Britney Spears Is My Hiro

Friend: Britney comes on March 5th…just so you know….tickets go on sale Monday… :)

I sighed and smiled.  She was a huge Britney Spears fan and she had hinted strongly before that she wanted someone to go to the concert with her.  I typed my reply.

Me: Well, when you get yours, get mine and I’ll pay you back.
Friend: SWEET!  That’s what I was hoping to hear :)
Me: Dork. (But in a good way.)
Friend: I know!

She IMed me probably because she couldn’t find anyone else who wanted to go and, while I was no particular fan of Ms. Spears, I figured my gay would protect me from any permanent damage your average straight guy might experience by going to such a concert.  Mostly, I liked to see my friend so excited.

I went over to Spears’ website to see what I was in for.  I was dismayed at the amount of pink in the color scheme.  As I scrolled through several stories on her blog, the reality slowly set in…I was going to a Britney Spears concert.

Gay.

I saw a story on the site that talked about Britney’s upcoming tour.  On it, I read a comment where a guy talked about how she was an inspiration for him in his own life.

Ultra Mega Gay.

Seriously, I thought, how can some people look to celebrities for inspiration?  Didn’t they realize that they were just people?  I’d always hated when celebrities were raised to the level of demigods.

I continued through my day.  I was feeling numb from the previous couple weeks.  A powerful wave of depression had hit and while the depth of the depression had broken a week earlier, I was left feeling lost and empty.  I was left with a new confusion over my future and I considered putting Soy Made Me Gay on hiatus to devote more time to figuring things out.

After work I came home and started working on a freelance web project.  As I typed out code, I watched the latest episode of Heroes on Hulu.  In the episode, Hiro Nakamura had been trapped into thinking he was ten years old by Peter Petrelli’s father.  Faced with the horrors that the future would hold for him should he remember his life past ten, the immature Hiro locked himself in a bathroom, yelling “I don’t want to grow up!”  He was eventually coaxed out by the comic book guy (played by an awesome Seth Green).

“Why would I want to be a hero?” Nakamura asked from the bathroom.

“Because, you give people hope,” Seth-Comic-Book-Guy-Green said back.

I thought about the scene and how it related to Soy and my life.  While I was no hero, I had gotten emails from people who said that my blog had given them hope (for various reasons).  And if it gave some people hope, I thought, it was worth continuing.

And then I realized how amazingly nerdy I was.

Instead of looking to an unstable pop star for inspiration, I ended up finding guidance in a time-traveling television character who had been trapped in his childhood mind by an evil psychic.  Passions didn’t even have storylines that were so absurd.  However the guidance came, I was glad it did.

Now if the new season of Lost would just start already.