Good Advice From a Bad Person

Dear POP,

Thanks for taking time from your busy schedule of reading Britney's tweets to write me. This must have been a busy week for you with Miley's birthday and Eva Longoria's divorce. Also, thank you for a letter that had complete sentences and was more than 140 characters. I know that must have been hard for you.

While I am a little embarrassed that I knew those two little tidbits of celebrity gossip, it is to my point. This is news these days. Celebrity news is so pervasive that everyone knows about their absurd lives. You aren't the only one who knows about them, but it is your fault I know about them. The round-the-clock news cycle coupled with less than credible journalism produces this phenomenon. It's pretty terrible.

I had to wait through an "embargo" to find out about NASA's massive scientific discovery, but if Robert Pattinson pooped on someone's lawn last night, that would break before dawn. (Get it? Twilight joke!) On election night, I had to trudge through stories of Nancy Pelosi's personal thoughts and feelings before I could find numbers and results. Michael Vick's personal controversy trumps his remarkable performance on the football field. Who knows if journalists' chicken of gossip or readers' egg of squealing over personal lives of the rich and famous came first, but it is moot at this point. Our news has changed.

So maybe you can pass the buck onto our culture at large for pushing these stories, but I won't let you off the hook that easily. Now that my rant is out of the way, I can address your problem.

Yes, it's pretty gross that you care so much about celebrities. The reason is pretty obvious—your life is boring. To you, your choice of organic or sustainable oranges at Whole Foods is not as interesting as an actress's love life. Your guilt over your non-compact fluorescent light bulbs is pushed to the back of your mind by a check-in to a sex addiction clinic by a man you will never meet. The hole in your life that you can't fill with your cat is crammed and clogged by the crap overflowing from Hollywood.

While your mundane little life can't hope to produce the drama that millionaires with no real jobs manage, you can make your life interesting, or at least interesting enough to wean yourself from the ample and fabulous teat of Perez Hilton. You could always just start doing drugs and wrecking hotel rooms, but that sounds expensive. Try dumping your boyfriend for no discernible reason (Hey! that's why girls do that. I am glad I finally figured that out). Or, just get a hobby; take an art class, buy a how-to book.

I haven't even mentioned your crippled attention span. Your poor brain atrophied and filled with sparkles because of Twitter. Read a goddamn book. Seriously. This one is that easy. A real book, by the way. To be safe, just grab something that was written at least 35 years ago.

We all like gossip, we all like breaking news; it makes us feel like we are in the know. It doesn't have to be about celebrities though. The internet has given us access to breaking news in all fields. Replace assholes acting out with arsenic-based life forms discovered in California. Trade rehab for theater reviews. I know it will be a long, hard road. You'll want to know what your people are up to, but in the end it really doesn't matter. I know you'll get bored reading complete paragraphs. Commit to this, not just for you, but for me too. Let's kill this drool-mouthed pseudo-journalistic machine together.