Online Profiles

Many of us these days have an online profile. You know, those little things you put up on Friendster, Facebook or the likes, telling the world how superbly unique you are by doing exactly what a billion other people are doing.

What I wanna discuss today are the subtle and sneaky ways people have started to use online profiles. Have you ever seen a profile where the user, usually a female and a good-looking one at that, deliberately puts up a photo of herself alongside her trusty female sidekick, who happens to be unfortunate enough to be uglier than the user. And the Good Looking One captions her photo as : ‘ Me and my cute/pretty/gorgeous friend!’

My first thought upon encountering such a profile was , ‘Wow she is HOT!”. After the initial awe had died down, and I had cleaned myself up, I then began to observe The Hot One’s friend.“Wow she is UGLY”. And it’s not like I have anything personal towards the Ugly Duckling, as I myself possess the physical attractiveness and sexual magnetism of a collection of haemorrhoids, but the relative comparison of the two just makes matters worse for the poor gal. I mean, the hot one looks THAT much hotter when placed next to the her ugly companion, who looks THAT much worse. It’s like comparing body fat percentage between me and a pen, and then saying ,’Oh Jason, you are so slim!”

That is just self promotion at its sneakiest. Even Pepsi and Coca Cola wouldn’t do that. The best either company would do is just say “Here is our drink, it is the best in the world”. In all fairness, I suppose one can’t really say , “I am the best looking gal in my group of friends”, as that will produce a catfight even World War 2 veterans would fear to interfere, but still, how dare she?How dare she be so superficial and heartless?

And the caption in itself is the most devilish and cruel of all. By referring to her ugly friend as ‘gorgeous’ , and herself who is good looking as just ‘Me’, that is just rubbing salt, pepper, paprika, and industrial strength hydrochloric acid into an already festering wound. Just for the record, such a thing won’t happen to boys, as an act like that will be described as “Totally Gay’ and that message will be conveyed to the perpetrator of so heinous an act through the medium of fists to his face and knees to his testicular region. And who’s to say industrial strength hydrochloric acid won’t be involved at all?


And what about those really really self absorbed individuals who take a picture of just their face, but THEY ARE NOT LOOKING AT THE CAMERA. Instead, they are staring wistfully into space, showing thoughtful and endearing emotions. How much of a poser can you be? Can you imagine how insulted the person holding the camera is? The person being photographed isn’t even paying attention to the photographer! “What is so interesting to the left of your visual field that you aren’t even looking at me, the loser who agreed to photograph you? Shall I photograph that instead?”

Then it gets worse. Not content with just ONE photo of themselves as their profile photo, some individuals take like, 50 photos of JUST THEIR FACES and then assemble them into a collage of some sort.So now, when you click on their profiles, you are treated to like a million different camera angles of their nostrils, eyebrows, facial hair, pimples, freckles etc etc. It’s like they are trying to convince you , “Look, it’s really me okay?” in case you get confused with someone else who coincidentally share their name AND their facial features.


I once had a female friend named Joanne Low Yan Lee who for her sake of privacy we shall refer to as Miss X who had been going on and on for months about this friend of her friend’s who is ABSOLUTELY gorgeous, with smooth skin, anime-like hair and that dangerous, bad boy look about him. Of course, she had only saw him online on his Friendster profile and the only thing she knew about him was through his testimonials, many from girls who described him as “leng chai”, ”sexy man”, ”bootlicious”, etc etc, all bordering on the pornographic.

When they finally met at a gathering at Starbucks, Miss X nearly puked her coffee via her nostrils.The cruel irony was that this particular dude, whom I shall refer to as Mr. X instead of Justin Teoh Boon Chuan, had the complexion and skin texture of a rotten pineapple. His bad boy demeanour came from several years of evading the law while selling highly illegal yet very much sought after pirated porn VCDs. All his female ‘friends’ referred to him as ‘the sexy one’ out of sarcasm and out of the fact that every single one of them had rejected his advances.

After her coughs and sputters, suddenly Miss X began laughing. I felt a bit disturbed, as clearly this was a bit rude. Mr. X was after all, a stranger she had just met. I reprimanded her for her superficiality. She then apologized and clarified, “It’s just so bloody funny ‘cause he’s actually better looking than you!”. On a totally unrelated subject, Miss X is from house number 12, SS 4C, Kelana Jaya and has a nose the size of Nigeria.

Online profiles do have their perks. But some people overdo it. Have you heard of people who have like, multiple Friendster accounts, and like, a megazillion blogs, each one detailing their personal life by the second? I mean, how many friends can one have? I have seen a few people on Friendster who each have like a total combined number of friends in the thousands. In my opinion, if you have more than a 100 friends, you are a celebrity and no longer need an online profile. Just stick to about 50 or so, and pass the rest to me.

The other day I went to London to visit my friend, Selina Sharmalar Solomon of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College, UK (not her real name, course or college). The politically correct term to describe her is “Facebook Whore”, and I feel that it has taken over her life. The moment I met her for the first time in a long while, she immediately exclaimed, “OH MY GAWSH, I have not seen you for so long…on Facebook”. I replied that Facebook didn’t appeal to me, and she replied with the most dangerous sentence in all of Womankind - ”Oh”- in a tone that suggested that I had defecated on her bed. To fill in the awkward silence that followed, I decided to ask her about the virtues of Facebook : -

“See see, it’s so cool, you can write on your friends’ wall! And you can also check ‘wall to wall’ and see what others have replied to each other’s wall! Cool right? Faster go write something on my wall!” And if you look at your friends’ photos, you can move your mouse over their faces and their NAMES WILL APPEAR! Cool right? And if you CLICK on their face, you can immediately see their profile! Cool right? And look look, you can give gifts to your friends! *moves mouse pointer over a Teddy Bear icon the size of a thumbnail*. If you click here, your friend will receive the gift! Cool right? And if you want someone’s attention, you can poke that person! Cool right? See, this fella has poked me. So I will poke him back. I tell you, I have been poked by him and his friends for like, 50 times last week. I better go mention that on his wall. Cool right?

We should try to do other stuff besides online profiling. Go out. Talk to an actual living, breathing PERSON. Gossip. Bathe. Fantasize about the opposite sex. Do something you can be proud of. Many years from now, will you tell your grandkids, ”Hey, when I was your age, I had an awesome online profile”? Or when you are lying on your deathbed, you ain’t gonna say , “Damn, I wish I jazzed up my HTML on my Friendster account”. If you got that last joke, you NEED TO GET OUT OF YOUR HOUSE.

So start living life outside of cyberspace more often. But whatever you do, stay true to yourself, don’t be a hypocrite and do come back to this blog often!