Somewhere in the wee hours of Tuesday morning I had a bizarre dream; one I retained well into my conscious hours. I was on some sort of overseas sightseeing excursion with others, and our group stopped for lunch at a historic convent. Egg salad sandwiches were handed out by the nuns and I promptly dropped mine onto the cobblestones. The dream only gets more disconnected from there but I’ll share one more noteworthy detail. My traveling companion was the actress Mary Stuart Masterson.
Got all that? Okay, now forget about everything except Mary Stuart. Masterson has had a respectable (if not award-winning) career as an actress. She was only ten years old when she first appeared on the silver screen, in the original version of The Stepford Wives. She went on to play colorful characters in Fried Green Tomatoes and Benny & Joon. But her most enduring performance – the one she will forever be linked with – was as “Watts”, the companion/tomboy of “Keith” in the high school rom-com Some Kind of Wonderful. Masterson’s turn as the loyal friend who quietly wanted to be more absolutely stole the show.
As if nuns and egg salad sandwiches aren’t enough, you’re wondering why Mary Stuart Masterson was sitting next to me in my dream. Actually it wasn’t Masterson herself; it was her movie character Watts. Which brings me to the Cambridge Dictionary’s 2025 Word of the Year. Would you believe Cambridge added 6,000 new words to its big book this year? 5,999 of them were runner-ups to parasocial, a word “describing a connection people feel with someone they don’t know (ex. celebrities, influencers, and other online personalities)”.
Blogger’s Note: WordPress needs to get on the ball here. “Parasocial” is underlined here in my draft post as being an unrecognized word.
Parasocial’s win as Word of the Year has everything to do with Taylor Swift. Her engagement to NFL star Travis Kelce generated countless claims of “heartfelt feelings toward a couple the vast majority had never met”. The same applies to Watts. I don’t know the first thing about Mary Stuart Masterson herself, but I know everything about Watts from watching Some Kind of Wonderful a dozen times or more.
“Parasocial” has actually been around since the 1950’s. In that era it referred to the innocence of television viewers connecting to television characters (or in my case, movie viewer to movie character). But today’s version of the word is described as “an unhealthy modern phenomenon”. Why? Because of social media. Because of artificial intelligence.
My example of Watts is one movie and one instance. I’ll finish this post and the “encounter” will fade into my memory forever. But social media – which brings the viewer constant feeds about the “viewed”, and artificial intelligence – which creates a sense of connection where there really isn’t one, makes it clear why there’s reason to be concerned. Are we really so desperate as to develop foundation-less relationships with strangers?
AI has already found its place on Spotify. Search for Xania Monet, the first artificially intelligent singer to grab a ranking on a Billboard chart (Adult R&B). Everything about Xania was created on a keyboard. But her face, her social media profile, and her voice suggest she’s a living, breathing human somewhere out there in the world. I wouldn’t be surprised if you can even chat online with Xania. If so, you’re developing a one-sided relationship (you) with someone who isn’t real whatsoever (a computer). Seriously, who has time for this nonsense?
Coincidence or not, one of the Cambridge Dictionary’s runner-ups for Word of the Year was “slop”, which in this day and age means “content on the internet that is of very low quality, especially when created by artificial intelligence”. Let’s declare “slop” a lot of what’s going in parasocial relationships as well.
The real message of this dictionary winner is clear. We need to remove the “para” from parasocial and focus on simply socializing with our fellow humans. It’s the only path to truly fulfilling relationships. Having said that, for some reason I’d love an egg salad sandwich right about now.
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LEGO Trevi Fountain – Update #4
(Read about the start of this build in Brick Wall Waterfall)
The travertine is stacking up quickly as we continue our work on the LEGO Trevi Fountain. Bags 7 and 8 – of 15 bags of pieces – came together like the Domenico Scarlatti piano sonatas that accompanied them – seemingly simple on the surface but more intricate and involved the further we dove in.
The Trevi Fountain has some strange elements, made even stranger when represented by chunky LEGOs. Check out the shapes I assembled today (and don’t ask me what they’re meant to represent). Little LEGO pieces positioned in just about every point on the compass. My singular mistake this round – realized well after the fact – was putting the right piece in place, only the wrong color. Then when I came across another “right piece wrong color” I knew I had them transposed. Took a little disassembly to get everything correct.
A continuing mystery of LEGO sets is bags within bags. When I opened Bags 7 and 8, each came with a smaller bag of pieces like you see here. It’s not like the smaller bag represents its own unit of the fountain. You just tap into those pieces every now and then as the instruction manual demands. Yes they’re tiny, tiny but you also find tiny pieces in the bigger bag. Maybe someday I’ll tour the LEGO factory and solve this packaging mystery.
We worked with some surprisingly large pieces of travertine today – the entire wall of white you see behind the fountain and the white surround you now see defining the entire front of the main pool. Would’ve taken a dozen Italians to put these monster pieces in place on the real Trevi. And don’t miss the pink accent strips to the left and right of center (pink!) This fountain is turning out to be more colorful than I expected.
Running build time: 3 hrs. 5 min.
Total leftover pieces: 23 (10 more extras today!)
Some content sourced from the BBC.com article, “Parasocial is Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year”, IMDB, “the Internet Movie Database”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.
Life In A Word 
So, can I say you are my ‘blogging friend’ even though we have never met in person?
I know what you mean by right piece, wrong colour. My Sunflower build is complicated enough without having the instruction manual not being printed in colours that match the actual LEGO brick colour!
