Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Allow Myself to Myself Myself

Myself and myself's friend Cindy took myself's dog to myself's favorite ice cream store last weekend. Myself had the chocolate chip cookie dough; Cindy tried myself's ice cream and liked it better than her own! Myself even gave a lick to myself's dog, Flicka. She was very grateful to myself for sharing myself's ice cream with her. This was a new ice cream place, one that myself had never tried before. Myself and Cindy will definitely go again - myself enjoyed it very much!

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grammargirl's grammar tip of the day
Figure this one out on your own!

Monday, June 4, 2007

Forget Paris

I made a decision two weeks ago. I will never again read a gossip rag. As average people go, I did not read them all that much anyway, so it wasn’t a hard decision. Mostly I partook at the gym, where they were free, when I needed “light reading material” (HA! I can’t even believe I just wrote that with a straight face) because I was bouncing up and down on the elliptical. Nonetheless, the fact that I did not read them all that much does not detract from the realization that hit me that these things are trash and they were filling my brain with garbage and I wanted no more of it. So, I’m done. I made a conscious decision to never read a trashy celeb mag again. That includes all of ‘em: Us Weekly, In Touch, OK!, People (yes, people, People is a gossip rag. This is NOT real news), and the rest of the lot of ‘em.

I am a well-read individual. I have a Ph.D. for crying out loud, so what was I doing reading this crap to begin with? I got sucked in just like everyone else (Oh, and I soooo hate to be just like everyone else! Ick.). I have read some of the most important novels of our time and my favorite magazine is the New Yorker. The realization of the irony in that or, perhaps, the blatant absurdity of the clash of cultures is one of the things that led me to this decision.

The other thing, though, was a vacation I took recently. I vacationed with several of my girlfriends and while having the opportunity to hang out and converse with them for longer than usual, I realized that hardly any of my girlfriends can carry on a conversation for longer than 10 minutes without comparing something in that conversation to some celebrity. “It’s just like when Brad dumped Jen for Angelina” or “Can you believe that Scarlett Johansen was dating Jared Leto?” or “I cannot believe Nicole Kidman took Keith Urban back after he cheated on her and went to rehab!” Half the time, there was a tenuous, if any, connection between the celebrity talk and our own conversation.

Mind you, these are normally intelligent, articulate, successful women, prone to displays of sheer disgust, anger, or even delight at the behavior of celebrities—people they do not know. What’s even more disturbing is that they talk about them as if they DO know them! They are on a first name basis with some of these people and they talk about aspects of their personality as if they have first-hand knowledge. To one person’s “Can you believe…” comment, another will say, “Well, she’s always been a jealous person.” REALLY?? How would you know that exactly? You and Madonna hang out a lot, do you? Yours and Gwyneth’s kids have playdates at Chuck E. Cheese?

It all became too much. It was on that flight home when I decided I would not subject my own brain to any more. No more garbage.

We all have pretty interesting, fulfilling lives if we would live them instead of being so wrapped up in what other people are doing with theirs. I wish my girlfriends would realize this so that we could start to talk about things that matter, like politics (do any of them even know who the nominees are for the two parties? Do they care?) or the environment. For now, I guess I’ll have to settle for being out of the loop at our next get-together, when the rest of them are talking about whose cellulite looked worse on the cover of the Enquirer.

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grammargirl's grammar tip of the day

The word is "frustrated" not "fustrated."
The word is "ecstatic" not "estatic."