From the subject matter (celebs! and Gwyneth at that! and interior design! Gwyneth’s interior design!), to the fabulous links, to its celebration of unabashed procrastination, the below email from law-school Lindsey (not to be confused with college Lindsey, although admittedly I often send them emails intended for the other) is perfect in so many ways…

Are you looking at her legs or the Madeline Weinrib chair? Tough call…

“So I really should be studying, but instead I’m googling everything Gwyneth Paltrow because I’ve become completely obsessed with her look recently. I mean, those legs…. I need them. Yesterday. I really want to be able to wear the dresses she’s wearing (if you’ve been too busy to follow her Iron Man press tour, you can get a fashion recap here: http://www.people.com/people/stylewatch/gallery/0,,20195908_1,00.html)

“But anyway, I was googling ‘Gwyneth Paltrow Stylist’ b/c I wanted to see if I could figure out who styles her, and I came across this design blog that had a few entries in October 2007 about her home layout in House and Garden in November. Anyway, I thought you would enjoy the blog, based on some of the entries I’ve read in your blog… habituallychic.blogspot.com 

“Happy writing….we’re almost done!”

Of course, this sent me off on 30 minutes of procrastination of my own (not including writing this post), but does she know me or what? Maybe I need to have a Marbury v. Madison Ave. guest blog…

(Photo thanks to Habitually Chic)

Who said this blog can’t be newsworthy? My sister’s boyfriend told my other sister that the New Kids on the Block are rehearsing from 12-4 in Central Square in a studio next to my sister’s (not the one with the boyfriend, the other one) husband’s friend’s wife’s Pilates Studio. Yes, the news couldn’t be more direct.

The comeback is happening!

I have two friends who are my go-to celebrity gossip aficionados, and when the three of us get together — an MBA,  doctor, and lawyer (don’t worry, I’m not going to out you…) — our conversation inevitably touches on what we’ve recently read on Perez, Go Fug Yourself, People, US Weekly, In Style, etc. We are concerned about Renee’s recently tragic hair (and consistently annoying pursed-lip “smile”), Gwyneth’s need for a trim (she just got one! Yay!), and Christina’s prematurely scheduled c-section (three weeks early, for convenience’s sake – what doctor in his right mind would OK that?). We are the demographic who keeps all these places in rolling in advertising revenue, seriously. We should know better.

Anyway, one of us (the doctor) recently checked out Jamie Lynn Spears’, J. Lo’s, and Halle Berry’s baby registries on Babies R Us. First of all (1) she DID spend time doing this, but (2) she nevertheless is fully aware that they probably are all fake. I mean, do you think J. Lo is really going to register at Babies R Us? According to US Weekly, if you are a star, you register at a place called Milkshop.com for $500 cashmere onesies and $2500 antique prams… And she has an astute query: who is creating these fake baby registries? Is it the manufacturers, who want people to think, “Well, if Halle Berry uses Pampers, maybe I should too?” Or is it random Jane Doe who thinks that J. Lo fans will fall for it, buy some crib sheets for J. Lo (because who wouldn’t want to send her favorite celeb a baby gift?) that will instead actually be sent to the scheming Jane Doe?

P.S. Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Garner are filming a movie in front of my building today. I told Janet to make sure to promenade the Little Bug by a few times to get her discovered.

I popped up to Christopher’s in Porter Square last night to meet Lindsey and Alison for a quick sauv blanc (since LMR was there, on the rocks, natch) after “work.” It was a warm and lively night at Porter, and it made me miss living in Cambridge. Our conversation was fun and fast, and during its course, Lindsey urged me to share a few lists on my blog. What a good idea because, as it turns out, I love lists! (See someone who has cornered this blog niche, here.) As Lindsey and I lamented the fact that we are too ADD these days to actually read real books (Alison apparently is far too erudite to subsist on magazines, as we do), the first such list is the ridiculous number of magazines I consume each month. Tim gives me a hard time for this, but considering my vices are pretty much limited to Starbucks and magazines (wine is an elixir, not a vice), I would counter that it could be worse.  

 People
US Weekly (yes, I do subscribe to both…)
Newsweek
The New Yorker
Sports Illustrated (Tim gets this, along with half-a-dozen golf publications—one of which, Women’s Golf, is inexplicably addressed to me—but I actually do read portions of SI from time to time. I have always thought that sports writing can be some of the most creative and fun to read journalism.)
Parenting
Fitness
Cooking Light
Domino
Vogue
In Style
Real Simple
Oprah
O at Home
Yoga Journal
PAW (I do read it! Every week!)

