I Will Buy You That Big House, Way Up In The West Hills

You want to know one of the best parts about moving somewhere? Having a whole slew of new facebook friend requests. Yes, it's petty and unbelievably superficial, but that's what makes it awesome. Go ahead, and tell me you aren't immediately intrigued and excited when you see that '1 new friend request', or better yet, the '2 new friend requests' icon at the top right corner. You are. We all are. We all like to know that people find us interesting and that people would actually like to get to know us. Of course, saying that sending out a friend request implies both or either of those is a stretch, but I don't care. I like to stroke the ego and take the opportunities that come to do so.

However, it does bring me to some of my more hypocritical moments. If you are my facebook friend, which I'm sure you must be because I have no clue how else you would even find this blog, then you know that the only things in the "Boxes" tab I have are lexulous, scramble and wordtwist. That's right. Three scrabble-esque, how many words do you know, games. And yes, I'm pretty good at all three. I still don't know how I lost that one game of lexulous, and truth be told, I think the other guy cheated (Sitterud beat me. Tell me he's not above using some website to come up with the best word possible from his tray. Go ahead. Don't mind my laughing. Continue.).

The point is, my profile beyond the interests tab, is about as blank as it can be. But I will tell you this. Whenever I get a new friend, the first thing I do is check out if they have bumper stickers and/or flair. I simply can't get enough of them. They kill me. And I have to look through all of them. Friend request from someone with 85 stickers and 75 pieces of flair at 12:45am? Guess I'm busy until 1:10 looking through them all. So what if I have a midterm tomorrow morning? I've got new stickers to look at! I'm busy here!

But you'll never see me put either of those up on my account. Ever. Mostly because I will likely add every single one that they have onto my profile. I would make an add-on that would simply stream the new ones onto my profile as soon as they were available. I would have them sent to my email and cell phone so I could see them as soon as they were hatched. And it would be an all-consuming activity for me. I simply can't afford it. It's the same reason I'm abstaining from reading the Harry Potter series. I know they're good. I simply don't want to sign off on a month or so of my life to knock the collection out. It might even be worth it, but I can't justify knowingly spending a month on a kid wizard.

Plus, it opens the door for the Twilight four-peat. I'll have none of that. Not now, not ever. I watched that first movie, and all I could think was, "Wow, this is some poor acting", "This seems horribly low budget" and "I'm so glad I'm never reading this". (It turns out that while the first and the last are subjective, the middle one is completely objective. The entire cost for the first film was about $37M, not including the sketchy marketing figures. To put that in perspective, 'The Devil Wears Prada' was $35M and 'Sweet Home Alabama" was $38M. And neither of those movies had special effects, and both had A-list actors and came off much more well done.)

So even though it is more than a tad bit hypocritical, I love the opportunity to see other people's favorite bumper stickers, but refuse to collect all of mine for others to enjoy. I just can't afford right now to start going down that road. There are too many time-dependent activities in my life that are marginally, if not substantially more important (e.g. med school). I'm sorry, but I just can't do it right now. Maybe in four years. Maybe.

Word.