Other bloggers had warned me Freshly Pressed fame was a fickle mistress, but I refused to believe she could ever leave me. In the midst of my one day rock star status my wife warned me to temper my expectations for the day after Freshly Pressed, and I shouted back with words that seemed less than poetic in retrospect, “The Paul Johnson success rocket has blasted off, baby, and ain’t never gonna run out of dream fuel! Next stop: Planet Fame and Fortune!”
Didn’t she know I already had tempered my expectations? When I reviewed my statistics and saw my views had gone up 4000% in a day, I knew it wouldn’t last, and that’s why I used a more conservative growth rate of only 3500% a day in predicting my site would be bigger than Facebook by the end of the week.
As my statistics fell back down to earth, and I realized I might have to settle for only being bigger than mySpace, I slowly realized I would owe apologies to people I had willfully alienated when I assumed I would be moving up into a classier stratosphere of associates and would no longer need my old friends and family. I would like to offer the following apologies:
1. I apologize to my friend Todd for calling him an “attention hog” for getting a phone call notifying him of his parents’ divorce during my Freshly Pressed banquet.
2. I apologize to my parents for accusing them of being too supportive, and insisting I would have been a success a decade earlier if they would have rejected my poorly written birthday cards as a child like that Tiger Mom everybody hates.
3. I apologize to my wife for leaving a message on my high school girlfriend’s voice mail, telling her she made a big mistake because I was a huge success now, then crying, then saying the crying was a joke, then crying some more, then saying how much I can bench press, then crying some more just as the voice mail ran out of space.
4. I apologize to my children for hiring stylists to help them obtain a level of attractiveness befitting my fame and for describing them as “gargoyle ugly”.
5. I apologize to my mom for trivializing her contributions to my life by equating the pain of childbirth to the soreness in my legs the morning after my all-night Freshly Pressed dance party.
6. I apologize to Paul McCartney for calling myself the most famous Paul alive and describing his contributions to culture as “perfunctory”.
7. I apologize to the word “perfunctory” for using it so often without knowing its meaning.
8. I apologize to Shakespeare for sending him a taunting Tweet calling myself the new, funnier, and more handsome Shakespeare.
9. I apologize to my high school English teachers for not knowing Shakespeare is dead, and has been for at least twenty years. Not sure who I’ve been exchanging Tweets with, but his terrible punctuation, incorrect spelling of his name Sh8kes-Pierre, and being alive probably should have tipped me off sooner.
10. I apologize to my wife for suggesting that taking my last name, Johnson, was insufficient, but that she should also take my first name, Paul.
If I owe you an apology, please explain the reasons in the comments section below.