Okay, Calm Down, It’s Not About YOU, John! (or is it?)

Oh my god. If I had any kind of ego, It’d be stroked right now. Tickets for Ignite Portland 5 went in 5 minutes 29 seconds!

Josh Bancroft writes:

Update: WOW! That was INTENSE. All of the tickets, about 560 of them, were GONE in 5 minutes. Amazing. BUT! Don’t panic if you didn’t get a ticket. You can still sign up and get on the waitlist, and when people don’t confirm their tickets within 24 hours, or cancel/give up their tickets, they’ll go to the people on the waitlist, first come, first served. You guys are amazing!

Now, we all have egos, right? And our egos generally want to frame the universe such that we are squarely positioned at the center of it, right? And our egos are usually wrong, right?

Right. (right? they’re wrong, right?)

Even so, mine still wants to believe that the crazy response to Ignite Portland 5 was purely because there are hundreds of women who want to throw panties at me.¹ I know, “shut up, ego.” Sadly, I have to admit that the great and always useful saying “It’s not about me” applies here. Because, well, like usual, it’s not about me.

It’s about the amazing PDX community, it’s about The Legion of Tech, it’s about the energy of Ignite. If anything, it’s about everyone else!

But, I guess it’s a wee bit about me, though, right? Because I’m presenting. Of course, there are 17 talks, so it’s only 1/17^th about me. There are a bunch of 15 second videos, this time, so that cuts it down a bit more.

And, there are 560 tickets, and a bunch of people that can wait in line (The Bagdad holds, what? 750?). Plus all the people who host and organize it, and all the sponsors. There are volunteers…

Wow. Okay, so we’re down around 1/1000^th about me. Wow, that’s tiny. I don’t know how the ego is goin– wait one.. there’s a call from The Ego…

Yeah… yeah… uh huh… panties, right… yeah… okay… Yeah, will do.

Great, that settles it. The Ego is cool. We’ll take what we can get. Ego has a good point: If I have the chance to have even one pair of panties thrown at me by even one woman while I am alone, on a stage, with a microphone in my hand, then having Ignite be only 1/1000^th about me is, well, just fine.

Because for one shining moment of my life, I may see a piece of fabric glitter in the lights as it flies through the air, and I’m going to believe that being a geek is just as cool as being Elvis.

Yeah, baby. The Mettadore has left the building.

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1. Okay, if you haven’t read this post, listened to  our craziness during last week’s Strange Love Live, and hung around on Twitter incessantly, you may have missed that reference. [↩]