Wow. Laura just read the posting about adding photos to her brant and she was shocked to see that without realizing it she switched from third person to first person and then back to third person during the course of that very short posting. As always, Laura chose not to edit out the strange inconsistencies of voice — she believes strongly in keeping her brant entries immediate and wholly honest no matter how psychologically revealing they may be — and she knows this leaves her open and vulnerable to analysis from every dimestore armchair psychologist out there. As always, Laura welcomes any and all comments — as long as people are writing about her and thinking about her and discussing her to her face, she is always interested in what people have to say.

Oh. My. God.
Laura just realized that she unwittingly switched from third person into first person while writing her last brant entry, “Branter’s Elbow.” Laura was completely unconscious about doing this — in fact, she didn’t know she had switched perspectives until she started writing her next brant entry and realized she’d accidentally written “I” instead of “Laura.”
But because Laura believes that branting should remain as spontaneous and honest as possible, she’s not going to go back and correct her last brant, replacing all the “I”s with “Laura”s. That, she feels, would be false. Better her rabid fans witness Laura’s mistakes than believe that she is perfection incarnate.

However, Laura is deeply confused and, if truth be told, shaken by the experience. She’d based a lot of her Web Identity on the third person persona of Laura the Branter — which is a completely different persona than Laura the Person — and now she’s not sure which is which and what is the more authentic persona for her brant. This is hard to explain — both to herself and to her fans — but Laura’s going to follow this journey wherever it takes her. In other words, she’s going to relinquish control. Meaning, she will not revise this sort of “mistake.” That is, when she writes in the third person, she will assume that that is the correct perspective to use at that particular moment in time. Likewise, when she accidentally lapses into first person she will assume that that, too, is the correct perspective to use at that particular moment in time.

Of course, this being the Age of Interaction, Laura welcomes your comments and thoughts about the first-person versus third-person perspective dilemma either right here on the brant or on her Discussion page.

For those of you (besides Laura) who are counting the days before “Piece of Work” is published, there are only ten more days between now, September 15, and the official publication date of September 25. Laura thinks she’s done the math right (25 minus 15 = 10), but just in case she hasn’t she’s showing her work (maybe if she hadn’t gotten an 11 on her math final in her junior year of high school she would have more faith in her ability to do math, if you can even call simple addition, or subtraction, math). If she’s made a mistake in her calculation, please bring the error to her attention by leaving a comment here on her brant (just make sure you sign it “Smarty-Pants”).

Not to get bogged down in more figures and numbers (this is the most math Laura has done in years), but in the 15 days since her first brant entries Laura got pretty busy. She meant to keep her brant current with interesting and entertaining entries to satisfy her rabid readers (although from what she can tell about them so far, she’s not sure satisfying her readers is possible because they are SO incredibly rabid), but she was kind of swamped (inundated, actually) with enthusiastic responses to her website. Yes, okay, so a lot of the praise was for the site designer’s (Jefferson Rabb’s) actual design of the site (”cool”, “hip”, and “modern” are three words Laura got really sick of hearing this week), but she, too, received her share of comments regarding the content. While most people (allegedly) enjoyed the faux-narcissistic voice of the third-person narrator (also known as “Laura The Branter”), one or two people (buzz-killers) doubted the fact that Laura is really as insecure as she makes herself out to be. In other words, they wonder if her self-deprecation is an act. This struck Laura as incredibly funny (in fact, she would have started laughing hysterically if she wasn’t already crying hysterically because of how wounded she felt having her credibility called into question like that). All Laura can say is that these doubters (buzz-killers) must not know her very well. In fact, Laura wants to reassure everyone that she is even more insecure in real life than she makes herself out to be on her website!

(OK, well obviously that’s a lie, but you know what she means.)

Laura also wants to call attention to the fact that her theories about celebrity narcissism (featured in “Piece of Work”) are actually based in sound scientific research. To prove that she does her homework before shooting her mouth off (even though, technically, she shot her mouth off long before this bit of supporting research was released), she’d like you to read this September 13th article from the Los Angeles Times — “Celebrities Are Their Own Biggest Fans.” (Again, she’s providing the link even though she doesn’t know how to get the link to light up and do it’s linking-thing.)

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/cl-et-narcissism12sep12,1,5835330.story?track=crosspromo&coll=la-headlines-entnews&ctrack=1&cset=true