Wonder I

  Sister, cast a shadow (Brother, tell me why)
  You're holding back the sun (No, it can't be done)
  We're towering to these spiders (But I feel so small)
  Is it all right (Is it okay)?
  It's okay; I feel small too
       Wonder, wonder I
       If I stood on your shoulders
       Could I touch the sky?

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There are (sort of) three kinds of people in the world:  the Lack-Awesomes, the Contagious-Awesomes, and the Intimidating-Awesomes.  Lack-Awesomes are self-explanatory and not the subject of this post.  Many of the people I know are Contagious-Awesomes, which means they're so awesome they're just lots of fun to be friends with, and proximity to them helps draw out your innate awesome.  I know a lot of these people.  I love them a lot.  But I also know several Intimidating-Awesomes.  These are people who are just as—maybe even more—awesome as/than the Contagious-Awesomes, but instead of spurring on your awesome with their awesome, they unwittingly scare your awesome into a cowering in the corner, condensing it into a forgotten little puffball of tangled deoxyribonucleic acid.  It's like one of those stacked bar graphs:  there's a set amount of awesome to be split between two people, so the more awesome the Intimidating-Awesome displays, the less awesome you can show.  The heat of their awesome evaporates your awesome (or at least that's what it feels like).  I know a couple of people like that.  I feel miserably inarticulate and and juvenile and boring around them (even if they're younger than me), which is ridiculous, especially since they're all uber nice folks.  I've always wanted to be friends with the Intimidating-Awesomes, but it's kind of hard to do.  I always get a tad bit starstruck, and starstrickenness makes it decidedly difficult to be (feel) awesome.  

[EDIT, approx. 12:27 a.m.]
…I just had a realization (I think with some help from God; late-night prayer rocks)—I think a lot of the cause of Intimidating-Awesomes is that they tend to be either 
1. really extroverted, or 
2. just like me. (That is not meant to be a brag on myself at all, by the way.)  
  ~  Extroverts tend to either be great for holding up a conversation with an introvert, or terrifying to to an introvert, because they naturally tend to emit awesomeness in their interactions with people instead of bottling it all up and quietly channeling it into things, like introverts tend to do.  Thus, it can feel like a standard I have to measure up to in my side of the conversation/interaction.  And I'm usually incapable of doing so (or feeling as if I am) because I usually have a completely different mode of self-expression than those sorts of Awesomes.  
  ~  People who are just like me (in terms of personality and often hobbies and talents) are people I'm really attracted to (friend-wise) but also feel a natural sort of competition with because we're so alike.  I REALLY feel pressure to measure up to (or over) their portion of awesome, but it's quite difficult due to the fact that's our types of awesome are usually very similar, or at least similarly expressed.  Thus, it's hard not to subconsciously view this sort of person as a rival, even while really wanting to befriend them.

[Wow, I wasn't expecting all of that.]

[ From the retrospective semi-objective viewpoint, it's an interesting phenomenon. ]

Now I have to figure out what to do with all of that.  (I apologize; this is a hazard of impulsive real-time blogging.  My "deep" posts are not neatly packaged.)