I confess that I have been reading Julia Allison’s blog and I promise never to do it again.

Hey. Those of you who still check this moribund site may not have any idea what I’m talking about when I say, “I confess that I have been reading Julia Allison’s blog and I promise never to do it again.” And I’m sorry about that. But I’ve got to do something here.  I’ve got to do it for myself. I’ve got to do it for my time. I’ve got to do it for my work. I’ve got to do it for my brain, my soul, for all my teeth and cells. I’ve got to do it for the mitochondria in my cells.  Here goes:

I’m never going to look at this again.

What is this crazy stuff, and how did I even come to it?  I’ll chalk it up to my old job in publishing.  It’s weird: I decided I didn’t want to continue in that realm partly because I never liked the insiderey, shmoozy stuff a person has to do to succeed; didn’t like the striving and the business and the doing deals and the being cool. (Mind you, photocopying manuscripts at 7:30 pm was not “being cool,” but to gain some prominence, it was clear that you had to play along and go to some parties and know some people and talk about the same subjects that were–how odd–cropping up in various media outlets in succession.)  So anyway, yeah.  It was paradoxical that, right around the time I started to detach myself from my job out of the desire to escape that stuff, I started reading Gawker all the time. Which plunged my head into that very same insiderey media world that I referred to earlier, although, granted, allowed me to experience it at more of a remove. 

Anyway, one of the targets that they, characteristically, both mocked and glorified was this person.  Let me just quickly define her as some sort of a celebrity pundit/dating columnist hybrid.  I wanted to write “mongrel.” My awareness of her has only been a toxic force in my life.  No–that’s an exaggeration.  But, when I think about all of the embarrassingly many times I’ve clicked on her blog, I’m ashamed at all the minutes, if not hours, that I’ve wasted. I’m ashamed that I could have been doing something else–anything else.  I could have made 7,000 hard-boiled eggs, one by one, and fed them to squirrels, and still felt that my time had been better spent. I could have peed on a subway platform, gotten cited by the cops, fulfilled the requisite hours of community service, and still have spent that time better.  I could have even eaten 9,000 loaves of frozen white bread, and there’s nothing I hate more than frozen white bread.  But still, still.  It would have been better than allowing my mindspace to be occupied by Julia Allison.

So why did I even read her shit? By the way–in case it wasn’t clear–I’m writing all this as a binding promise to myself that I will never do it again.  I guess I found her to be a familiar type–irritating, false, “successful,” highly invested in “femininity” while at the same time incoherently professing some superficial, apolitical brand of feminism. I mean, I realize that I sound like a hater.  And I suppose that’s because I am.  And that’s okay, really. 

I think there’s something more meaningful to say here about fascination with celebrity as a means of avoidance and distraction, but I’ll spare you.

In conclusion: if I ever visit that blog again, I will have to eat one loaf of frozen white bread for every click.