Joel Stein: arch nemesis or the twin I never had?

During the course of my work day, I often have large gaps of time in which I do nothing. A few months ago, during such a time, I googled Leonardo DiCaprio - I had just seen Blood Diamond, and while annoyed at the "message" being shoved down our throats, I was sufficiently bored enough to see what Leonardo DiCaprio was doing with his life.

Anyway, I stumbled across the best. interview. ever. It was a five page interview of witty cruelty, satirizing Leo with every word. I had to stop reading it halfway through because I was laughing out loud at work, which I thought might be somewhat suspicious, since unless I found sadistic amusement in researching the purging of monasteries, Stalin-style, there was no reason for mirth.

I searched the rest of the Time Magazine archives for the writer. And that was how I discovered the existance of Joel Stein. Within the first few articles, I had the strangest realization: Joel Stein was the old Jewish male version of me. During the next few days, in lieu of doing any actual work, I spent all my time reading his past articles and sending them to my friends for comparative analyses.

Who is Joel Stein? Well he worked for Time until he was ..let go? fired? not really sure, and now he is a columnist for the unbelievably biased LA Times. Sometimes he pops up on I <3 the ... series and he is married to an unfortunate woman named Cassandra, whom he often discusses in his articles. And he went to Stanford.

I can now say with the authority of having read every single article he has ever written, that Joel Stein and I think exactly the same. I'm sure that if we ever played chess, no one would ever win because we would make the exact same choices.

I am annoyed by his existance. He has made a living out of what I do out of boredom: blogging about things that are ridiculous and deserve to be mocked. I will not deny that I am envious. He gets to do the job that I would have done if I had known that it was an option. Instead, I will graduate in four months to a life potentially full of the drudgery and misery of international policies and law. Not that I don't love international communication- but let's face it, my area study is Russia. Not exactly the most joyful place.