I’m listening to Keith Olbermann as I type this. He’s interviewing someone, and they’re talking about how more people vote for American Idol than they do for the president. That’s just sad, but even sadder is the fact that except for a few short bits they show on talk shows or news shows, I have never, ever watched American Idol.

There are a lot of shows I’ve never watched, actually. I’ve never watched Lost, or 24, or Charmed, or Smallville. Never felt the need to. Never even wanted to try.

But American Idol is the big one. Even senators vote for their favorite contestant on that show, and here I’ve never even seen Ryan Seacrest introduce the damn thing.

I know who he is, though. I used to regularly listen to him on the radio on my long way home from work, when he was metrosexual long before it even became a “thing.” I remember feeling slightly appalled as he obsessed over his hair, or his nails, or his spa facial, or whatnot. I got the impression that he was straight because he would talk about dating women, but then there was this weird vibe of a primping queen, and I totally didn’t know what to make of it. He just seemed both insecure and full of himself, and he was really into his growing TV career … because even then he was hosting some obscure game show when he wasn’t on the radio. He was very … L.A.

Sometime during all that, I got the impression that I might have somehow “bumped” into him even long before then. I remember looking up the radio station online to see what my favorite morning DJs (a woman named Jamie and a couple of guys) looked like, and while I was there, I thought I’d look up Ryan Seacrest’s photo as well.

What I found shocked me … because I had seen the exact same headshot photo before, long before I’d ever listened to the radio show. In fact, the first time I saw the headshot was in an e-mail. Some guy I’d met in an AOL chatroom was flirting with me and trying to make the moves on me, and when he sent me a photo of himself, he sent me a headshot of Ryan Seacrest—only I had never heard of or seen him before.

I can assume it really wasn’t him, and therefore the photo was a fake. Or I can assume that it really was him, but he was unknown then, so it really doesn’t matter.

One of the guys who worked part-time at my last day job actually went to school with Ryan Seacrest and is good friends with him. When I told him about the headshot, he thought about it a while and said, “Hm. It could have been him, you know. Maybe it was.”

Not that it matters. Because it doesn’t.

I’ve never even watched American Idol, and every time I hear about it, Ryan Seacrest’s name hardly even comes up. It’s all about Simon, Simon, Simon, or Paula, Paula, Paula, and I’ve never seen their headshots on AOL. Never.

I used to dance with Paula Abdul moves, though. That was back when she was a choreographer. She was very … Janet Jackson. Even long before that became a thing.

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