Fucking Famous As Shit!

First, check out the new badge from Expats Blog!

Then forgive me for what's to follow!

I'll never be rich beyond my wildest dreams, but at least I'm not these folks.

So from time to time, I get an email about how my blog is so great and could I just add this widget or banner or thingie or whatever to my site and then through some unlikely convoluted Internet mechanism, someone might heft a few cents or pence my way. I usually ignore them, because most of the time the emails are spammy or over-general about discount travel or selling stuff I don't give a shit about, like fashionable tables or trench coats.

Insecurity is Fun!

But sometimes, it's a real thing that people send me emails about, where they want to give me some credit about doing whatever it is I do. And they offer me a cool badge and for about 5 seconds I feel a little better than I usually do. After that 5 seconds is up, I start wondering to myself, "Why did they choose me? How did they find me? What's wrong? Is there really no one else they could have chosen?" because whenever someone thinks I've done something good, I assume it's either because a) I've come in third in a two-horse race, or b) they want me to give them money for some sort of vanity prize, or c) my parents have gotten to them, and either guilted them into making me think I'm cool, or paid them to make me think I'm normal.

I blame her.

I think I haven't mentioned this particular unfounded paranoia of mine, which has nothing to do with my parents and everything to do with my own personal crazy. Starting when I was about 8 and I saw this Vegas hypnotist on TV, I became convinced that my life wasn't real, and that I was in fact miming my every waking act in front of my 2nd grade class while they laughed, and at some point in my life our guest-speaker hypnotist was going to snap me out of the trance and I would be returned to 2nd grade, my life unlived and pretend. I would be left to deal with the playground jeers of my classmates who'd watched me miming taking dumps and masturbating and goodness knows what else.

I blame him.

Entering adolescence, I mostly abandoned the hypnotist thing in favor of the camera forever pointed on my bedroom and bathroom, making movies of me doing stuff for my peers to snicker at. Not that I've completely given up on the fear (hope?) that I might be returned to 2nd grade to start my life over again. Given that this camera issue was way pre-Internet, I suppose the peer-sharing aspect would have had to involve a lot of VHS tapes.

Stupid body.

And then I got my period. I was 12. It was a bit early, but not too abnormally so. For some reason, no one I knew ever talked about periods except my mother and some people who taught us about sex ed and ovaries and stuff. The whole thing was cloaked in crushing, unbearable mystery-shame. I could never bring myself to ask our PE teacher or school nurse for much-needed feminine hygiene items whenever that came up, because I was convinced I was the only person this was happening to. Any evidence to the contrary was because my parents, in their desire to protect me from the humiliation, had paid off the world and engineered hint-dropping, such as Judy Blume books and feminine hygiene advertising, to make me think it was normal that this fucking god-awful thing was happening to me.

Welcome to the shitrealm of my ridiculous First World insecurities.

Anyway, if you don't want to punch me in the neck after that whole unrelated mess, please take a second of your time to notice the cool new badge from ExpatsBlog. They found me somehow. At the moment I'm just trying to feel good and not suspicious. Apparently, I also have to plug myself (hee! plug myself!) a bit and get readers to write something here about how I'm great and not a complete fuckup loser.

Even if you're just my mom and dad using various socks, I'd be ever so pleased.

Thanks for putting up with me.

It's not about him. It's about me.