How to Become (and Stay) Semi-Famous

1. Be born into a family that doesn’t share your genes (i.e., adoption). That way, the rest of these steps will be like putting a round peg into a square hole, which of course is the way any sensible project comes together.

2. Have a difficult childhood. The more bullying and awkward, self-consciousness-inducing quirks to suffer through, the better. Blame yourself, for example, for other people’s behavior, and begin pulling at the dead skin on your lip as a nervous habit. Who knows? Maybe all the licking you do to compensate will be interpreted by that 8th-grade cutie as flirting.

3. Discover acting as a creative outlet, and be told that you got the part because of “your dull, flat voice and monotoned delivery.” Of course, not every role will require such artful mastery, but refer to diagram A and begin breathing differently if your larynx lets you down.

4. Go stag to your senior prom.

5. Wear braces through your early twenties, and find a way to play The Star-Spangled Banner on them like metal drums or a built-in harmonica. Don’t blame me, however, if the gum sticking in every corner of your mouth makes you sound a notch less cool.

6. Branch out into writing and get a play selected for a college festival, but refer to diagram B or call our special hotline (‘1-800-JEALOUSY’) if your best friend at the time overanalyzes it and gets snarky whenever you quote your favorite line (“and I would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for those darn kids!”)

7. Realize you’re still a chemistry major.

8. Shift your schedule around constantly for a semi-girlfriend who is really just using you as a rebound relationship, but whom you can’t let go of just because you find her involvement in Men’s Glee Club fascinating. (Bass? Baritone? Tenor?)

9. Change majors.

10. Get an internship for the summer and bombard your team members with annoying movie quotes over email.

11. Attempt to adapt your favorite reality show from list A (see sidebar) into your own, much-less-expensive contest, in which all the sorority sisters compete for one geek (you) or you compete with the entire football team to see how well you can smash bones (basically Survivor: Gridiron.) Present your idea to the student financial board and get flatly rejected.

12. Win a Super Smash Bros. tournament while drunk.

13. Change majors again.

14. Overbook yourself in your final semester by performing the lead in a local play, doing a communications internship, working 20 hours per week as a computer lab monitor (not the square screen kind, but see figure C if confused) and carrying 15 credits, more than half of which can’t be taken over again in the fall.

15. Graduate and take a job where you are thrown into the deep end with no training and treated so much like a number that when you disappear but fail to file the paperwork, no one bothers contacting you for six months. This step requires all the parts in boxes B through D, but if something is missing, feel free to MacGyver your way through.

16. Get married. Stick your little pink peg into the little blue car and quote Fight Club (“I can’t get married. I’m a forty year old boy.”) as often as you can.

17. Gamble too much, then self-ban from the local casino. They’ll really know your name and face then.

18. If it seems like you now have too much time on your hands, submit to every whim, beck and call your wife thinks to bestow upon you. Alternate version: use your time to DungeonMaster, then write books based on the homebrew material.

19. Learn as an adult that you have been on a certain neurological spectrum since birth.

20. Perform in the same play twice but twelve years apart, once as a dumb southern farmhand, the next time as a two-faced minister orchestrating a KKK plot within an innocent rural Georgia county. Distribute your books to the cast and crew as a self-centered gift.

21. Distribute more books. Lower the price on Amazon. When all else fails, give the books away for free on Amazon.

22. Consider tracking down and whacking the idiot who claimed online, after you put four years of consistent effort into them, that your books “lack substance.” Fireplace pokers make a great weapon (easy to clean, commonly discovered in mansions, wields a twinge of evil!)

23. Get invited to speak at the local fantasy/sci-fi convention. Share your experiences and have a great time doing it.

24. Do this again the following year. Have fewer people attend your panels.

A. Repeat. On both counts.

B. Ugh, must we go to that convention again?

i. Change the content of your panels to favor a speech in which you decry the underrated value of indented lists and Roman numerals.

ii. This step is just here for the hell of it.

25. Change majors a third time. Or just tell people you did while you had the chance.

26. Become a reputable Scrabble champion. Make your secret crush cry by beating her 660-307 on the strength of a triple-triple, the holy grail of all word game maneuvers.

27. At your next Scrabble event, come back from losing your first three games to win the division championship, only to have the director make fun of your last name and call the books you donated as prizes “macabre.”

28. Drag your wife around the nation to more Scrabble events.

29. Tell everyone about your ever-expanding “honey-do” list, not the least task from among which involves a hand saw and the prospect of hacking apart a custom-made wooden bed frame and hauling the shards to the landfill, all simply because your wife “doesn’t want to have to climb that high into bed.”

30. Design board games in your spare time, but put off hawking them to publishers, always feeling there must be ‘something more important to attend to.’

31. Alienate your mother and abuse your father’s money. Split from your wife and make a big fuss about it.

32. Realize that you have undervalued God and religion this entire time.

33. Have a mid-life crisis, then write about it on vocal.media.