And then, if the cover happens to be intriguing that month, I’ll pick up at the grocery store or drug store:

Boston Magazine (I like to see what Boston freelancers are in there, e.g., Jeff Klineman)
Vanity Fair
Cookie

Marie Claire (have a friend who is an editor there)
Elle Décor

Metropolitan Home (have a friend who is an editor there)

Bon Appetit (to see if any of Amy’s pieces have made it in)  

Entertainment Weekly (though I buy this less now that Troy has left)

Runner’s World (it’s true: I buy it when I need to get inspired)

I can justify some of this because I used to be in the “business” – I like to look at the mastheads and see who is doing and writing what. But I could and should cut back on the subscriptions. Fitness, for example, is a total waste.  I also rarely read through Parenting, but for some reason get it for free (I think it came with a 1-800-Diapers.com membership?).  And it’s not like I’m pulling recipes out of Cooking Light these days. But when a big, fat In Style, Domino, or Vogue appears once a month, I look forward to climbing into bed that night. And the weekly People and US Weekly delivery is like a martini in the mailbox – utter Friday night brain candy.

A long time ago in, quite literally, another life, I lived in Los Angeles.  In Brentwood, on the corner of Montana and San Vicente, with its tree-lined meridian that slopes gently down to the ocean (a perfect six-mile run to the beach and back.)  My life happily fulfilled many LA stereotypes:  At the Whole Foods across the street, I’d regularly bump into my “neighbors”:  Jennifer Garner, or Ted Danson, or Reese Witherspoon, or Brooke Shields (one time when I saw her and happened to be wearing a Princeton t-shirt, I stalked her around the store, hoping she’d start up a conversation, “Oh, what year were you?”)  And, of course, at yoga I’d see dozens more celebrities:  Kerri Russell, John Cusak, Lisa Rinna (is she a celebrity?), the guy who played Kramer from Seinfeld, and most notably, Gwenyth, who practiced ashtanga next to me for two ego-bashing weeks.  I was friends with both an honest-to-goodness raw-food vegan and a successful television writer and producer who threw parties in the Hollywood Hills (where you’d park your car down the hill and a private bus would shuttle guests up and down to the house all night long.)  When I catch an essence of Eucalyptus or see a purple that reminds me of the spring jacaranda, I miss Los Angeles terribly – I miss these friends, too, who sadly have slipped away along with this former life. 

Many aspects of my life in Los Angeles were pretty fabulous. There was, of course, the wine – $10-a-bottle, incredible wine that doesn’t necessarily get exported out-of-state. I wasn’t working too, too hard at the time. Despite being a high school teacher and/or freelance writer (and despite all the wine), I found plenty of time also to be fabulously in shape.  Not only did I run on the beach almost every day, but I spent my weekends hiking in the Malibu hills, I had a twice-a-week personal Pilates trainer (what?), and, of course, I did yoga.  Religiously and fervently.  I went on yoga retreats to the desert in Joshua Tree and to Brazil.  I actually meditated.  And for a stretch, I got up every morning at 5:30 for a two-hour Mysore practice.  I stopped eating meat, most dairy, and wheat.  I read the Bhagavhad Gita.  I had a mantra. 

Like any other addiction, I suppose, my devotion to/obsession with yoga was filling another hole in my life.  But when I left Los Angeles, the hardest thing for me was leaving behind my yoga studio and teachers.  When I started practicing again on the East Coast, it was hard for me to abandon the rigors of an ashtanga practice, as frustrating and sometimes un-enjoyable that practice was for me. 

I did find a great studio in Cambridge and, for a time, got myself devoted again (sweating through a teacher training retreat in Hawaii, practicing for 40 days straight, volunteering at the studio, going on a fruit fast…).  I realized recently, however, that I have not practiced yoga since before the holidays.  Getting to and from class is a 2+ hour endeavor.  In that time, I could step out my door, run six miles, shower, and still feed my baby.  Nevertheless, the words of my aforementioned vegan friend have been circling around me:  “When you think you can’t find time for yoga is when you need it the most.”  My eight-month-post-baby body is aching (shoulders, back, neck from nursing, picking up an increasingly heavy child, lugging the stroller up and down steps, working, etc. etc., sob sob), I’ve had a low grade cold for a month, and my mind is restless.  It’s time to go back, though obviously I cannot commit to a 90 minute class, five times a week.  I’ve been focusing on running recently:  it’s a quick-fix, an immediate endorphin booster, instant gratification in so many ways, physically and mentally.  Is running my new yoga?  I hate that time forces me to choose between them (in my Los Angeles days I would practice ashtanga for two hours and then run for another.  I was 10 pounds lighter, yes…but – a good lesson learned – certainly no happier…exercise can be an excellent avoidance technique).

