Just because you're famous doesn't mean you have a lot of friends

I can't believe I looked at this, but I saw it off of the blogger.com website and I had to click on it, because it was like the time I saw that one of my nth degree friends in friendster was Triple H, of world wrestling fame. Anyways, it's the blog of David Duchovny (you know, the guy from the X-files). Apparently he's a director now. Hollywood is just like the corporate world, you start off small (actor or worker bee) and eventually in order to maintain your career, you need to go up higher in the food chain and start giving orders (director or manager).

Anyways, I didn't read too much of it because I'm not really interested in what he has to say, but I did see that he has like a million comments, probably mostly all 40-something women who are totally obsessed with him and fantasize about being Scully with Mulder's half-alien baby. I don't know if he bothers reading any of those comments but if I were a famous person and had all these psycho stalkers out there telling me how wonderful I am, I would be a little weirded out (thought I still don't give celebrities the right to harm the paparazzi :-P). I guess to some degree people love that sort of thing, being patted on the back or kissed on the ass. I think most people who blog want that kind of attention and they probably write something and then sit back and watch as people leave comments and tell them how funny or how witty or how cool they are. I mean why else do I write this stuff anyway? I need to get more people reading this so I get more comments. :-P

Someone sent me this today and I realized how real this need is for people. This blog is some young mother who wants to share her experience...apparently there's a huge community of young bored internet-savvy mothers who need people to hear about their daily lives (because heck if their working husbands give a damn about what their baby spat up during lunchtime). The first I heard of this group of women was from this site which is the blog of that woman who got fired from her newspaper job because she blogged about people at work and they got mad, waanh waanh waanh. Both of these women actually have a very similar life (both young blogging mothers) and similar writing styles and senses of humor. I didn't particularly find the post about smelling babies butts that funny, but apparently that lady's internet friends think she is a total riot. Comment after comment was totally stroking her ego, "LOL! You so funny girl!" or "Oh my gosh, you are amazing, you're so funny, I love you!" Not those exact words, but you get the point. Made me want to throw up into a baby's diaper and ask her to smell it to see if she can tell what I ate.

So please don't ever give me three character comments like LOL or try to suck up to me and tell me how funny or hot I am. If you leave a comment, I want to know really what you think about what I say...it's the only way I'll learn about humans and how they think so I can take that back to my mother planet and tell them what they need to do to take over Earth. :-P

Don't look in the aquarium...

This morning d said, "Awwwww!!!" and then "Don't look in the aquarium." I knew right away what had happened. I just didn't know to whom.

It turned out that the second of our snakeskin gouramis paid a visit to davey jones' locker. He was EIGHT years old! I don't know typically how long fish last, but this pair was pretty hearty, lasting through three big moves and a couple of major ICK breakouts. Sometime last year one of them croaked and I knew it was only a matter of time before his twin met the same fate.

So goodbye forever, Happy and Ralph. I'll miss you guys.

No refund on lost time

I'm not good at returning things. If something I bought doesn't work or look exactly the way I want it to work or look, I probably just try to live with it. Like the printer I mentioned before. Instead of being completely unsatisfied and letting go, I sucked it up and made the best of what I had. I guess I have a lot of things that I'm not completely satisfied with but keep around because I'm either too lazy or too apathetic to do something about my dissatisfaction.

That's not the way things always work though. Take the real estate industry for example. If you're not completely satisfied with the deal you're getting, the best thing you could do about it is to walk away. Even if you've already wasted a lot of time and effort on your part making phone calls, meeting with people, writing checks, researching on the internet, picking out paint colors...if you're not happy with what's going on, people say that you should just walk away. That may sound really easy to do when you're talking about a printer that doesn't perform to your standards. You just go to the store and return it, get your money back, you go buy another printer, no big deal. The thing with printers is that they're all pretty much the same, just different prices, different colors, different plastic, but in the end, they all produce the same output. But with something like a house, no two are exactly alike. If you like one and you want to buy it, and then end up having to walk away, you can't just go back to the store and pick up another comparable one.

I guess what I'm saying is that when you spend a ton of time trying to buy a house because you think you're going to end up living in it, it's hard to just forget about it and walk away. But that's apparently how the cookie crumbles. People always say, if it's not meant to be, it's not meant to be. But why can't people find that out sooner? I guess it's the same with those weddings where the bride or groom gets left at the alter. The only thing to do at that point is to move on. All you've really lost in the end is time. And unfortunately no one can refund that to you. Except that guy that has that time machine. But I'm sure he's going to charge you a pretty penny for using it.

Your personal network

Most people ask other people they know for advice or opinions about anything. You want to be sure, right? If other people have had bad experiences or good experiences, you want to know, to make sure you're making the right decision. That's what consumer reviews are for. And friends and relatives.

Sometimes people give bad advice. Or they have a different experience with something or someone than you would have. I remember the one time I posted a customer review on Circuit City's website, for a printer I bought that printed a 4x6 photo in a really slow 10 minutes. That was just my experience. So I put on the review, I couldn't get this printer to print at the rate it was advertised, it was too slow, etc. Of course soon after I post, people start commenting (even though this really shouldn't be allowed, since everyone's entitled to their own opinion)..."You must be stupid, mine didn't take 10 minutes" or "What are you talking about, idiot, you probably messed something up to make it so slow." Everyone has different experiences and you can't expect that because it's good for the goose, it's good for you. Or if it's bad, same thing. The truth is, even after I bad-mouthed my printer on the website, I still kept it and it lasted me a good while, through 3 christmas cards and a wedding.

Anyways, my point is that if you ask people for opinions or advice, they're only telling you what they know. And if you ask them to recommend a person to help you with something, they might not recommend the best person, they'll recommend a person they know, maybe a friend or something. And maybe they might not recommend to you someone who is good because he was a jerk to them. It would be interesting to track that kind of social network of referrals...to see how much "inbreeding" goes on between social and business transactions.

Trust me...would I lie to you?

It's so hard these days to trust people. But if you don't trust people, you're pretty much a non-contribution to society and might as well be dead.

I find it very hard to trust people. I was thinking about this the other day when I was watching something on tv about religion. People believed in Jesus because they trusted him, they had faith that he was special. He didn't have to or want to prove to people that he was special, if you doubted him, then you didn't have the faith. Then I thought if I were living in those Biblical times, and some dude came up to me and said he was going to save us all, I would totally doubt him. I would think, how do I know he's not a representative for the evil side? I'd better be safe than sorry.

That's the thing about religion. If you don't have the faith, you don't believe. And you have to trust to have faith. And in order to trust, you have to be a little ignorant or naive. Trust isn't one of those things that you can logically deduce or mentally vote on. You either trust or you don't. You just have to trust that the guy telling you he's the son of god is really the son of god and not the son of the devil lying to you.

I guess in this day and age, it's more likely that someone would lie to you than people would back in Biblical times. There's so much more at stake for people that they need to look out for themselves, and if it means telling a little white lie to you in order for you to trust them, then I guess it's ok. But I still wonder...