brain break

A friend of mine, B., has a special talent for punctuating serious comments with pop culture references, which is jarring and often hilarious.  After writing to me that he enjoyed reading about my recent thoughts on how we, in a consumer society, accumulate too much stuff, he wrote:

Apparently Gwyneth Paltrow has a blog about things you can buy to have a beautiful life like hers.  Maybe you could get rid of the thinking and learning parts of your blog and add more pictures of stuff to buy.

His comment actually made me feel a little sheepish about one of my “guilty pleasures,” which is the TV show Lipstick Jungle. Oh, to live the life of Wendy, Nico, or Victory! (No, I actually don’t envy a glamorous or celebrity life, but it was a fun soap opera to escape into with women my age who are dealing with career and love problems just like mine…………although mine doesn’t include a six-figure-salary, press conferences, private jets, designer clothes, Page 6, celebrity friends, etc.)

I blame my sister and Andrew McCarthy (who plays Victory’s love-interest, Joe) for this addiction. I blame my sister for telling me that it wasn’t as silly as it looked and it might be fun for me to watch and then I got hooked, and I blame a lingering nostalgia for my 1986 crush on Andrew McCarthy in Pretty in Pink.

Alas, Lipstick Jungle has been canceled by NBC. I’ll have to find some other show to fluff my brain.

 

a fri night story (guilty pleasures vol 2)

I hadn’t ever read all of Jane Austen’s “Pride & Prejudice,” so on one Friday night not long ago, I decided to stay home, make myself a decent dinner, and dig into the book. I read for a while but was having difficulty focusing on the book after a long work-day. I turned on the TV and flipped channels, and stumbled on the chick flick “Must Love Dogs.” I’d read bad reviews of it, and wasn’t too interested, BUT it did star John Cusack after all, so I couldn’t resist.

I figured that since I was evidently spending the evening watching bad TV, I could also succumb to my most guilt-ridden snack: a giant spoon of peanut butter, along with a handful of chocolate chips in a cup, and I dip the spoon into the cup. (I started doing that sometime in the early 80s after seeing all those old Reeses’ commercials, “You got chocolate in my peanut butter.” My favorite was the one where Juliet accidentally drops a bar of chocolate from a balcony into a jar of peanut butter that Romeo is holding.)

So there I am, eating chocolate chips embedded in peanut butter, “Pride & Prejudice” on my lap…and about 2/3 into the movie, Diane Lane’s character–after bemoaning her bad dating experiences–says “I don’t want to end up a middle-aged woman sitting home alone, eating chocolate and reading a Jane Austen novel.” I froze with the spoon mid-air, looked down at my book, and just started to laugh, “Oh my god, I’m that woman.”

I am a cliche. No, I don’t have a cat.