Complex Numbers

Fear Itself

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1877187,00.html

Facebook's "25 Things About Me" meme seems harmless enough; people write 25 facts about themselves and post them on their Facebook pages, just as they do with videos, status updates and photos of last weekend's party. An estimated 5 million of these notes — that's 125 million facts — have appeared on the website within the past week. Assuming it takes someone 10 minutes to come up with their list, this recent bout of viral narcissism has sent roughly 800,000 hours of worktime productivity down the drain...

Piss off, bitch.

5. I fear success more than I fear failure.

Not really sure how to expand on this, but I'm on too much of a roll to stop now, even with sandy-vagina Time writers throwing a wet blanket over the very idea.

Which leads me to wonder how someone like that gets a job writing for Time. Maybe she's a free-lancer; maybe she's a full-Time writer (or would that be full-Time Warner?) (heh). It's not because she's saying anything fresh or funny. In her own words, "Most people aren't funny, they aren't insightful, and they share way too much." Pot, meet kettle.

In my own humble opinion, while I am not funny (looks, as they say, aren't everything), I do say - or write - funny things sometimes. Sometimes I can even be insightful. And yeah, I probably share way too much, but this here's MY blog, and in the immortal words of Eddie Murphy's father, "if you don' like it, you can get tha FUCK out" and "Your wife's a bigfoot, isn't she, Gus?"

Hint to Ms. Suddath: being random is not the same thing as being funny. Anyone with a computer can be random. Being funny involves, among other things, taking two random things and finding a connection between them in some way that, in retrospect, makes a weird kind of sense.

To take random examples from the list she compiles in the above-referenced article,

9. I can't grow hair on my arms.

and

16. A horse once fell over while I was riding it.

I'd say, "What do you expect? It thought your completely furless arms were snakes and freaked out."

Maybe that's not roll-on-the-floor hilarious, but I smiled when I thought of it.

Which brings me back to why I fear success. Ms. Suddath is successful enough to have been published by a major publisher, Time magazine. I, on the other hand, have been published by, well, me. Here. And that's all. So who the hell am I to criticize a paid, published writer?

And when I'm published, what kind of idiot bloggers who can't be published to save their lives are going to be talking shit about me?

See why I fear success, now?