I idolspize Dave Eggers!

There, I said it.

Ann Hornaday has a great column in today's Washington Post "That Wonderful Woman! Oh, How I Loathe Her.", about her feelings for Susan Orlean, that is, people one simultaneously idolizes and despises, usually because they are close enough to you in age, chosen career, and talent for you to think "that could/should be me, dammit!"

Now, I don't think idolspize is going to catch on as a phrase immediately, given that most of us don't want to own up to being envious, petty, smallminded creatures. Oh wait, is it just me in here, idolspizing Dave Eggers? Am I the only wannabe writer in my mid-30s who thinks Mr. Curly-Haired Orphan was in the right place to catch the memoir wave and surf it all the way to the zeitgeist picnic, and yet is somehow even more personally offended that he has chosen to parlay that fame and fortune into do-gooding, I mean really doing an astounding amount of good -- starting after-school writing programs for inner-city kids all over the country, publishing cool magazines and books by other people, and writing op-eds in the New York Times about Teach for America? Is it so much to ask that I not have to come across the Hipster Posterboy's name practically daily, doing something that once again shows that he's not only talented, he has a big heart, a wide and loving circle of ridiculously cool friends like David Byrne, a lovely, talented writer for a wife, and ... and .... I could go on, but my spleen hurts.

According to Hornaday, "We all have them, those close friends, colleagues, casual acquaintances or complete strangers whose lives and careers exist -- it seems to us -- solely as a rebuke to our own. We respect them, admire them from afar, maybe even love them -- but with a twinge of . . . what exactly? Jealousy? Envy? White-knuckled rage? They're the people who are constantly reminding us that we'll never quite measure up. They're the valedictorians to our salutatorians, the bestsellers to our mid-listers, the mid-listers to our never-published, the homecoming queens to our also-rans. They seem to have sprung fully formed from our ugliest competitive streaks, our egos at their most fragile, our deepest self-loathing. They are our own squandered potential, fully realized."

She nailed it. Squandered potential, yep, ouch, leggo my ego, Eggers. See, I don't idolspize Zadie Smith -- even though she's writing exactly the kind of books I would love to write, and she's a year younger than me yet getting shortlisted for the Booker Award over and over....she's so out of my league, I can only bow before her as Salieri did before Mozart. But although I liked "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," I thought it was light. Not important. Certainly not insightful enolugh to qualify one as The Voice of His Generation...or is it the conscience? who knows. And yet. I really admire what he's done with 802 Valencia. I even like the damn pirate shop. McSweeney's is a consistently great magazine. I find his celebrity reluctance and sullenness oddly charming. Dammit!

How much time have I wasted idolspizing? Probably more than I have spent actually writing. Which explains a lot.