So you’re asking how my presentation for the recently concluded iBlog summit 2 went. I could say it went smoothly and I kicked ass but that’s like saying “Mike Villar has a normal-sized penis” or “Mike Villar has had consensual sex with a non-deceased person, whose gender is debatable, within the last two months,” or “Mike Villar has a perfectly healthy heart not made up of 70% nicotine and 20% cholesterol.”
Truth of the matter is I fucked up. Really bad. It’s all my fault really; this project has been given to me by my bosses several weeks before but thanks to the mighty triumvirate of laziness, working on my blogs, and smoking marijuana at work, I totally forgot about it and was totally freaking out the day before the summit because shit, I’m presenting my company’s flagship product and all I had ready was a couple of slides that really don’t amount to shit.
Fast forward to the day of the summit; in attendance were some of the biggest names in the local blogging scene like Manuel Quezon III, Dean Alfar, Abe Olandares, Marc Macalua and Angelo Racoma(Well I really don’t care much about Angelo, but he does belong to the country’s blogging elite, so whatever. Fuck you.). I was terribly unprepared and deep in my heart; I was banking on the incompetence of the other speakers to make me look good in comparison. Much to my dismay, everybody else was prepared and all their presentations were absofuckinglutely awesome. The fact that my presentation was just after the very informative talks made by Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices and Dr. Ronald Meinardus of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation only served to heighten my nervousness and send my already low self esteem swan diving to the asphalt.
The only card left to play was my Internet celebrity status. The good thing about celebrities like me is that we can be totally awesome at our craft (blogging, in my case) and be boring as fuck on interviews and speeches yet still come off cool. I mean shit, I’ve seen Lindsay Lohan’s interview on Conan and she just sat there looking all cutesy and slutty and everyone watching in the audience were pretty much happy (I think).
So when it was my turn to stand up and get on with my presentation, my boss introduced me: “Helping me with this presentation is Mike Villar, who himself is a very dedicated blogger. He blogs over at http://mikey.i.ph and he is one of the editors of The Man Blog”
I ran this scenario over and over my head the day before and this was what I envisioned happening:
Me: Hello everybody, as my good looking boss over here said, I am a very dedicated blogger. But what you don’t know is that when I’m not slacking off and misallocating my company’s time and resources, I actually work as the Global Account Manager.
Random male audience member: I LOVE YOU!!!!
Me: Thank you sir. I love you too.
Audience: [Raucous laughter]
Random female audience member: [Raising hand, interrupting] Mike you are so sexy, are you single? What do you look for in a girl?
Me: I don’t think this is the proper venue for such queries, but yes I am single. And I am looking for a girl whose idea of fun is watching me put on women’s clothing and dance to the tune of “Ice castles.”
Audience: [More raucous laughter]
Female audience members: Ugnhhhhhh…(Sound of them simultaneously experiencing orgasm)
But of course this didn’t happen. Instead, what happened was I stood there, reaching down to rub my crotch as I am always inclined to do when I’m panicking (And something which my boss noticed, and now everything’s weird between us), and pulled off a Steve Ballmer sans the intensity and the charisma.
Of course there was a collective murmuring when I was introduced, but I reckon this isn’t because of my internet celebrity status but rather has something to do with the fact that I was sweating like a bitch and the fact that they can’t understand a single word I’m saying because my nervousness caused me to speak in tongues or something.
OR maybe they’re thinking “That’s Mike Villar? He’s totally unattractive in person. And he badly needs a facial cleaning, look at those whiteheads! And oh my God, is he having a heart attack?”
The worst part is that the entire thing was televised via ANC. So yeah, instead of the proper fanfare I was expecting like a recording of crowd cheers, trumpets, confetti and a video of some guy dancing around naked with a monkey; I was welcomed by polite applause and some really inappropriate comments about my weight.
And all of this was broadcast on international TV too. God, you don’t have any idea how much I hate all of you right now.
Mike "Fucking" Villar
"a Manila-based blogger made famous by his Atrocities of Friendster series, a regular feature he publishes on his blog where he mercilessly criticizes and mocks pictures of ugly people he stumbles upon on popular social networking site, Friendster. Although a lot of people are offended by what he writes, long-time readers of his blog regard him as a brilliant satire writer."
-Taken from my WikiBios page
