Celebrity abstinence

First things first: let's give a BIG shout out to EJ and her evisceration of Newsweek for its pathetic "slow news week" story. "Girls Gone Bad," features such notable role models as Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton. The media (paparazzi on up) give these nitwits WAY too much credit, and now too much blame, for the state of American society, body image, and how American girls act. Most women I know are interested in them the way you would be interested in a soap opera: you follow the story, but you laugh when the main character gets impregnated by her friend's boyfriend who also happens to be the long-lost brother she didn't know she had.

I was actually going to write about the U.S. and nationalism, a topic which I am doing a paper on at the moment, but I decided that my writing on the topic should probably be limited to said paper, and that what EJ was writing about was MUCH more interesting.

In protest of the fact that so-called venerable publications like Newsweek have sunk to such depths, I have decided to not actively read any celebrity gossip for one week. This will have two functions. First, I will not know exactly who went to lunch with whom and wonder if they may or may not be dating and therefore valuable brain space will not be wasted. And second, I have been threatening to do this for awhile and now is as good a time as any. So no popsugar, perezhilton, pinkisthenewblog, e! online and I'm even abstaining from gofugyourself for the next week because sometimes as much as it isn't gossip and just catty side comments, the grammys are next week and that makes this whole task that much harder.

I'm going to put parental locks on those sites so I'm not even tempted. This should be interesting.