Life of the Lintee Bean

Okay, I’m needy. First of all, I am STILL trolling MySpace, searching for friends. I’ve added celebrities like KT Tunstall and Evanescence. I’ve added fictional characters such as Spencer & Russ from Psych, “Chuck” and even Vincent the dog from LOST. I’m pathetic, and sadly I STILL have less than 40 friends. I look at the profiles of people I know with over 100 or even 250 friends… and wonder what they have that I don’t. (I realize the answer is most likely “a life”.)

I’m needy here as well. I look eagerly to see if anyone has commented. Generally, no one has. Some have viewed, that’s encouraging. Hopefully they didn’t just get here by accident, and leave as soon as they saw “Crazy Cat Lady Blogging” – huh? What the heck? I don’t want to be here…

Perhaps sadder yet, I actually go to the comments that wordpress has marked as spam, and read them all. I hope to discover they’re not spam – but genuinely people I’ve never met that have commented on my blog. Now, the ones that contain links to Viagra or hot cars are unlikely to have actually looked at my blog…. but maybe the ones that just say “Nice read” or “Looking for something different and found your blog” or “Keep the posts coming”, maybe wordpress is wrong. Maybe they’re not spam, but fans.

By the way, I have actually started writing the book – the first in what I hope to be a series of books. Pretty exciting! Of course, I got all bogged down in details and wasted the first afternoon debating what size the book should be – standard paperback or grocery-store paperback? I spent hours debating where the page numbers should be. However, once I really started writing, it was fun! Fun for a while, that is. After about 10 pages, it got significantly less fun. I’m up to about 16 pages now, with pictures, if it’s a tiny grocery-store paperback. I will either need to push myself harder, or it will be the shortest book in history.

A friend suggested I need to give it to others for feedback, once it’s drafted. She says writing a book is not supposed to be easy. It’s not? That’s a huge bummer. My dilemma – if I give the book to friends and family, who will buy the book? I have maybe ten people who have promised to buy a copy – but if I’ve already provided it to them for feedback, there go all my sales.

Same friend suggested I decide how much I’d like to earn, then divide that by the number of people who will likely buy it. However, I doubt these people would pay $1 million for a book. I’m counting on, if the price is low enough, some will buy it out of pity.

In the meantime, I’ll attempt to bask in the two mentions I have in other books. One is just a first name, but the other has first and last name… on page xv. Unfortunately, it seems few people read those roman-numbered pages. I’m considering buying packages of those small stickie notes with the arrows, like you use to indicate people should sign documents, and trolling bookstores placing them strategically on page xv.

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I am thrilled to announce I now have EIGHT MySpace friends! Wow!

Of course, the joy at having eight MySpace friends is a bit dampened by a few things:

1) One of my new friends is an animal shelter – I do like the shelter, but you can’t exactly go out for a cup of coffee with an animal shelter, or order pizza with an animal shelter…

2) Another of my new friends is a cat. LOVE cats – but I somehow feel the fact that two of my eight friends are non-human depletes my “cool and hip” quotient on MySpace.

3) One new friend is my brother. Siblings are kind of bound by DNA to be your friends, I think. On another (but related) note, my dear brother has posted a few comments to my blog. Thanks, Kurt! I suspect Mom told him to. Moms are the ones you can count on to attend your high school sporting events, high school plays, and read your blog. Except my mom is pretty busy, so apparently delegated that task to my brother. I do have to commend Kurt on the t-shirt recommendation. TOTALLY ordered a “Tom is my only friend” t-shirt!

4) That leaves me with five human friends, unbound by DNA. Two are shelter staff, that I suspect felt obligated to be friends with the pathetic old “unhip” cat lady that’s friends with their shelter. (In fact, I do suspect my cat friend may also be a pity vote.) But you know, I’m okay with pity friends.

5) Finally, and perhaps most importantly – I have fewer friends than my cats. Omaha, for example, now has 40 friends. Rumpelmintz has 43 friends – and she doesn’t even like other cats.