When I started this blog, I created a category called “yoga.”  But this is the first time I’ve had anything to write about it – two years ago, this blog would have been mostly about yoga:  how my practice went that day, what I was eating, what was up at the studio, and replete with links to every yoga publication out there.  Yesterday, I posted a query on a mom’s listserve I belong to for a recommendation for a good masseuse or chiropractor for my back.  A woman wrote me back a long message about some Eastern treatments she has been getting for similar problems.  We began an all-day email exchange about our experiences with alternative medicine.  I’ve never met this woman and probably never will, but this serendipitous exchange stirred up something in me.  So this evening, instead of hitting the gym for a six-mile run, I may take my mat two blocks further to Back Bay yoga and see what’s up over there.  Or I may get real with my current life:  20 minutes on the living room floor will do. 

You know that the saga of Britney Spears is a lasting cultural phenomenon when the Times (deigns to) write about it (here).  Makes me want to move to L.A. and be an entertainment lawyer.  Just think of all the craziness!  You could set up the contracts, licensing deals, irrevocable trusts — the whole deal.

A girl I go to law school with gave up Facebook for Lent.  Interesting choice of addictions (though if she plays Scrabulous, I kind of understand it.)  I was reading a post from another woman who gave up celebrity gossip for two weeks.  She saw it as a moral crusade:  she would not support the crazed paparazzi, nor the press who hound normal families such as that of Heath Ledger.  (Her account of her abstinence, here, is funny.)

So I’ve been thinking about my own role in this.  I mentioned at work the other day that I used to write for People magazine and people looked at me with shock, as in “how did a celebrity journalist end up in law school?”  I couldn’t tell if they were horrified or secretly impressed (in this crowd, probably the former.)   But I think there are many links between the law and “celebrity journalism.”  (My ulimately abandoned Law Review note was going to discuss them; I’m sure it would have been brilliant.)  Whether or not publications that have themselves begun to take a moral stance on buying pictures that put people in dangerous situations (e.g., speeding cars chasing Britney) — such as the UK gossip site Holy Moly — are truly honorable in their intentions, maybe I should rethink my own role in this somewhat.  I regale people with tales of my days asking innane questions to celebrities on the red carpet in Hollywood, but in the moment, I also was embarassed and self-conscious when I had my tape recorder in their faces.  We had a symbiotic relationship, those (mostly A-minus) celebs and I:  I needed them to give me a good quotation that would please my editors and keep me employed; they needed to get in People.  So we kind of smiled knowingly at each other and played the game.  But that was almost seven years ago:  after the death of Diana, but before the days of Britney-esque public melt-downs.

In the aforementioned post, the writer ultimately erases her bookmarked celebrity gossip sites.  If only for the sake of productivity, I could start out small by doing the same (sorry Perez).  But give up my Friday afternoon People and US Weekly (yes, I get both.  But the US subscription is in Tim’s name!)?  I can recycle and give up meat, but that might be going too far.  For now. 

Anything she can do…

 Before the rumor that Katie Holmes was running the Boston marathon was debunked, she fired up my competitive side.  Much to Tim’s derision (”Can you really say you ‘ran a marathon’ if you did it in more than five hours?”), she completed the NYC marathon in November, bra-less (check it, above) and flanked by bodyguards.  And if she were running Boston, certainly I could pull it off, right? (Indeed, I had wanted to run Boston last year on the 10th year anniversary of my close-to-five-hour 1997 bandit run, but Little Bug put a stop to those plans…)  I even went so far as to secure a charity number, until Ellen and Nell (ever the voices of sanity) reminded me that although, like me, she does have a baby, Katie Holmes also has the resources to hire people for essential time-saving tasks, most notably styling her hair and fetching her Starbucks — while I have to waste precious training minutes doing both for myself. 

Instead, the three of us are going to attempt the Great Bay Half Marathon on April 6.  Tim is going to run it as well, but since he runs 12 miles every Sunday morning, with or without a hangover and will finish probably a good hour-and-a-half before we do, his undertaking is not quite the production ours is.  What this means is that even though all I want to do on this gloomy, rainy Super Tuesday is go home and watch MSNBC with a glass of wine in my hand, I will go out and run five miles in the dark.  Anyway, our logic is this:  we’ll get in shape before a month of pre-graduation partying, before bar review hell, and before Ellen’s wedding.  And training for a half-marathon should still allow me ample time to fetch my own Starbucks.