You know,

it is so easy for people to feel threatened.

I was thinking about this this morning. I started thinking about gay mariage and why straight people care and , clearly enough - in fact I think they say so outright-straight people who object think the existence of another kind of marriage threatens their kind of marriage. I think everyone should individually think about what they want a marraige they would be involved in to be. I think this would make for better marriages. Fat chance-ola on most people giving this emotional energy and consideration, but if people treated their lives and their choices as unique, then I think they'd be less threatened by other people doing the same.

I'm not exempt from sometimes feeling threatened by difference. I think there's no crime in stealing what you like and discarding what you don't like from something you've observed is a different way and feel threatened by. I am so modern!

Because I have nothing to do here, I've been following every turn of this thing that was in the Sunday NYT magazine. This girl got blog fame, blogging about her personal life, also being mean about things on Gawker. She wrote a 9 out of 10 narcissistic essay all about it... ten pages long about two years od her life and how bad it all got - internet addiction, losing privacy, etc. Then people ripped her to shreds: "get a life" and outrage at the NYT for giving it so much space and "get over yourself" and how many times the word "I" and all this... Now she's still employed as a blogger, so it's clear enough it's a spiral situation we have here-- justifying and unjustifying and driving herself crazy.

My overall take is that people are just terribly threatened and largely attack when threatened. In retrospect, I'm sure she wishes she'd done a little reseach in the field - since she does have a problem with making stories excessively about herslef.


But overall, I certainly wasn't outraged by it! I'm narcissistic enough myself so maybe that's why I'm not that threatened by narcissism. I'm more threatened by stupidity - because dude, I am smart. So, yeah, I got no problem with personal essays or personal essays that run in the New York Times, or narcissistic young women in crisis with writing skills. The essay is basically like being inside her immature crisis, but that's interesting enough! And tells us something about how fucked up things are -- considering all the problems in the world that angry old people were just dying to point out (outraged-ly -- there's a war! climate change! --everything else that's covered in the hundreds of thousands of other words in the Sunday NYT! Those things: It's very hard for the smart individual to know if there's anything she can do about them --- I thought the girl revealing the extent of her introspection and self-obsession commented on this -- although she probably should have mentioned it was commenting on that if it was, which she didn't.)

Many people thought she should turn her talents to work that helps the world. True enough.

I would like to know how to do that.

It's very confusing all the different value systems out there - how deeply flawed some of them are... and the staggering rewards of signing up for some of them which are shallow. Of course the rewards are rewards from within the same system (i.e. work with money, make money... deal with fame, be around fame....)

Anyway, I think the girl needs a vacation and people should let her be. She's going to drive herself mad.

I also think it's sad to see the way people think as soon as they feel threatened. It's so useless feeling superior. Feeling superior was a crime to which she was (at least attempting to be) coming clean and people went and felt all superior on her, and it is ugly to see.

God knows how much I hate the girl at work who talks shit about me. I practically shake every time I see her.

Love to you
A