Thursday, July 29, 2004
Baring My Soul, and Anything Else that Won’t Get Me Arrested
Lately I’ve been sort of obsessed with the website grouphug.us, where people "confess" things that have been bothering them or that they feel bad about. I have to admit there’s a certain degree of shadenfreude to my enjoyment; no matter how strange I sometimes feel, I can look at these confessions and say "hey, well, at least I’m not into monkey porn" or "thank god I’ve never had fantasies about Janice from the Muppets." But what really interests me about the site is trying to figure out which confessions are made up. For instance, if you’re confessing to one bizarre sexual conquest, okay, I believe you. But if it becomes three or four, it seems less likely, especially if they were supposedly in the course of an hour or if you claim there was a salad bar involved (trust me, you would never get past the sneeze guard). Or "confessing" that you watch The Goonies whenever they rerun it on television? Okay, that’s all of us. Why don’t you confess that you breathe oxygen or that you think Ben Affleck is overexposed?
But anyway, in keeping with the spirit of confessing (and lying), I’ve come up with my own list of never-before-told secrets. Some of them are real and some of them are fake. The first person to guess correctly which are which wins a prize, which will be all the more enjoyable because it is completely unverifiable.
– In second grade I had a crush on my science teacher. I used to imagine she was demonstrating how friction can create static electricity only for me.
– Even though it’s completely great literature and all, I think The Faerie Queen is like the boringest thing ever. It makes me think that maybe banning books wouldn’t be entirely a bad thing, so long as I got to pick 'em.
– I once killed a man with my bare hands. I felt kind of bad, but I didn’t really have anything else to do.
– Once when my friend and I were drunk and violent we broke the couch in my living room. We didn’t tell anyone, and then we let my roommates think it was broken because a fat guy sat on it.
– I played the role of "Betsy" on the popular daytime television program As The World Turns from 1982-1984.
– I am the one who told Demi Moore to make a film version of The Scarlet Letter. It was also my idea to add all the fucking.
– I came up with the nickname "White Trash Face" for this girl at my undergrad, and it caught on. I think her makeup and scrunchy bangs were more to blame than me, however.
Isn’t this fun? Send me your guesses and I will most likely completely ignore them, but at least it will make you feel involved in the process. Kind of like voting in Florida.
Lately I’ve been sort of obsessed with the website grouphug.us, where people "confess" things that have been bothering them or that they feel bad about. I have to admit there’s a certain degree of shadenfreude to my enjoyment; no matter how strange I sometimes feel, I can look at these confessions and say "hey, well, at least I’m not into monkey porn" or "thank god I’ve never had fantasies about Janice from the Muppets." But what really interests me about the site is trying to figure out which confessions are made up. For instance, if you’re confessing to one bizarre sexual conquest, okay, I believe you. But if it becomes three or four, it seems less likely, especially if they were supposedly in the course of an hour or if you claim there was a salad bar involved (trust me, you would never get past the sneeze guard). Or "confessing" that you watch The Goonies whenever they rerun it on television? Okay, that’s all of us. Why don’t you confess that you breathe oxygen or that you think Ben Affleck is overexposed?
But anyway, in keeping with the spirit of confessing (and lying), I’ve come up with my own list of never-before-told secrets. Some of them are real and some of them are fake. The first person to guess correctly which are which wins a prize, which will be all the more enjoyable because it is completely unverifiable.
– In second grade I had a crush on my science teacher. I used to imagine she was demonstrating how friction can create static electricity only for me.
– Even though it’s completely great literature and all, I think The Faerie Queen is like the boringest thing ever. It makes me think that maybe banning books wouldn’t be entirely a bad thing, so long as I got to pick 'em.
– I once killed a man with my bare hands. I felt kind of bad, but I didn’t really have anything else to do.
– Once when my friend and I were drunk and violent we broke the couch in my living room. We didn’t tell anyone, and then we let my roommates think it was broken because a fat guy sat on it.
– I played the role of "Betsy" on the popular daytime television program As The World Turns from 1982-1984.
– I am the one who told Demi Moore to make a film version of The Scarlet Letter. It was also my idea to add all the fucking.
– I came up with the nickname "White Trash Face" for this girl at my undergrad, and it caught on. I think her makeup and scrunchy bangs were more to blame than me, however.
Isn’t this fun? Send me your guesses and I will most likely completely ignore them, but at least it will make you feel involved in the process. Kind of like voting in Florida.
