Extremely Perishable

In New York, celebrities come out in the sun. And they always flock to the same 3 places: SoHo, MPD and the West Village. If you see one anywhere else, they're either doing TRL, a movie premiere/shoot, Heath Ledger (a la Michelle W.) or lunch at the De Niro apartment. This is a rule, not an opinion.

Today I saw rookie celeb Chris Evans strolling up West Broadway. Chris Evans = the cocky fireball, Johnny Storm, in Fantastic Four. (B minus celeb, max.) I was sitting on a storefront stoop talking to one of the Ithaca kids on my cell phone and I see him strolling along in the typical Soho uniform: dark sunglasses, air of entitlement. Okay, I apologize; he wasn't strolling so much as strutting. And it was the type of strut that couldn't be natural. It was a little too slow and reminded me of when white kids try to imitate hip-hoppers.

This is an obvious sign that Evans is a novice when it comes to being a manhattan scenester. Maybe that's the way they do it in LA, but, in New York, we do naturalism ... or, at least, we fake it. Celebrities in New York generally move around in public as if they are "normal." They draw attention to themselves only in NOT drawing attention to themselves, and New Yorkers generally leave them alone. I could see the comic book think bubble coming out of Chris's head. It said, "LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!"

I smiled at him and he didn't smile back. That was the only New York thing about him.

Every gay man in Manhattan was at Marc Jacobs, yesterday. There was a denim sale -- 60% off all jeans and jackets. As you can imagine, things got a little nasty: "A Marc by Marc pant leg poked my eye out!"

Anyway ... I was across the street getting doped up on cupcakes. I have to line my frame with enough fat to get me through the winter. And, by "winter," I mean "finals." And, by "finals," I obviously mean "the worst week of my collegiate life."

In other news -- I found myself missing my brother this weekend. Usually I try to forget he exists because it's easier, that way, to deal with the fact that he has forgotten that I exist. But it wasn't happening yesterday. I called him and had a one-sided conversation with him. Halfway through, he gets up to answer the door at his apartment and I hear people come in, I hear talking, laughter ... Cutting to the chase: he never came back to pick up the phone. He left me waiting on the other end of the line; all I could do was hang up.

This is now the 4,637th time that he has made me feel like a chump.

Many more to come, I'm sure.

Jake is back in town! I am fully aware that my obsession with him is reaching epic and ridiculous proportions, but fear not -- I limit it to the internet.

(Although, if I knew where he lived ...)

P.S.
I have always been a big supporter of facial hair but there are times when enough is enough. I'm not down with handle bars or the woodsman look. No Santa Claus. Let that be a lesson to you, J.

"Why?," I ask myself. "Why do girls do this?" And I'm talking about the baby-voice thing. That thing, that a person I live with does all the time, that makes me want to vomit. That thing that many a fine man has been subjected to by a girlfriend who doesn't know any better--by an asshole who embarrasses all real women.

To me this is one of the most disgusting ways imaginable of endearing yourself to someone--a boyfriend, anyone. It involves mimicking the vocal quality of a mewling four year-old girl. It conjures up images of diapers and drool and sticky fingers--all the nastiness of infancy. And when a 20 year-old person (or older) drops into the baby-talk, it also conjures up images of mental asylums, old folks homes and mental retardation facilities, where there are actually a lot of older people who can't wipe their own asses or feed themselves, whose minds have either degenerated into nothingness or never developed properly in the first place. Only there would you find a 20 year-old who has an honest excuse for the inability to speak like he or she passed first grade.

Essentially, when I hear the baby-voice, many negative references are rolled into one. The high-pitched, nasal, whining sound only makes matters worse ... That sound, and the possibility that the boyfriend, who's on the receiving end of all this, might be getting off on it, is highly disturbing.

The grossness is truly endless.

Why do girls do it? Who teaches them? Every time I hear a girl--a WOMAN--squealing like an infant, I have to grit my teeth and stifle the pain. I honestly don't understand why people think it's cute to start talking like a little kid. It's not sexy. It's not empowering. It's NOT cute. It makes you look like a fool and if I was your man, I know I'd be running for the hills.

Best New Show:

VH1's Can't Get a Date - HERE

AND ...

Here, JK Rowling sounds off on the stick people:

Being thin. Probably not a subject that you ever expected to read about on this website, but my recent trip to London got me thinking...

