Terminal 5 at LAX? Looks like a good place to set up camp.

So a friend of mine just sent me this picture he took while at the airport:



That is a tent someone set up at the airport to sleep in, or just to say "look at me, I am an attention whore"

Focus: What incredibly blatant attempts at attention whoring have you had to put up with in your life?

 

There is a guy at work that is sometimes fun to hang out in moderated doses, but he has a serious case of histrionic personality disorder. I don't know if any clinician has diagnosed him with that, but I certainly have. You could just set up a redirect from his name to that page in Wikipedia and nobody would notice because it is so fucking spot on.

Quoting the all-knowing Wikipedia:

You know how some people are one-uppers, like they have to one-up everything you're saying? It's worse than that. You know how some people have to bring around every conversation to themselves? It's worse than that, even. When this guy gets worked up or misses a smoke break and comes by and the conversation turns to anything other than him, you can see him cogitating for a few seconds and then, right in the middle of someone else saying something appropriate, he will just start telling a story about himself. He doesn't even wait for the other person to finish, and the story he tells has nothing to do with whatever the current topic of conversation is.

This is just the tip of an equally-charming personality iceberg. Most of us spend much of our time trying to keep him from getting fired. It's a good distraction from work, but I'm glad I'm not his management.

 

What a timely thread. This picture is from last Saturday morning, after an acquaintance crashed at my house after a boozy night. Look closely. While we were sitting around nursing our hangovers, she went over to our washing line, grabbed three different people's clothes off it, put them on and paraded around. Then she decided to go for a swim. Except she didn't want the pool cover removed, she just wanted to wallow on top of it shrieking.


Yeah.

 

From the party foul thread:

This was only one instance of this guy using cutting to get attention. I wouldn't blame him if he was legitimately sick (clinical depression) but he never did it when he was alone, I know because he would tell EVERYONE when he did it.

 

Facebook has become a venue for people ridiculously expressing themselves for the sake of attention. One of my roommates good friends (I won't call him a friend, he is an acquantance) that posts pathetic shit about "Rough week at work, bourbon and ice cream and a sad movie for this guy" or "Fridays with laundry and beer, is this what my life has come to? " just begging for people to comment or give him sympathy. Not to mention the fact that he posts about every inane Notre Dame sporting activity just so people realizes he is the BIGGEST ND ALUM EVER! He's been graduated for 4 years yet last spring, he posted a message about the ND Women's Softball team, in a preliminary NCAA tourney game...are you kidding me? Kid is a joke.

Any of those chains where you change your profile picture for a "cause" is ridiculous and attention whoring to me.

 

Nothing really comes to mind.

 

Focus: What incredibly blatant attempts at attention whoring have you had to put up with in your life?

There's a woman in my class who drives everyone crazy with her attention whoring. She has an opinion and comment for pretty much everything, regardless of being asked for it. If someone is talking about an experience or a person they know, she has to butt in and turn the conversation into something about HER instead. She cackles about 10 times louder than any normal person laughs, and when she's across the lab she speaks so loudly that I can't even hear the person across from me. I didn't know that was possible.

For one class, each of us had to take home an empathy belly to get an idea of what it's like to be pregnant. Most everyone just wore it around the house a few hours to get a good idea. This girl wore it out on a Saturday night on McKinney Avenue (one of the busiest strip of bars and restaurants in Dallas. If you are a douchebag and/or go to SMU, you are probably somewhere on McKinney every weekend). She said she ordered multiple drinks at a restaurant and a bar just to get "crazy reactions" from people.

The most blatant attention whoring, however, is the shit she says during class. She frequently interrupts our professors mid-sentence during a lecture or demonstration. This happens every day. These people have PhD's and are specialists in multiple areas. She has nothing valuable to add. The upside is that when she yells, "That's because x and y cause z!" the professor says without pause, "No," and explains something not even remotely close to "x and y causing z."

This woman is 39 years old and is trying WAY too hard to be accepted.

 

I'm probably the attention whore of my circle of friends. I tend to do stupid shit if it will make people talk about me later. I also do a lot of insane things when my friends aren't around just so I can tell them the next time we're all drinking together and not be lying. I don't derail conversations like Frylock's coworker, though.

 

This reminded me of someone from one of my classes. Every class has an annoying cunt, but this guy took it to a whole new level. It was a lecture with about 200 kids, so there wasn't a lot of time for bullshit. This kid did not understand that. He would babble on and on about personal stories, and a few times took half the lecture. Why the professor didn't just tell him to shut the fuck up, I'll never know. The highlight was when she was talking about children getting hurt and older people telling them to not look, it doesn't hurt. Him? "DON'T TELL HER IT DOESN'T HURT. SHE KNOOOOOOOOOOWS IT HURTS!" Ok, buddy. I think I hated him more than anything because he was a fucking idiot who thought he was smart. Those people are the worst.

 

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Vaguebooking

Focus:

I've mentioned her before, but I was seeing this girl for a while, who was bat shit insane and had to one up everything anyone else did. I realized it fairly early on, but for some reason I'll never understand I stuck around for far too long. Luckily things ended before they got too serious

Things she claimed to have done:

- Went to rehab for heroin in grade 9, without her older brother who lived with her knowing about it.
- Was pregnant in grade 10, but had the fetus taken out of her uterus and implanted in another woman partway through the pregnancy, again without her older brother knowing.
- Worked as a welder for $40 an hour at her dad's shop, claiming that she would weld in a tank top and goggles, and just wear lots of sun screen to protect her skin. She never had any sorts of burns or scars from the welding on her arms, and she couldn't even name the type of welding when I called her on it.
- Broke her ex-boyfriend's nose by slamming his face on the windshield of his car
- Had her ribs broken by her ex-boyfriend from him shoving her into a wall during an argument
- Was anemic because she went vegetarian for a while and now she can't eat meat or else she gets sick. Also has a protein deficiency because of this

I'm sure there are plenty more but I stopped keeping track of her shit after a while. Anytime someone would mention anything of interest, she had a better story. She was so desperate for attention it was scary.

 

Focus: Me.

Back in high school, I was in a pretty bad way. I was insecure as hell, really didn't like myself, and didn't have anything to make me stand out. So I made a fantasy version of myself, someone who was extraordinary. I convinced myself that I could make everyone believe it. It wasn't the ridiculous shit that Creelmania posted, but it was always stupid little exaggerations, little one-uppers. I really can't imagine going back to those kids from high school; they'd probably just remember "Kid who made up a bunch of stupid shit about himself." I'm ashamed of who I was back then.

Nowadays I sit down and shut the fuck up. It feels better, and I don't have to live in fear of someone busting me for who I really am.