Am I Annoying?

I knew better. I had about as much business being there as an elderly tourist has of being on Skid Row after midnight with a map in his hand and a blank cashier’s check taped to his forehead. I was in grave danger of a psychological mugging, and I knew it.

I kept telling myself to walk away, hail an emotional cab and get out fast, but I couldn’t. The pull was too strong. I had to know.

Am I annoying?

As the host of a television show on The Learning Channel, I have been graced with my own page on a little Web site called AmIAnnoying.com. On it, thousands of celebrities are displayed, each with their own page and listing of reasons why they might or might not be annoying. Visitors can vote, a tally runs, thousands participate. It’s picking teams all over again, but nastier, more anonymous, cyberstyle.

I hadn’t heard of this site, but it seems to be very popular, a raw sore on the ugly underbelly of the Internet. The Web site wrote to inform me of my inclusion, and I told myself I’d just check out the site but not my own page.

At the time, I was about 53 percent annoying, based on 27 votes. That’s not bad, I guess — if you choose to see the glass as half annoying.

I couldn’t help noticing my tally on the site’s front page, but I knew I really shouldn’t open my own page, see what annoying qualities they had laid bare. Looking at the grotesque photo of me they’d created from pausing my show and digitally capturing the moment in time when I intersected with Bea Arthur, I knew it was time to go. If there’s one thing I know about myself, it is that my need to be liked is both paralyzing and persistent.

I should just sign off, go to CNN.com, find out what’s happening in the world, maybe e-mail a friend, I thought. Instead, I decided just to peruse the site, see just how annoying others are. I got sucked in.

The pages were sort of funny. I scrolled around. Something terrible happened on the mean streets of AmIAnnoying.com. I had the overwhelming urge to start voting.

A sinister slice of me wanted to cast my vote, a drive-by hurting, a stone thrown at Jenna Elfman or Carson Daly. The equation seemed to formulate in my head: the more annoying they are, the less annoying I am.

And I got it. I’m one of “them,” the evil “them” I’m always railing against, the people who write critical letters to the editor, the people who post incredibly insulting missives on message boards. I know how they feel, anyway.

The magic of this site is that it taps into the universal question we ask ourselves. Do people really like us? Or do they just pretend to? Is there something wrong with us? Are we broken and the world is afraid to say it to our face?

The site distills it beautifully, really. We all want to know if we’re annoying. To that end, they could start amifat.com, amistupid.com, doesmymotherreallylikemybrotherbetter.com, doesmyboyfriendreallyloveme.com. These are the types of questions we can never truly answer, but we all ponder from time to time.

I didn’t vote. Well, OK, I did place one vote for myself as “not annoying.” This may be one of the most annoying things I’ve ever done, and there are plenty.

Just as I was about to leave, I clicked on my photo. I had to. This can’t break me, I thought, inhaling deeply. I’m stronger than this. I have to thicken my skin. I have to stare my fear right in the Bea Arthur face and beat it.

There it was. Not bad really. There were a few annoying things listed, but way more reasons that I’m not annoying. It was sort of flattering, actually.

And I reminded myself that I should be grateful I have a job in my chosen field that has even deemed me worthy of this sort of humiliation. I’m at the bottom of the celebrity barrel, but I’m in there, for better or worse.

And maybe one of the worst parts is one of the best. Maybe the more I’m exposed to judgment, the less I’ll feel the sting. It’s my greatest wish in life just to be happy, to be of service to others, to laugh more than anyone else at movies and to do all of this without ever checking my vote count.

It occurred to me that to be annoying at times, self-absorbed, stupid, inconsiderate, insecure, is to be human. So the syllogism follows that if we’re all human, and to be human is to annoy, we’re all annoying.

Is that the worst thing to be? Maybe the effort to not be annoying is worse than the embracing of it.

Take the case of Sabrina, a girl I haven’t seen since I was 12. I think of her now only because she was nothing if not a bouquet of traits her peers found annoying. She was a child actress; she and her mom wore the same hairstyle — an odd configuration of one-too-many braids. Sabrina wore only red and black, donned leg warmers long after they were out of style and spoke in the overly annunciated fashion one might expect from Madonna. Adults loved her. Kids hated her.

Last time I saw her was at a school dance. She was in the zone, dancing by herself, a frighteningly uninhibited blur of red and black. For some reason that image of her stays with me, at least 92 percent annoying, but 100 percent alive.

Teresa Strasser can be seen Saturdays at noon and 10
p.m. on The Learning Channel’s “While You Were Out” and is on the Web at www.teresastrasser.com .