Different Thinking...

Hey, you! Yeah, I'm talkin' to YOU...

Whatcha doin'?  :)  Well, Stevie baby, whatever it is, I hope you're doin' it good, and doin' it right. Or, bein' REAL bad, and doin' it REAL good...mmmm!! (insert eyebrows moving up and down).

It's time for me to hit the hay but I wanted to just toss out this weird thought I had earlier...because that seems to be one thing I have a talent for doing---have you ever seen the movie The Truman Story? (Jim Carey starred in it).  Well, my thought was this...

If celebrities (like you) have spent a long time feeling as though you're living in a fish bowl, with gawking weird people clamoring for your attention at every moment, breathing germs in your face, and acting like friggin' wild animals around you---common SHEEPLE who have common jobs, common lives, common relationships, etc., would that make YOU want to put THEM in some kind of fish bowl, so that YOU can sit and watch THEM and THEIR weird lives, as a sort of "revenge *slash* karma-like" existential, bizarre, abstract "kink" of sorts??

Like, are you enthralled by boring people who write stupid shit on Facebook?  ('Cause I do that all the time). hehehehehe

But I digress.

Well, what if, there was some kind of social network LIKE Facebook, or similar to Twitter, but it's only just for celebrities---not John Q. Public---but ONLY for all the famous and popular celebrities---to sit and check out those boring people, to read about a boring regular lame-ass person's life, or, well---heyyyy.....

....to sit......and read a boring BLOG......that some boring lame-ass person in Pittsburgh writes....often several times a day even.....with a bizarre knack for imagining what you might think or say or do, (not really knowing what, if anything, you actually think, say or do for REAL).......wow that really sounds pathetic.........but does it tickle your fancy knowing that there are people like me, sitting out here in la-la-land, trying to achieve who-the-hell-KNOWS-what by writing stupid stuff like this, just to pass the time??  And if I'm so bad by writing this crazy stuff, what the hell does that make YOU, in reading it?!!

I'm just curious.  People are weird, no matter where you go. Watching them is a fine art though. My grandma taught me that. We would go to the local Meijers store in Michigan and sit in the cafe and just watch people, and make up stories about their lives, based on what they were wearing, doing, or saying.

When I worked at the Museum, I often felt like I was the one in a fishbowl, especially if I was a captive audience stuck at the information desk, answering the same questions over and over and over, with people breathing germs on me, (somebody once asked me, while pointing at the stairs that led down to the lower level, "Do these stairs go down?" and I just stood there, silent, and blinked a few times before I said, "No, those actually go up." (I am a smart-ass sometimes).  The person said, "Oh! Okay, sorry, thanks...and she turned around and walked the other way towards the door). Unbelievable.

Another person actually asked me "Where do they keep Hitler's money?" (The Museum is located next door to the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, where they make all the money).  I blinked again, and finally said, "Oh, he didn't have any left, he spent it all on Eva Braun before they committed suicide." The person thought I was telling the truth, and said, "Oh, bummer...ok, thanks." Tourists. (shaking my head). One person asked me where the "lamp shades made of human skin" were located.  I said, "Probably in Hannibal Lector's house." The person thought Hannibal Lector was a famous Nazi. If you've never seen The Silence of the Lambs movie, go rent it. You'll figure it out.

So, when I rotated to another post in the Museum, I would often watch through the glass windows on each floor, all the people (tourists mostly) sitting down in the lobby area.  They had no idea they were being watched, and sometimes they were really bizarre...fascinating, but also horrifying on some level. I mean, they were really just sitting there, doing nothing, killing time, not really understanding where they were or what they were supposed to learn while they were there, and sometimes they were just doing strange things, or acting very strange. I would stand there, above them, and watch them...and it felt odd. But they were the ones in the fish bowl, and it was a strange, surrealistic feeling.

I remember one day, where one of my coworkers and I laughed ourselves sick, because we suddenly decided to make various people that we saw into "Super Heroes."  Yes, I know this sounds really lame to you probably, but if you had actually been there with us, you would have guffawed like a hyena.

One kid was making his way down the stairs to the main lobby and he was flipping his baseball hat around like some kind of num-chucks, (I am not sure how to spell that),  and I said, in my most convincing super hero voice, "I AM A SUPAH HERO! My name is NUM-CHUCK BOY!" And my coworker chimed in with, "My mom says that I might poke my eye out with REAL num-chucks, so I am only allowed to flip my HAT at various villains!"

One lady was holding her stomach area, and running down the stairs, (it looked as though she had to go to the bathroom really bad), and I yelled, "I AM FULL BLADDER WOMAN!" and my coworker instantly chimed in with, "FOLLOW MY TRAIL!" and we fell all over each other, hysterical from all the laughing...it was a classic moment...I'll never forget how damned funny that day was...

Another day, I dared all of my coworkers in my team to count how many women were wearing VERTICAL STRIPED shirts.  Did you know that those are RARE?!  For men, they are pretty much standard issue, but for women, oh nooooo...we get those nasty horizontal striped crap that make our boobs look twice as big....because MEN design that stuff....so, I figured we'd see maybe 5 or 10 at the most...but by the end of the day, we had about 50....it was hilarious to hear everybody get on their radios and say, "Found one...third floor...near the shoes..." or, "Saw one near the bathrooms..." and "There's one, over by the Zyklon B."

NOTE:  In case you've never been to the Museum, on the third floor there are shoes from Auschwitz that victims in the concentration camps wore, in a huge pile, and the Zyklon B pellets were rat poison that emitted a "gas" when dropped down a wire metal shaft and rubbed against the wires...which is what the Nazis used in the gas chambers and/or the "showers" to kill the Jews.  Our supervisors, who also had radios, didn't have a CLUE what we were talkin' about the whole day, but we all got a kick out of it.

That's the kind of "rabble rousing" I did, little things, that eventually got on the nerves of the powers that be.  But, I was just being creative, and trying to make the day go by without so much doom and death and destruction in my face all the damned time.  I mean, I had to go home and watch the Three Stooges every night, just so I could laugh awhile, and feel better after a long, depressing day of working there.  And I did that for 6 years.  Yeah, Mo and Larry and Curly were my therapists!!  Hey, it was cheap, and it worked.  So, what the hell.

"For the Love of Strange Medicine" indeed.

I just wondered if you liked watching regular, boring people, and reading about their boring lives.

Ok, well, I'm off to sleep....it's still raining here, third day in a row, maybe 4th...can't remember....but the hurricane is causing this place to be rather soggy everywhere, our lawn needs mowing but we can't...and there were 5 deer in our backyard tonight, just standing there in the rain, chomping on grass...I love watching deer...they are so peaceful and quiet and just so elegant in the way they run......I get so sad and upset whenever I see one dead on the side of the road. We saw a fawn today, dead on the side of the road and both my mom and I yelled, "OH NO!! DAMMIT PEOPLE!! Ohhhhh I HATE THAT!!"

Well, I gotta scoot. Love you lots....sorry for my weird ramblings, I'm rather tired. I get a bit loopy when I'm tired. Have a good night...

Love, Rebecca