when he is not alone, every new song that comes on is greeted with, "Can we change this?" or "can we hear something with words this time?" or "do you have any Pretenders?" Needless to say most of his friends have learned their lesson and bring their own CDs on car rides now.²

Gregariousness

• A feeling of camaraderie with his friends and a desire to be around them a lot.
• An apartment that is 25 miles (that's 45 minutes to an hour in DC traffic except at rush hour, when it's an hour and a half) away from the friends that he doesn't see at work every day.

Family values

• A love of kids and hanging out with his family and other people's families
• The inability to speak two sentences without using the F-word. As Lewis Black says, for Shaw, the F-word isn't a verb, it's a comma.

It's a list like this that makes him wish he were blissfully unaware of his own uselessness, which, as you might guess, he is not.³

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[1] Thanks to Shaw's friend Hunter, who provided the necessary goiter image here.

[2] In Shaw's defense, when Shaw was on a car trip with Clay once, he put on a song which sparked this debate:

Clay: What is this?
Shaw: You don't know this song?
Clay: No. I've never heard this before.
Shaw: Dude, this is one of the most popular and famous songs of all time. And best.
Clay: No, there's no way that anyone else likes this song. This is shitty music.
Shaw: Clay, this is Stairway to Heaven. Led Zeppelin.
Clay: I don't know what that is.

So he thinks some of this is due to the people he hangs out with.

[3] Shaw asked me to write this column for him. --Love, Shaw.

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