Let me preface this by saying that on any given day, at any given moment, I look like your average yuppie preppy white boy, accentuated by the fact that I wear glasses and my fashion sense isn't the best it possibly could be. I have been called "nerd," "geek" and all the other wonderful complimentary terms you give to the timid people who don't fit in so well because they might be more bookish than socially skilled (though I'd like to think that I am pretty socially skilled, but that doesn't mean that I won't feel comfortable lounging on the couch with a book either).

But I have my other moments, even though they may be few and far between. And every now and then, I go through what one of my former co-workers dubbed "a Clark Kent moment," where I shed the skin and the image of a stone cold rockstar emerges from this rather unremarkable shell. Or even when the looks are still in place, but the other personality comes out. I remember driving home once from a job interview last year -- it was during the summer, so I had all my car windows down and the roof open as well, so the music I was listening to was audible in the car next to mine. Given the look on the faces of the people in the car next to mine at the stop light, I'm sure they wouldn't have expected a nice-looking and well-dressed (I was wearing a suit) preppy white boy completely thrashing -- as much as possible while restrained by a seat belt -- to the sounds of Anthrax. But I was. At a previous job, a bunch of us went out and got drunk one night at a downtown bar, which happened to have a live band playing that night. My former co-workers started razzing me and saying things like, "You keep telling us you can sing... prove it!" So I drunkenly went up to the band, asked for a favor and completely rocked out while singing lead to the Buckcherry song "Lit Up." For those of you who don't know this song, it's fairly hard-rockin'. Suffice to say that when I got off the stage, my co-workers just stared at me for a little bit, then basically said things like, "Dude... you really do rock hard!" They were astonished to see such a performance from me.

I went to a concert a few months back with one of my best friends who knows that I'm into hard music, she just hadn't experienced it too much personally. So it was a new experience for her to see me react when System of a Down took the stage for a 40 minute set. I thrashed. I screamed along with the lyrics. I headbanged. I flailed, I jumped, I rocked out. And she confessed that it was a side of me that she'd never seen before and it lent a whole new perspective to my personality. I wasn't so mild-mannered and shiny-happy to her anymore.

In the episode of "Sports Night" that I TiVo'd this morning, Josh Malina's voiceover talks about how one of the characters gets past his writer's block by realizing why guys do things: to impress women. And personally, I feel like I'd get a rather nice head-start on impressing the women I want to impress if I could just get them to see me pull a Clark Kent moment.