Being on CNN.com should have been a bigger deal. And it’s not that it wasn’t a BIG deal; I’ve gotten a lot more traffic here & gotten a few people contacting me directly and commenting on the post from 3 years ago. But for those that are sitting & waiting for something amaze-balls to happen to them & thinking that being featured in a CNN article about celebrities, Sinatra & paternity might actually stoke that fire, here’s an update from someone who’s done it: the President hasn’t called me, I still haven’t gotten an RSVP for the Halloween party invitation that I sent to Kate Middleton, and my Twitter feud with Barbara Streisand is more heated than ever.
So it hasn’t exactly changed my life in amazingly celebrity-based leaps & bounds… but it has helped in smaller ways. It feels good to have gotten my story out even further than this blog. It feels good that a few comment-dwellers have gotten something out of the story.
Those are the good parts. The weird part is, I haven’t told anyone that I actually know. I told Facebook (not a real person) about it once on Tuesday, but given that the half-life of a status update or tweet is 3 hours, that barely counts. But I haven’t mentioned it to any of my colleagues at work… even my cube neighbor, Sal, hasn’t caught wind of it. Mainly, that’s because I figure it would go something like this:
“Hey Sal. Hey, did you see I was in a CNN.com story?”
“Really!?! About what? Did you get choked by Wayne Brady?”
“Is that a Chappelle Show reference?”
“Nailed it!”
“No, Wayne Brady & I are simpatico.”
“So what was the story?”
“Y’know how they’re saying that Mia Farrow didn’t have sex with Woody Allen?”
“Are they saying that?”
“… I don’t know. But this CNN reporter did a story about something going on with Mia Farrow’s kid & how he just found out he might be a Sinatra offspring or something.”
“Wow… wait… who’s Sinatra?”
“Oh… sorry, I forgot you’re twelve. Sinatra… Sinatra… well, imagine an attractive Tony Soprano with bluer eyes and less fat, and now imagine he could sing really well, in between sleeping with attractive women of multiple ethnicities.”
“You mean like Adam Levine sing? or Michael Buble sing?”
“Buble. Definitely Buble.”
“Shit I love Adam Levine. So are you… are you telling me you’re on CNN.com because you know a lot about this Sinatra guy?”
“No dude! Stay with me! Can you PLEASE STOP PLAYING CANDY CRUSH ON YOUR PHONE FOR TWO MINUTES!
“My new high score though!”
“SERIOUSLY!”
“… Fine. Asshole.”
“The story was about how finding out something like that can totally shake the foundation of who you are.”
“Yeah, I hear that. Did you know that J-Lo and Ben Affleck never really loved each other? When I read that on TMZ I cried for days. It was such a big part of my sophomore Prom. My buddies & I did costumes, and I went as Jenny From The Block and my buddy Rico went as Ben Affleck from Gigli. That movie was AWESOME but I can’t frikkin’ believe it wasn’t real.”
“That sucks but can you bring it back to me now? I’m trying to tell you a fucking story about my life that has nothing to do with the cinematic merits of Gigli.”
“Chill, man, chill… you brought it up.”
“NO I FUCKING DIDN’T. NEVER IN MY LIFE HAVE I BROUGHT UP GIGLI.”
“Okay okay… get to the point.”
“Goddamn you. *sigh* The reporter included me in the story because I also don’t know who my real father is & when I found out it totally shook my sense of identity.”
“… Wait… what? You don’t know who your father is?”
“Correct. Welcome to The Point.”
“… Um. Wow. I mean… wow.”
“Yup.”
“So… what do you want me to do with that information?”
“I dunno. I just… I thought maybe you’d want to read the article and maybe you might have questions and we could, y’know… talk about it.”
“Uh, yeah, sure man, I’ll read it. Hey, did you hear about that girl in HR?”
“No, what happened?”
“She got lippy with her director… totally got a few demerits I think.”
“… mmkay, we’re done here.”
See what I mean? I have this perception that telling more ACTUAL people – people that I know & that have faces & names in my universe – about this story will not really do any good for anyone… but at the same time, having it out there for the figurative masses has somehow benefited some small portion of society, as evidenced by the comments section.
Say what you will about media, but this type of separation between the circles (the first containing myself & those I know, the second containing myself & those I don’t know) … well, it’s powerful, at least in this instance. I don’t have to deal with how circle 2 denizens will take it… and they get to hear my story without any emotional investment or risk of being made to feel awkward. To them it’s just words on a page. To those in circle 1, the people who know me, it’s some real shit we’re talking about & the social contract between us says that it is unacceptable for them to not know how to deal with real shit. (For the record, that embarrassment is self-imposed as far as I’m concerned; I don’t exactly know how best to deal with this shit either, so why anyone would think that I expect THEM to know how to deal with it is straight-up wacko.)
In short, I guess I’m saying… MY MESSED UP FAMILY SHIT WAS WRITTEN ABOUT ON CNN.COM BITCHES. PASS THE … CRISTAL? DOM? … PASS ME WHATEVER RAPPERS DRINK THESE DAYS!
