"We are taking a brief break so I can focus on myself."
- Lindsay Lohan gives E! News the skinny on why she's no longer with girlfriend Samantha Ronson
Okay, so it's possibly the straightline of the year -- a movie star telling the world she needs more "me" time.
But it does explain a lot about the literal car wreck that is Lindsay Lohan.
The problem all this time has been her selflessness, always thinking of others, to the point that her own needs have been dying on the vine.
It's been right in front of us the whole time. What fools we've been. I feel like one of those idiot residents on House who slaps his forehead in the final 10 minutes when Dr. House deduces that the patient's symptoms are not a penicillin allergy, but a rare jungle virus that made its way to America in a case of mangos.
Apparently, when Lohan allowed Kate Moss and the cast of Saturday Night Live, respectively, to stage interventions about her partying and booze-and-drug-fueled lifestyle, it was a clever ploy to make them all feel needed and boost their self-esteem (I mean, Kate Moss giving a "smarten-up" talk? What, Pete Doherty wasn't available?)
When Lohan was seen wearing an Alcoholics Anonymous "90 Days" sobriety bracelet, her spokesperson called it "a tribute to a friend."
See what I mean?
And a little-known fact about her DUI (with prosecutors opting to overlook a small amount of cocaine in her possession) is that she was actually the least effed-up person at the Beverly Hills party she'd attended, and according to local custom, therefore inherited the job of designated driver.
Recently, much media attention has been focused on Canadian academic Malcolm Gladwell's book The Outliers -- a work that would have been more memorably titled 10,000 Hours because of its theme that says that many hours must be devoted to any passtime before you can be successful at it. It applies to almost any line of work -- 10,000 hours learning to throw a sinking fastball before you're Roy Halliday, 10,000 hours playing in Hamburg before you're The Beatles, 10,000 hours writing code before you're Bill Gates, 10,000 hours preening and rewriting other people's jokes before you're Dane Cook.
But the job of movie star fits oddly into that template. Yes, you used to have to pay dues. Leonardo DiCaprio and George Clooney had to take shark-jumping roles in sitcoms either starring or featuring theme songs written by Alan Thicke before they made it.
But these days youth is paramount, and actresses in particular come with a best-before date. If you spend 10,000 hours doing anything, it's, well, nothing.
You're paid huge sums of money to be on call for months of production on a movie where you may only do a few weeks work. And that's not counting the time in between projects -- you know, "me" time. The upshot is you've got millions of dollars and endless spare time. And you're in your teens or twenties (by your 30s you'll be playing the mom of leading men who are actually older than you).
There are really only a couple of directions this scenario can go, one of which involves you staggering out of Hyde nightclub, flipping the bird to the paparazzi before driving into a Walk/Don't Walk sign and leading off the next day's story-lineup on tmz.com.
The other direction has to do with why religious cults do so well in Hollyweird.
Anthropologists tell us that our brains are hard-wired to try to make sense of random events. It's a mechanism that explains why we see dragons in clouds, a face on Mars and the Virgin Mary in Doritos.
And there is truly nothing more senseless than a high-school dropout making more money than the GNP of a developing nation simply because he or she is unusually photogenic. Anybody with even half a social conscience would have trouble dealing with the randomness of it.
Ah, but if Shirley MacLaine can tell you it's your karma that makes you special, or if somebody tells you it's because you are virtually thetan-free, then you make sense. It's because you're you.
So focus on yourself freely, Lindsay. Those other people only drag you down.
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