Catster.com is interesting. A MySpace for cats. Like MySpace, I joined out of curiousity and so I could see a friend’s private page. Within minutes of joining, I kid you not, cats I (nor my cats) had ever met in our lives were asking us to be friends. No real reason not to accept those invitations, right? I mean, even if these cats are a horrible influence, smoking catnip out behind the litterbox and tipping over garbage cans, how much impact can they have over the internet? I’ll monitor their “Paws mail” inboxes, just in case.

Soon, my cats were having a lovely time with Catster. They were like little Jehovah’s Catnesses or Born-again Catstians, preaching the evils of dry food and the good word of a grain-free wet diet. I think some of their new Catster friends are annoyed with them.

Speaking of fantastic tehnological advances – how about eBay? eBay ROCKS! A friend sent me this great auction… who wouldn’t want a 7’2″ lifelike Jolly Green Giant statue?
Jolly Green Giant

He’d make a great date for my friend’s upcoming wedding – but I’m not sure I want to fork out the dough for an airline ticket for him. Plus, I can just see the issues in-flight:

Flight attendant: “Sir, you will HAVE to sit down so we can take off”

Me: “He can’t sit.”

Stewardess: “He has to sit – we can’t take off until he sits.”

Me: “He can’t sit. His joints are immobilized.”

Can’t exactly put him in the overhead bin. Maybe he could ride in baggage.

Note my first use of a link with the Jolly Green Giant – go me!

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I’ve heard of MySpace. I knew it existed for some time. Heck, I watch TV and I see the crime shows where an integral part of the plot is some website (which you KNOW is MySpace, but under a different name to avoid a lawsuit) – where some young person is taken advantage of, or hires a killer through, or finds a killer through, this “friends” website.

Never had any desire to have my own MySpace account. I’m a bit too old for that, I think. I know the “cool” cat people have them – the younger ones that work or volunteer at the shelter – but also sing/play in bands or go to college or other hip, cool, young things. But hey, that’s not me. I have my feline diabetes online forums and groups on gastro-intestinal disorders in cats and now I even have a blog with an impressive mature name like “wordpress”.

Then it began with an innocent comment. A shelter staff member commented on a cat bite – and how I could see how the bite looked when it was new and nasty on MySpace. Well, I had to see. I mean, who can resist looking at a picture of a hand swollen up like a nasty pink balloon with puncture marks from a cat’s canines?

So, I go online and find the MySpace page with the swollen hand. I see Ms. Swollen Hand has friends. Hey – I know that friend… and I click. Interesting – look at the musical interests, the videos, the pictures, the comments… more friends. Click… click… click.

Eventually I stumble on someone I know that’s private. I can’t look without an account. Well, no harm to creating an account, right? It’s free, after all. So, I’ll just set up a quick account.

Now I have an account with one friend – some guy named Tom. Tom’s very happy in his picture, and rather cute, I must say (though much too young for a crazy cat lady). He’s not really my FRIEND, though – he apparently created myspace. I delete Tom from my friends. (Sorry, Tom! Really, it’s NOTHING personal. You are an amazing guy. It’s not you, it’s me!)

Well, now it says – in very big letters. THIS MEMBER HAS 0 FRIENDS.

I have no friends. Wow, that looks pretty bad. Well, my friend that had the private page – I’ll add her as a friend. Then I can view her page. So, I do that (with her help).

Now it says in big letters. “YOU HAVE 1 FRIEND”

Still, that’s pretty sad. One friend. One sole friend. One person that took pity on me and is my friend. Maybe I pay her, for all others know.

So, I convince another person to join myspace, so I can have them as a friend. I have two friends now! My friend also has two friends because she kept Tom. Maybe I should have kept Tom. Darn. I don’t suppose Tom would forgive me and take me back now, after I dumped him.

It’s addictive. I need more friends. More friends.

Maybe it’d be easier to find friends for my cats. I’ll check out catster.

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