Mom, Dad, I know you always said you'd be proud of me for whatever I do, but I know that the honor I'm about to tell you about is something that I doubt you'd ever dreamed of for your little girl.
No, I didn't win Miss America (though I hear the Miss USA crown could be up for grabs in a few days), and I didn't discover the cure for cancer. This, trust me, is much, much bigger.
I am Time Magazine's Person of the Year.
To be fair, I should admit that I'm sharing the honor with about 50 million of my closest friends (and, really, they are...my MySpace profile says so), but it's still an honor to be considered above false presidents, great women, and the various and sundry despots (Pinochet, Hussein, Hastert, Foley) who could have been considered front-runners for the honor that you have raised me to believe is a benchmark for the success or failure of a particular year. The people who have come before me have included the greatest aviator of all time, the Duchess of Windsor, both of you (mom twice), presidents, popes, queens, dictators, and Bono. No, not Bozo the Clown, Bono the hot Irish rocker. Yummy....
I guess, if we're being honest here, the distinction of being named POTY bothers me a bit. The fact of the matter is that the honor wasn't given to all of us for doing anything more than sharing. Whether it's our blogs, our MySpace profiles, or a crazy video we put together for YouTube, all we did this year was observe the world around us and share our observations. Sure, together we may have taken down Senatorial Candidates and exposed Congressmen for the pervs they were, but we also dished about our dates, outlined our quests for girlfriends by the end of the year, came up with funny anagrams that ensured that you'll need the Rosetta Stone to talk to your eventual grandchildren, spoofed those PSAs that were supposed to teach us valuable lessons, and gave new soundtracks to childhood classics. Sure, we were creative, but I think you'll agree that we all could have done without someone hand-farting the Star Spangled Banner and Lindsay Lohan telling us all to "Be Adequite."
Something tells me that this wasn't quite what Al Gore had in mind.
So, while I'm accepting this honor under a bit of duress, I am, nevertheless, accepting the honor bestowed upon me and the rest of the "Web 2.0 generation." This is purely in the hopes that this will be the beginning of something beautiful and that the validation that we, the bloggers, the YouTubers, the Facebookers, the MySpacers, and yes even the drunkards from Late Night Shots have received from the main stream media will cause us to abandon our plans to produce yet another Brokeback Mountain parody and possibly use our influence for something good, like bringing another POW home.
A girl can dream, right? In the meantime, let me tell you about my latest date.
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