Dear Shia LaBeouf, *Side-Eye* Love, PopBytes

Shia LaBeouf

Shia LaBeouf

So apparently, Shia LaBeouf decided to rectify receiving millions upon millions of dollars from Hollywood by starring in a Broadway production (called Orphans) with Alec Baldwin, because pretentious hipster douchebags don’t seem to understand that Broadway is basically Hollywood minus the cameras. Except then Shia dropped out after having a diva tantrum, and decided to apologize to the play’s producers the best way possible: By plagiarizing Esquire and then putting it on Twitter for everyone to see how mature and ‘artsy’ he really is. Here’s the email in question

… as well as the Esquire piece for comparison:

A man is good at his job. Not his work, not his avocation, not his hobby. Not his career. His job. It doesn’t matter what his job is, because if a man doesn’t like his job, he gets a new one.

A man can look you up and down and figure some things out. Before you say a word, he makes you. From your suitcase, from your watch, from your posture. A man infers.

A man owns up. That’s why Mark McGwire is not a man. A man grasps his mistakes. He lays claim to who he is, and what he was, whether he likes them or not.

Some mistakes, though, he lets pass if no one notices. Like dropping the steak in the dirt.

[…] He does not rely on rationalizations or explanations. He doesn’t winnow, winnow, winnow until truths can be humbly categorized, or intellectualized, until behavior can be written off with an explanation.

[…] A man knows his tools and how to use them — just the ones he needs. Knows which saw is for what, how to find the stud…

[…] A man does not know everything. He doesn’t try. He likes what other men know.

A man can tell you he was wrong. That he did wrong. That he planned to. He can tell you when he is lost. He can apologize, even if sometimes it’s just to put an end to the bickering.
(Via Esquire)

An addendum here: When a man actually apologizes, he uses his own words instead of plagiarizing someone else’s like an asshole without giving due credit. A man apologizes because he does so privately because he actually wants to make amends, and doesn’t do so to save face publicly. A real man doesn’t act like a pompous, arrogant sh!thead because he’s convinced himself he’s an artist when he is, at best, the kid from Even Stevens, or the kid from Transformers who spent the entire movie shouting “NO NO NO NO!” And a man knows that these guidelines basically apply to all of humanity, not just to little boys pretending to be men or vaguely androphilic guys who mean well but don’t seem to get the point that morals are unisex.

About JEREMY FEIST 5002 Articles
Jeremy Feist is an (ahem) entertainer from Toronto, Canada. He writes, acts, and performs on stage, and has been a writer for Popbytes for almost three years now. He lives in Toronto with his boyfriend, his incredibly dumb but cute puppy, and his immortal cat.