The Look Challenge

Alright, I’m in.

I just was asked to play along with one of those self-spamming games of blog-tag.  Thanks Maddie Cochere (see here and here), I have plenty of time for this sort of thing.  Can you believe I’m playing along with this time waster, blog spamming, chain-letterish concept?  It’s very unlike me.  I feel a little queasy inside.

However, since Maddie is a great individual, as well as an excellent author, I feel compelled to push through this task.  Maddie and I both live in Ohio.  Please visit her site and buy a handful of books from my dear friend.  I remember when I first ran into Maddie; it seems like a lifetime ago.  It was earlier this week—Monday, I believe.  She visited my blog.  I read hers.  Our families have never been closer.

This particular game caught my interest because it serves as a yet another means to plug my book.  The idea is to grab the nearest book and search for the first instance of the word “look”.  Once found, post what you see with a bit of context surrounding it.  So here goes…

The closest book that I can see from here is clearly the book that I wrote solely for your entertainment value: My Status Update Journey: A Quirky In-Depth Analysis of the World from the Voices in My Head.  Seriously, when I was looking for the nearest book, I raised my head up and opened my eyes and there it was right in front of my face.  It probably helped that I saw my book first because I was rolling around on a floor covered by one hundred copies of my book.  I do that a lot.  Just so you know, I kept my pants on.

So here is the text where the word “look” first appears:

The Facebook website was launched in 2004.  I was five years late to the game with my first status update.  I remember that shallow feeling I had realizing that an automated interactive computer database system was telling me that I had no friends.  Screw you little electronic chips and network cabling.  You suck too, despite that fact that you’re right.

February 15, 2009 at 10:43 pm
Aaron: Hey Marcus!  Good to see you!  I’ll suggest some friends.

How about that?  I do have friends!  And it only took 5 hours and 33 minutes to find one.  Hey look!  The friends are rolling in now!

February 16, 2009 at 2:55 am
Michael: Good to see you on FB. Hope all is well.

This particular friend was way ahead of the times.  He used “FB” instead of typing out the whole name.  So damn hip.  I’ll bet he already had hundreds of friends compared to my total of two.  After all, he stayed up well past midnight accumulating friends by the dozens using his way-cool abbreviations.  Say, maybe he was the first person that actually was seen rolling-on-the-floor-laughing-out-loud.

I can do this Facebook thing.  I know I can!  The next morning came around and I had yet to update my status.  People would begin questioning whether I was going to be a Facebook user or a Facebook loser.  Quick, self!  Tell the world something.  There’s no time to waste!

Here ends the Look Challenge.

So that’s all you get.  Was playing the Look challenger and reading along to this point worth your time?  I’ll bet it was!

In conclusion, I joined the Look Challenge so that you can be bombarded by one more attempt to put my book in front of your eyes.  Mission accomplished.  But wait!  I’m adding one more step to this challenge—a responsibility that you, the reader of this text, must complete.  You need to go to amazon and post a review for me.  I would be a very, very, very grateful person for your actions.  And that’s a lot of ‘very’.  Consider it—oh you wonderful reader of my blog.  Only then, will our new relationship become as tight as Maddie’s and mine.

…and I’ll say nice things about you too.  You can choose from the following:

1)        {Your name here} is a great individual—one of the smartest people I know!
2)        {Your name here} is an amazing and caring person.
3)        When you need to enhance the life of the party, you can count on {your name here}.
4)        {Your name here} does not suck!

Buy my book.  {Your name here} loved it!