Bonnie Chau bchau@media.ucla.edu
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Fame is a funny thing. Every once in a while, someone brings up
the theory that every single person wants to be famous. I have
always regarded and dismissed it as just another expendable
conspiracy theory of sorts. Until now.
Wielding the small yet potent power that is the Daily Bruin
column, suddenly everyone thinks I can ““ and should ““
give them their 15 minutes. Every other week, someone else begs me
to put them in my column. There are the friends who are only half
joking when they request that I dedicate an entire column to them.
There are those who suggest a new direction for my column, such as,
“From now on only write about masturbation,” or harass
me over every column that doesn’t follow their input.
My sister tries valiantly to maneuver a request for dates and
her phone number or e-mail address (ahem pneu13@aol.com) into my
column. Her boyfriend is prone to drunken e-mails which list every
column I’ve ever written and in what way I committed huge
transgressions by not mentioning him and then detailing a
convenient way in which I could have incorporated him into the
story. Her other friends whom I have not spoken to in years have
been known to write long e-mails proposing we establish some sort
of secret signal or code to acknowledge them. For example,
I’d include a random phrase like “stick to your
guns” and they’d know it was a shout-out to them.
Even friends of friends of friends whom I’ve just met at
dinner try to persuade me to simply drop their names into my next
column. “Can you write about anything you want?” they
say. “Yeah, pretty much,” I say. “Ooh can you
write about me? And this dinner?”
Only worsening the situation, I’m sure, is the fact that
whenever new people are being met, my friend seems to derive
infinite pleasure from introducing me as “Bonnie-do
you-read-the-Daily-Bruin-she-writes-for-the-Daily-Bruin Chau.
And then there are those friends who see themselves as already
famous, the ones who see themselves in every column I write. Of
course half my goals as a columnist are to get you to identify with
what I’m talking about (the other half being to get you to
totally recoil in disgust and repulsion and confusion and
non-identification). But what of my friends who proclaim,
“Wow you’ve written all your columns all about me!
What’s the next thing you’re going to write about
me?”, when in fact, I haven’t, and have no intention of
doing so?
What do I have to say to all these people in my life who think
fame is so swell? How about maybe their time would be better spent
creating something for themselves? If you want to be famous ““
and you know you do ““ let it be for painting something
totally horrendous, for writing a great song. Be famous for
inventing something really ugly but quite useful, or for
discovering a brilliant cure. Get up off your ass and be famous for
saving the world.