16:53:39

Gossip

We're coming down to the wire now. The Big 30th birthday is hurtling at me like a line drive. I must do something with these last, precious few days of my twenties. Something wacky. 30 is the cutoff age for me as far as amassing the trappings of the freewheelin' indie rock lifestyle I've clung desperately to for the past 10 years, as Kev believes that any tattoos or additional piercings I may acquire after the 14th "smacks of desperation." So what do I do? Shave my eyebrows and run around Kenmore Square in a prom dress? Drink my weight in Nyquil and lecture astonished tourists about my favorite piece o' freakish Boston history: the Great Molasses Flood of 1919?

I'm open to any ideas. Time is running out.

Here's my new addiction: Eyada.com's entertainment channel. I stream it from the RealPlayer on my work computer. Listen to it all day. Gossip, gossip, gossip.

Many moons ago, in my confirmation class, Bob and Ginny, the couple who were appointed to successfully steer me into a happy and healthy Catholic adulthood, spent the better part of an evening discussing the Nature of Sin. There was a sentence that my friend Christina and I found particularly pertinent and amusing, one that would become our rallying cry for the next couple of years: Remember folks - gossip is just as bad as premarital sex. This was as hilarious to us as it was baffling; try as we might, we couldn't find the correlation, but the line stuck just the same, and we repeated it often, much to the bewilderment of our non-Catholic friends.

At the time, Christina and I were closely following the antics of Tom & Mimi (for the younguns out there who may not be aware, before it was "Tom & Nicole," it was, for a brief shining moment in the mid-80's, "Tom & Mimi."), although I was more reserved in my pursuit of information pertaining to the couple, since knowing and/or caring about anything so mainstream as Tom Cruise was so not "punk." Christina, however, had no such concerns within her own social circles, and would enter homeroom practically crowing with the latest scoop. Frequently, she would come in with the latest issue of People magazine and plop into the seat next to mine with a conspiratorial smirk: "Contraband, Lees, contraband."

"Oooo. Don't let Bob and Ginny know you bought that. That's as bad as premarital sex."

So, now I'm almost 30, and yet the question still lingers: is the fact that I heard that Toni Braxton scrubs her feet with SOS pads to keep them soft a sin? Or does the sin lie in my allowing myself to hear that Toni Braxton scrubs her feet with SOS pads? If that's the case, do I have to stop watching VH-1?

I would ask Lino, my source of information for all my angsty-Xer-Catholic questions, but I really try to keep my queries to him to a minimum. I would bug Lino all day if I thought I could, but I don't want him to become scared of me and block my email address or something. Because once one of these questions pop up, I'm like a dog with a bone; I'm just not happy if I'm not obsessing over something.

lisamcc at Gossip

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