New York is a city that sometimes seems unmanageable - that whole "sea of nameless faces" thing.  Sometimes, it feels like a small town.  Sometimes it feels like Hell, but I guess that can be said of any place.  Recently for me, it's felt like deja vu.  After stopping in at my 10 year high school reunion some six months ago, I can't seem to go more than a couple of blocks without running in to someone who I knew back then.  The conversations all start the same way, either with "can you believe how poor a showing it was at the reunion?" or "how come you weren't at the reunion?  oh, good point," and then generally move to a very gossipy place.  Usually, I take no truck in that, but since there's been such a groundswell of information lately, I've started to find the update-mongering somewhat amusing.  Generally there isn't too much of note, so far there's only one Class of '98 baby, not one of the handful of marriages has ended yet, more than a handful of people are employed as social workers.  But there is one classmate who had sent out a mass email regarding the birth of his tech blog to most of the class, though I was not popular in high school and thus not a recipient, and everyone seems to have been taken aback at the angry subtext of his posts.  When his name came up, the surprisingly improved in the looks department classmate that I had just run into said this: "For him, it was always big time movie star or nothing, and now that it's nothing, he's losing his mind."

Apparently she is also much improved in the brains department because this might be the most insightful thing anyone has ever said about that guy, and probably me as well.

Before things go any further, I want to make clear that I am in no way passing judgment on this guy for not achieving his goal of ruling Hollywood, making millions and collecting Oscars as he goes.  Sometimes things just don't work out, I am most certainly speaking from a place of deep experience on that subject, and often there was nothing anyone could do about it.  It's easy to look back and decide that one decision or another was clearly a mistake, but it surely wasn't as easy a call back then and there's no point in rehashing it now anyway.  All the same, just so we're clear, I'm not hating on him for having failed in his bid to end up rich and famous.  But I am intensely curious about the urge within him, and the same one within myself, that drove him both to desire that outcome and flip out when it was clearly out of reach.

It's not that weird to want to be rich and famous in this culture that not only rewards so heavily those outcomes, but also nearly always ties them together.  I think this is an unintended result of the rash of vocational reality shows.  It's not enough to be the executive chef of a line of restaurants, you also have to pass judgment on fledgling chefs and make yourself a national TV figure in order to really be at the peak of everything.  You can't just be the editor-in-chief of a major fashion magazine, you have to also be a fixture on a show that upwards of fifteen million people watch so that when you saunter down Fifth Avenue people from Nebraska know who you are.  There's something about money that makes it not enough, and the more you make the more that's true.  No one is a better example of this than Donald Trump.  The guy owns tremendous chunks of the city, casinos, golf courses, all that shit, but he still needs that ridiculous (thankfully now-canceled) show to fill in that extra piece.  It's not enough to be rich, you also have to be famous.

Of course, Donald Trump has little to do with my life, or my hate blog-writing former classmate.  And grand hopes for one's life are certainly not ridiculous, where would we be without ambition?  We all have these hopes and dreams for ourselves, regardless of whether or not they include being famous.  But there is something extremely specialized about that particular desire, and as someone who also feels drawn to it, it's hard to ignore what hoping for fame says about the person doing the yearning.

When one's ambitions skew artsy, it's easy to discount the desire for fame that is subconsciously inherent.  Whether you want to be a movie star, a novelist or a rock star, being famous is a specific side effect of having been successful, or maximally successful.  We can all talk about writing for ourselves and all that BS, but writers write to be read, and hope to be liked, I don't care what they say.  Some might relish being hated, but only if there are enough people who feel the opposite as well.  I appreciate the diversity of opinion out there and even relish when friends take issue with something I've written (Plaxico Burress, anyone?), because starting some sort of dialogue is part of the goal, so long as it remains civil.  It's better than writing in a vacuum.  At the same time, however, I'm not gonna be able to leave my day job writing stuff that people hate.

But enough about me.  When one wants to be famous, it's hard to ignore the ancillary motivation of revenge.  Fame is the greatest one-upper of all and I think anyone who hopes to see their name in lights one day deep down has someone they will relish running in to on the street after they've had their big break.  I'm sure when people fantasize about winning an Oscar or an Emmy, they have to keep themselves from saying "I told you so" as they stand at their imaginary podium, like Steve Buscemi's character in Living in Oblivion.  Being famous is the ultimate middle finger to all those people who thought they were better than you, and I think this sentiment ran extremely strong in my former classmate.  Maybe it's why he turned out so bitter.

Maybe it isn't right to say how he's turned out, since I haven't spoken to him in over ten years.  Maybe it isn't right to judge him entirely on his blog, but it feels like a pretty authentic way of determining how he feels about his life.  Why does he have so much vitriol about the "Windows Mojave" ad campaign?  Why is the Blackberry Storm so offensive?  Because failure is so much worse when you thought you were better than everyone else.  I'm comfortable in failure, it suits me, but my former classmate apparently can't deal with it.  It's a shame that he let his drive for stardom so infect his life, but that's the price of lofty goals.  It's also the price of severe egoism.  When one feels they are superior to everyone else, yet can't prove it through the success of their life, it no longer seems so weird to rant uncontrollably about Apple pulling out of MacWorld.  I think my former classmate fell prey to his own delusions of achievement, and whether or not he realizes it, this makes him a tremendous asshole.  Suddenly, I'm glad my reunion had such a poor showing.