penfield | No sense in being a grifter if it's the same as being a citizen.

Everyone wants to be famous.

Fame is like a black hole, swallowing up any matter except for itself. We have famous people like Paris Hilton who seem to be famous for being famous; famous people like Ryan Seacrest who are famous for talking about famous people; famous people like the sun-dappled drones on The Hills who are famous for living where famous people live. There are famous people famous for marrying famous people (Kevin Federline), famous people famous for f&cking famous people (Kim Kardashian) and famous people famous for f&cking (Jenna Jameson, although judging by recent photos she seems to be morphing into some sort of famous water fowl).

And millions of us want to be a part of the black hole. When I stopped watching reality TV as a rule five years ago, people were eating live bugs and marrying total strangers for a chance to be on television. I shudder to think how far the envelope has been pushed since; are we feeding people to lions yet?

Even my dearest friends and family are vulnerable to famelust. My mother will tell anyone who is conscious that Jerry Seinfeld used to hang out in her kitchen, and to this day harbors the fantasy of accompanying me to the Oscars. [Probably not happening, Mom.] And I acknowledge that I am not immune. I have already calculated that there are five degrees between me and Kevin Bacon.

This very journal itself suggests a barely-conscious, passive-agressive search for approval and acclaim. If it weren't for the fact that I can usually count the number of thread comments in binary terms, I would feel sort of ashamed.

About the only person I know with a frosty-cool attitude about fame is ERD, who has exchanged pleasantries with hundreds of bullsh!t industry award winners (and their mothers) and whose real name is seen by more eyeballs than those of the rest of my friends combined. And still I suspect that he would trade in the relative romance and anonymity of print journalism tomorrow if MTV asked him to host Total Request Live!

None of this is new. Sociologists, satirists and David Bowie have been decrying this pitiable human trait for centuries. Fortunately, or unfortunately, most of us will never be featured on E! News Daily, unless we somehow end up f&cking Lindsay Lohan (Currently a one-in-five probability, according to prevailing research.)

So folks have had to settle for something slightly less than famous: popularity. Popularity is like fame, only popularity can be confined to a smaller locus, and does not entail obligatory endorsement offers and paparazzi coverage.

One bonus of popularity is that it implies some degree of quality, or at least commercial success, while fame carries a broader range of connotations. On the other hand, being popular virtually guarantees that you will be despised by critics and hipsters. Of course, critics and hipsters generally dislike famous people, too (unless they have been famous for a really long time, like Bob Dylan or Jack Nicholson), although in many cases the famous can be embraced for the purposes of irony or titillation.

So how does one achieve popularity? The answer is easy: be cool, good-looking, and in high school. Given that most of us have already graduated high school (emotional immaturity notwithstanding) and most of that group hated high school to begin with, the solution is more difficult than the answer.

Certain entities have arisen to fill the need for high school-after-high school. They are often referred to as "social networking" Web sites. These sites exist to: passively organize and standardize the various interlocking webs of acquaintance; actively bring together like-minded individuals by codifying interests and leisure activities; and enable unobtrusive stalking of ex- or potentially future mates.

First there was Friendster, then there was MySpace, now there is Facebook. I have been a member of each of these "networks" at one time or another, and they all seem pretty much the same, with the same form to fill out and the same value-added features and the same faces in the crowd.

I'm sure there are users of these services who aggressively leverage their social connections to generate more and more friends, thereby quantitatively creating popularity. But I was not one of these upwardly mobile people. My spaces served only as an awkward, incomplete list of people I knew, generally falling into one of three categories:
(1) Really very good friends, with whom I regularly interacted outside of the Friendster space;
(2) Old friends I hadn't talked to in years, who somehow located me through shared friends or mere coincidence
(3) People I sort of knew but did not necessarily like, connected by nothing more than third-degree shared friends and an echoing, pathetic desire to be popular.

This notion so filled me with feelings of agoraphobia and self-loathing that I canceled my Friendster and MySpace accounts, and switched to an alias on Facebook -- until some of you found me anyway (how did you do that?) and I deactivated that, too. It's nothing personal, I just don't want to play.

I've decided that if I'm going to be famous or popular, it's going to be for doing something, preferably something useful or artistic or noble -- not for knowing someone, or knowing a lot of people, or f&cking someone famous. (Note to Jessica Alba: that doesn't mean we can't meet up for a drink and whatever happens, happens.)

And in the meantime, if you need to know my interests, or my mood, or who my friends are, or when my birthday is, you can always find it right here. Think of it as a social network, without the "work."