It started in the car on the way to Leavesden film studios. I whiled away part of the journey reading a magazine that featured several glossy photographs of a very young woman who is either seriously ill or suffering from an eating disorder (which is, of course, the same thing); anyway, there is no other explanation for the shape of her body. She can talk about eating absolutely loads, being terribly busy and having the world's fastest metabolism until her tongue drops off (hooray! Another couple of ounces gone!), but her concave stomach, protruding ribs and stick-like arms tell a different story. This girl needs help, but, the world being what it is, they're sticking her on magazine covers instead. All this passed through my mind as I read the interview, then I threw the horrible thing aside.

But blow me down if the subject of girls and thinness didn't crop up shortly after I got out of the car. I was talking to one of the actors and, somehow or other, we got onto the subject of a girl he knows (not any of the Potter actresses – somebody from his life beyond the films) who had been dubbed 'fat' by certain charming classmates. (Could they possibly be jealous that she knows the boy in question? Surely not!)

'But,' said the actor, in honest perplexity, 'she is really not fat.'

'"Fat" is usually the first insult a girl throws at another girl when she wants to hurt her,' I said; I could remember it happening when I was at school, and witnessing it among the teenagers I used to teach. Nevertheless, I could see that to him, a well-adjusted male, it was utterly bizarre behaviour, like yelling 'thicko!' at Stephen Hawking.

His bemusement at this everyday feature of female existence reminded me how strange and sick the 'fat' insult is. I mean, is 'fat' really the worst thing a human being can be? Is 'fat' worse than 'vindictive', 'jealous', 'shallow', 'vain', 'boring' or 'cruel'? Not to me; but then, you might retort, what do I know about the pressure to be skinny? I'm not in the business of being judged on my looks, what with being a writer and earning my living by using my brain...

I went to the British Book Awards that evening. After the award ceremony I bumped into a woman I hadn't seen for nearly three years. The first thing she said to me? 'You've lost a lot of weight since the last time I saw you!'

'Well,' I said, slightly nonplussed, 'the last time you saw me I'd just had a baby.'

What I felt like saying was, 'I've produced my third child and my sixth novel since I last saw you. Aren't either of those things more important, more interesting, than my size?' But no – my waist looked smaller! Forget the kid and the book: finally, something to celebrate!

So the issue of size and women was (ha, ha) weighing on my mind as I flew home to Edinburgh the next day. Once up in the air, I opened a newspaper and my eyes fell, immediately, on an article about the pop star Pink.

Her latest single, 'Stupid Girls', is the antidote-anthem for everything I had been thinking about women and thinness. 'Stupid Girls' satirises the talking toothpicks held up to girls as role models: those celebrities whose greatest achievement is un-chipped nail polish, whose only aspiration seems to be getting photographed in a different outfit nine times a day, whose only function in the world appears to be supporting the trade in overpriced handbags and rat-sized dogs.

Maybe all this seems funny, or trivial, but it's really not. It's about what girls want to be, what they're told they should be, and how they feel about who they are. I've got two daughters who will have to make their way in this skinny-obsessed world, and it worries me, because I don't want them to be empty-headed, self-obsessed, emaciated clones; I'd rather they were independent, interesting, idealistic, kind, opinionated, original, funny – a thousand things, before 'thin'. And frankly, I'd rather they didn't give a gust of stinking chihuahua flatulence whether the woman standing next to them has fleshier knees than they do. Let my girls be Hermiones, rather than Pansy Parkinsons. Let them never be Stupid Girls. Rant over.

I'm having an intellectual love affair with this bitch I met in one of my classes last year. We are so creepy together. We're like ...

Well, I don't know what we're like. Mind is shot. Can't come up with something witty.

Anyway, point is we have fun together. We're mind-blowingly cool with each other. This results in moments that are way too zen for me to believe. For instance, on Tuesday, we're sitting in a movie theatre and I say to her, randomly, "maybe I die every night and am born every morning." Then she says, "Maybe every time I look at you, you look brand new."

WTF? See what I mean? We're creepy.

I don't even know where it comes from.

It's been a while. I've been hiding under mountains of work.

Just thought I'd share this with the world: Joe Gordon Levitt Corners the Razis