Short preface: This story made us violently angry. Violently. Angry. We’ve been accused of being old-fashioned or contrarian and, hey. Maybe! But we cannot help but feel grossly ill-equipped for this world when we read a story about thirty-five year old, professional women paying hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to stage a paparazzo-style photo shoot:

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, photographer Izaz Rony waited across the street from an office building on Chambers Street in Manhattan. As he sat on a bench eating a late breakfast, a visibly pregnant young woman wearing a black-and-white striped dress walked out the door, exactly on schedule.

Rony jumped up and ran down the block, snapping photos of her as she walked toward him. Trying to blend into the crowd, he followed her - to the grocery store, then the dry cleaner, through an outdoor market and down to South Street Seaport - taking pictures the entire time. She appeared natural and beautiful in the photos, exactly what she wanted.

Rony was hired to take these pictures by his subject, Kaiama Glover, a 35-year-old professor at Barnard College. And he’s been hired by many others like her - mostly female New Yorkers in their early 20s to late 40s - who are looking for paparazzi-inspired photographs of themselves captured as they go about their daily lives.

“It could be a horrible, invasive thing, like a stalker,” says Glover, who gave birth to a baby girl, Salone, on April 11. “But instead he is really capturing you as you are.”

NO! No. That is not who any of us really are. No, we are not our MySpace profiles, our Facebook status updates, our screen names or our internet sex tapes. No. This gross obsession with self, coupled with a troubling melding of personal and private life is, to us, incomprehensible. Take Gawker’s own Weird Science project / creation, Julia Allison. Guys. We know the name of her dog. We know her favorite color, her dating habits, what her family looks like, her ex-boyfriend’s names. We don’t even know the middle names of our own cousins. Is this wrong? We don’t care, really. We just know it’s annoying. It’s annoying when people feel entitled to a level of notoriety completely separate from talent or achievement. Not to say someone like Julia isn’t talented, that’s just not why we know her. We know her because she’s famous. And she’s famous because we know her.

But at least she has an excuse: She’s a media person. Our former high school classmate who posts various paparazzo-style photos onto Facebook of herself cavorting in a bikini has no excuse except that she’s been brought up to think that anyone can, and deserves to be, famous. Lauded, complimented, sought after. For what? Owning a bikini? We don’t fucking know! But at least we take some comfort in knowing our classmate is really, really stupid. This a 35-year-old Barnard professor, though? Most of our classes took place at Barnard. We know this woman isn’t stupid. We know she must be thoughtful, she must intellectualize and analyze her decisions. So what drove her to do this? And why are we so driven to vomit all over our keyboard?

God, we don’t know. Excuse us as we update our Facebook status to Alex “is freaking the fuck out.”

Not famous? So what! Hire your own paparazzi [Newsday]