When you get out of the car, it’s like getting onto the world’s worst conveyer belt. You’re whisked into a tent and along a path, through a security checkpoint where a guard with a gun judges you when you empty your pockets and all that’s inside is lip gloss and oil-blotting sheets. Once you’re deemed safe, you step right onto the stretch of carpet where attendees stop and pose for photographers, before taking another ten steps and then stopping again, and so on and so forth until everybody dies a fiery death. There’s no order to it, at least not at the People’s Choice Awards, so the sequence of people walking along the carpet is simply the sequence of people who happened to arrive at that very moment, and in this very moment, I happen to be sandwiched between Kate Hudson and Jack Black. And let me tell you, photographers don’t give a shit about you, especially when someone more famous is within five feet of where you’re standing. But that doesn’t change the order of things! So then you’re walking along the carpet and photographers are shouting at you, but not as loud as they’re shouting at Kate Hudson and Jack Black. You can feel the corners of your mouth shaking, partly because your cheeks are starting to ache from smiling, but partly because you’re afraid your bangs fell back to Green Day status. A typical photographer interaction goes like this:

“Who are you?!”

“I’m Matt.”

“What do you do?!”

“Um. I write stuff on the Internet.”

At this point, the photographer’s face always drops. “Oh.”

“I’m nominated for an award,” I shouted at one of them in indignation.

And then, “Fine. Look over here. And try not to look like you’re shitting your pants!”

OK, nobody actually said that. But they might as well have.

When the photographer stands end, someone pushes you out of the way to make room for Jack Black, and the conveyer belt continues. The next part of the carpet is where all the press stands waiting with lights, cameras, and microphones, craning their necks to see who’s coming along the carpet. Typically, this is the part where your publicist walks ahead of you, goes up to some of the reporters, and says, “I have Matt Bellassai, the guy with the wine,” and the reporters will shrug their shoulders and shake their heads. Typically, your publicist will try to get far enough ahead of you so that you don’t have to bear witness to this rejection firsthand, but the carpet is far too crowded for you to stray too far without getting lost, so you hear all of it. Nobody wants to talk to an Internet writer when Kate Hudson just walked through.