Just watched a horrible show on owning chimps as pets. They showcased the two attacks in Stanford and Northern California, and had explicitly stated that all chimps past puberty are an accident waiting to happen. They had a physiologist advising that all people who own chimps think that their very special bond is just so much more special than anyone else’s bond possibly can be, and the camera just showed this woman who owned not one but two so completely deluded that she knew all that and still thought she was safe with her “children”.

Are we that deluded that we have to be so special and unique from everyone else that we need to resort to keep animals that actually does something called a coordinated chimpanzee mauling. Chimps go for the face, genitals and fingers when they’re in a rage? If there’s three things that make us separate from anyone else it’s what we can do with those three things.

No one is a special snowflake. We are all so achingly similar, and that is not a bad thing. If you want to be that special snowflake, it’s not going to happen without the years of practice and work it takes to be better at something than most people on average are.

I think we should start by stop calling first books by new authors that. They are the first published book by new, published authors, but that “first” book and your first book that you write ever are both printed on paper, and that’s about the only similarity. It takes years and years to be an overnight success, and yet we have television shows built on the delusions that just because you can sing/dance/cook/build fences etc, that the people who actually have been practicing singing/dancing/cooking/building fences for so long aren’t interesting enough.

We have to watch the average person (Canadian idol was just as bad as American Idol) think that just because is a camera involved, their good enough is good enough to make it, and we, the viewer, get satisfaction out of the lunacy) and yet 10,000 people lined up for hours for that chance so that 38 could move on to the next level. How is that any different than the average numbers of authors picked up by a new agents in the last year?