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“Blogging friend” is so much healthier than “parasocial relationship”. I think those of us on WordPress really do get to know each other through writing and reading – a legitimate fringe benefit. Yes to the LEGO color challenge. Maybe my eyes are aging but the gray and brown pieces sure look a lot alike!
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I feel very connected to Taylor Swift because Travis Kelce is on my Fantasy Football team again this year. I am hoping to be invited to the wedding if it hasn’t already happened.
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If I’m not mistaken Kelce continues to be a good FF choice this year, even if the Chiefs aren’t quite the product they’ve been in the past. And whether or not you’re invited to the wedding, make it a blog topic. We want to hear more about your parasocial relationship with the couple!
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My Fantasy Football team has a losing record but Kelce has been my one player outperforming his projections (the experts seemed to think he would be showing more signs of age).
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I like what Amusives said about blogging friends. I have met a few in person and it always feels like we have known each other forever! It’s amazing what dreams the mind can make up.
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Nice to hear about meeting blogging friends in person. I can’t help but think of blind dates, where the perception and the reality aren’t close to a match. Not so bloggers!
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Dave, I heard about that “Word of the Year” on the morning news the other day and missed the word and they didn’t give the meaning – slipshod job reporting re: this important stuff, so I had to Google to find out the scoop. Well, there have been stars idolized for years and years. I can remember seeing an old black-and-white clip of the Beatles performing in the U.S. for the first time, with girls fainting dead away. Elvis had that impression on women as well. 🙂 But social media has spun this star idolization out of control when those that follow the stars think they have achieved some type of “buddy status” with them.
The country-music AI singer named “Breaking Rust” created a unique song “Walk my Walk” which isn’t half bad considering a human didn’t create it. See, now humans are not only dull colored as you commented on for my post, but now, AI can create a meaningful song, even throwing in a few twangs here and there and it sounds like the genuine article – please tell me humans won’t be involved in songwriting anymore. Scary! Scary is also if I tried to do that Lego build. I’d be afraid I’d get to the very end and be missing a crucial piece … that’s if I lasted that long with this challenging puzzle.
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It didn’t bother me to own up to my dream because – like the Beatles – it felt like a common, ordinary connection that you get from a movie character or a celebrity. But today’s version of parasocial is more of an obsession and that is a real concern. I think there was a movie about this topic (“She” or “Her” or something like that), where a person became infatuated with an AI creation. Maybe addiction is a better word?
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People make me shake my head a lot these days. The AI world is closing in on us, that’s for sure. I’m sure recent graduates, people entering the workforce after layoff, shutdown, or just switching jobs are sure to be disenchanted. I heard a story on the Bloomberg Business Report this week that all headhunters use AI to screen out all the AI-generated resumes and cover letters. After that is done, AI is then used to choose the candidate. The candidate uses an AI template and suggested text, so there is zero thought process involved. It’s all too much sometimes. My all-news radio station’s “sister station” here in Detroit is all country and they refuse to play any song that is AI in any form.
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Wait – do you mean that Kate Jackson STILL doesn’t know I exist? This post is just cruel.
And is it a parasocial relationship I have with the egg salad sandwich in your dream if I love actual egg salad sandwiches that I make at home? Or would make if my Mrs. didn’t despise hard boiled eggs.
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If we start discussing parasocial relationships with food I’d say we’ve gone completely off the rails with this topic. And as much as I crushed on Kate back in the day, it was Jaclyn who caught my eye more often. Farrah? Who’s that? 🙂
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That was an interesting topic Dave….and an interesting dream. I now have a craving for an egg salad sandwich too! With all these celebrities being continuously and instantly available to anyone with internet, that’s just scary. I would never want to be one. As for the Swift/Kelce team, you’re a football fan, but I don’t know what she sees in him? I read an article about how she is trying to re-live her high school years, where she was apparently unpopular according to her song lyrics, by dating the captain of the football team. I really need to give her some relationship advice! Oops, I might be Parasocializing…..
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Many years ago we went to a George Strait concert in Denver and his opening act was a sweet little girl named Taylor Swift, who no one had ever heard of before. She went on to write some really good country music. Kind of wish she never “crossed over” to a different genre. Would never want her level of fame now!
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She was supposed to play at a big country music festival here in 2008 when she was just starting out (17yr?) but cancelled at the last minute and by the next summer she was on her way to famous. I have to admire her drive and ambition, not too many singers would embark on a 2year world tour in order to buy back their music catalogue. She’s a talented songwriter and a strong woman and controls her own empire so I used to think she was a good role model for young girls, but lately, I don’t know….she’s veered too much into the Beyonce/Madonna/Jennifer Lopez prancing around the stage category to me. Plus the drinking shots on the jumbotron at the football games – she’s 35, not 22, but I suppose it you missed all that the first time around. I have to admit though that since I stopped commuting to work 10 years ago I don’t listen to pop music on the radio, anymore.
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I’ve had the opportunity to meet in person two bloggers (both women). We became acquainted online, reading and commenting on each other’s blogs long before we knew the opportunity was going to present itself for us to meet. I agree with Lyssy in the City above. Both times there was a lovely sense of connection, because of what we’d already shared. “Parasocial” doesn’t quite cover this phenomenon. We need another word for this!
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So nice to hear about this experience, Nancy. I’d hate to get one impression from words and another from a face-to-face meeting. It speaks to the substance (and positive vibes) our writing feeds one another.
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What a strange dream and with Nuns. How funny. The Trevi is looking great. I’m sure you are enjoying this from an architecture stand point. I love it.
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