In the old days, if someone exhibited an irrational, dysfunctional, pointless pattern of thought and behavior, family and friends would have told the idiot to shape the hell up and can the nonsense.

Today, what somebody this goofy does is define one’s defect, one’s personal weakness, one’s failing as an “identity,” making one special and conferring a right to special treatment and consideration.

After that, you then sit down and write up the story of your personal sorrows, looking for sympathy and attention (on top of a pay check).

There are a million contemptible forms of feebleness exhibited by representatives of today’s America, but Jen McGuire‘s certainly takes the cake.

Say a person is trying to eat oysters with all the French people at Les Halles in the south of France on a sunny Sunday afternoon. And that person has a serious problem with pigeons but really wants to also be the kind of person who eats outside on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the south of France. The pigeons will not have to pay for such an experience but will insist on inviting themselves anyhow, cooing and pecking underneath the tables.

I will be too embarrassed to tell people, “Hey, can you not ever stand up from your table or drop any food lest a pigeon invasion happen?” like I might at home. So instead I’ll sit there with my heart pounding in my throat as I pretend to enjoy this meal like everyone else. At least until the woman sitting close to me in a chic sweater lazily tosses the last of her frites onto the ground beside her. That’s when I’ll nearly upend my table as I flee.

This is not who I wanted to be when I first started traveling, but my fear of birds is somewhat of a curse.

I was five years old when I watched two seagulls tear a baby duck apart.

And as you might imagine, I’ve struggled with ornithophobia, or an extreme fear of birds, ever since.

RTWT