Gossip Girl

Lately I've been thinking a lot about gossip: how quickly you can get wrapped up in it, what it creates in people and how it makes me feel when I participate in it. It's so easy to get caught up in the latest chisme when there are magazines, websites and Page Six's dedicated to celeb lives, who's hooking up, who's separating, cheating, adopting, etc. Why should anything beyond their work matter to us?

Then there's the role it takes in our personal lives. Instead of confronting issues head-on and leaving it at that, we talk behind each other's backs fueling rumors and creating new ones as we go. And even if we don't create or spread the gossip ourselves, the simple act of listening is bad enough.

I can admit that I'm one of these people. Girl talks become gossip fests in which we analyze and speculate about everyone else's lives and as much fun as it is to get sucked into it, in the end it just feels...gross, wrong, like I should know and be better than that. And so it goes until the next time someone goes, "Yooo, guess what I just heard?!"

This needs to stop, for me anyway. As hard as it may be, I don't want to continue being a cog in any rumor mill. If someone comes to me with the latest news on so-and-so, I'm turning the other way. Now I'm not referring to well-intentioned updates about someone I haven't talked to in a while. I mean the snide remarks and malicious comments you probably wouldn't want that person to ever hear. If I wanted to know that person's story, I'd just give him/her a call. If he/she doesn't give up the info then maybe it's because he/she doesn't want me to know and that is just fiiiiine by me.

Surely we have enough going on in our own lives that we don't need to go meddling in things we've no business meddling in. But if you're that starved for entertainment, I hear those celebs put out movies every once in a while.

Image: thefreshxpress.com