"I didn't say it was reality, I said it was the fantasy."

I have been laughing this afternoon. I told my father about the little dilemma I'm having with a friend who's getting a little bit weird to me. (I figure it takes a guy sometimes to figure out the behavior of another one.) Things look better in the light of day, I must admit. We were talking about the situation and it was pretty funny. One of the things we were laughing about is that this guy friend of mine is a bit on the vain side. In his mind, he thinks everyone is looking at him. If you go back to one of my previous blogs, he's the one I talk about where I am ranting about how I was out to dinner with him and he spent the entire night preening in every reflective surface. He's still like that. If he passes a mirror or any other similar surface, he always stops to look. Sometimes I even catch him doing like this really cheesy practice walk in front of reflective surfaces like he thinks he might be a model on a catwalk. It reminds me of "I'm Too Sexy" and I want to laugh but I know better; his ego, while big, is far too fragile to tolerate me giggling at him so I don't. And that is why I have you, fair blog readers. It's a great place for me to write what I need to and then go on with my day. So anyway, my dad was pointing out this friend's vain nature and how over-the-top he can be and he pointed out to me that this friend may have the idea that someone important is going to see him and who knows what-- offer him some posh job, tell him he should be in movies, etc. And I laughed and laughed. I was like, "Yeah, because where we are, that's so genuine of a possibility." And my dad said, "I didn't say it was reality, I said it was the fantasy that's probably playing out in his mind. He probably says to himself, 'If I just preen and copy some ideas from someone else I think is cool, maybe I will get discovered because everyone in the world is looking at me anyway.'" It brought it all home to me that I don't need to worry about this guy's copycat tendencies. At the end of the day, it's only screwing him over. It's screwing him out of finding his own personal identity and it's making him look like a poor Xerox without originality. Strangely enough, it made me flashback to grad school. Our program was very heavy on language theory and I remember learning about how the Structuralists theorized about binary oppositions (God/Devil, Man/Woman, Love/Hate, etc.) and then the Deconstructionists postulated that in any binary, one concept is always superior to the other even to the point of marginalizing the other. That's what I think about a copycat friend: one person is always going to be better at what is being copied so you're putting yourself in a bad situation by forcing people to make a comparison. Like in those celebrity mags where photographers track down two women who wore the same designer dress and then ask readers to vote which one wore the dress "better." It's best to just not even go there. What a shame. I hope he wakes up and snaps out of it all soon.

In other, brighter news, I am excited. Stream of consciousness moment: Family Guy is on where Bill Clinton hangs out with Peter and sings "Barbie Girl" on the Dance Dance Revolution machine. Shit, that's funny. What was I talking about . . . Oh yeah, vacation. I'll be going on vacation soon and I'm ready for it. And the holidays are coming up too and I'm weirdly happy for them this year. Damn. Turkey already sounds good. Fun things are on the horizon and I'm ready to soak them all up.

Zzzzz. It's about time to make myself into the blanket burrito. And wish, of course, that the work week wasn't starting anew all over again.