Before we go too far into this, let's make one thing clear: I was not feeling old.
Despite the recent passing of another birthday -- one that's ostensibly launched me into the "late 40s" category (although I'm not convinced that's a correct classification, but, then, I may be a bit too close to the subject).
Despite hearing my joints crackle every time I crouch to pet the dog.
Despite my son's gasping in horror at the sight of a proliferation of gray strands when he saw my hair pulled back the other night.
Despite all these things that might beat down a person with a less well-cultivated ability to delude herself, I was not feeling old.
Until, that is, I decided to catch up Thursday afternoon with a variety of online celebrity gossip sites that I'd gleefully ignored during the better part of a vacation week.
Sure, celebrity gossip sites are pathetic, but don't judge -- it's part of my job. OK, so it's a part of my job that I made up on my own. But, still, it's important to know who's who and who's doing what in entertainment if you're going call yourself an entertainment editor.
Which is why the whole gossip-sites-on-a-Thursday thing made me feel like hanging my head in woe and crawling into bed with a shawl and half gallon of rocky road.
As I scrolled down the headlines on one site after another, it became more and more obvious that I was barely glancing at most. I was reading maybe one out of every seven or eight stories. I didn't care about the "celebrities" being gossiped about, I didn't know who a sizable portion of them were and, frankly, I am not the target audience for tantalizing tidbits about nubile blondes and arrested rappers.
Sad realization: I am quickly aging out of today's rotating list of celebrities du jour.
Which made me consider two things: One, I am now actually going to have to put effort into keeping up with who's who and who's doing what in the entertainment world; and two, where's a good Clooney hit when you need one?
Seriously, a headline about Clooney scratching his left arm would have garnered far more interest that stories about such luminaries as Aubrey O'Day, the Kardashian sisters or Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag.
I know. I had to look them up, too.
O'Day, it seems, is from some girl group called Dannity Kane. She, no doubt, only can dream of having the same musical talent as, oh, say, Posh Spice. Best I can tell, the Kardashian sisters' talents lie in having a whole lot of disposable cash and the same voluminous posteriors about which rapper Sir Mix-A-Lot waxed poetic. Spencer and Heidi are a couple from "The Hills," which I guess is a reality show about monied brats, but who really knows because MTV lost me with its botched coverage of Live Eight a few years ago. Besides, isn't that what Paris Hilton is for?
Sure, sure, these are the current generation's celeb obsessions -- just like my generation's obsessions with folks like Bruce Willis, Farrah Fawcett and Bono. But those folks were/are talented actors and musicians. This new group of supposed celebrities? How to put this gently ... mmmm. Would talent challenged attention hounds seem too harsh? Not harsh enough?
The more I scrolled through pictures of platinum and poses, the more exhausted I became.
I was going to switch over to IMDB.com to find out who some of these young celebrities are and why anyone should care. Then it hit me: In a year or so, no one will care. They aren't entertainment's future. They're 15-minutes-of-famers getting way too many extra minutes because of the crazed need for the paparazzi to sell pictures and gossip sites with a crazed need to fill the Web.
I decided to hold off on an IMDB search until I was back at work. Clooney, Pitt, Bono, even Fawcett? I'd read about them in my free time any day of the week. The rest, not so much.
And in a clarifying moment of well-cultivated ability to delude myself, all was well again. Because it turns out I'm not getting old. Just more discerning.
Scene editor Pat Clark can be reached at pclark@modbee.com.
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