I think I was supposed to be relaxing as I lay on the table. It was my first acupuncture appointment. I was not relaxed. But I was thinking about what would be relaxing--being in Hawaii. Since recently, all I want to do is go to Hawaii. I feel it in my bones, like arthritis. Seeing online pictures all week of Jennifer Garner and her family on vacation with Matt Damon's family on the big island in Hawaii has been excruciating. I find Miss Garner to be appealing in an unexotic way, which is odd since her shot to fame came with kicking ass in impossible dresses with a martini glass disguised as a gun/recording device/lock pick. But I remember her as the mousy ex-girlfriend on Felicity and as the earnest actress wannabe roommate on Jennifer Love Hewitt's failed Party of Five spinoff The Time of Your Life. So approachable!For all the time I spend reading about celebrity gossip and fashion at People, Perez Hilton, Page Six, Bricks and Stones, A Socialite's Life, Us, In Touch, Sky Showbiz, Pop Sugar, IMDB, NY Daily News, Gawker, TMZ, and best written of all, Go Fug Yourself (good thing I am semi-retired), I do have my favorite stars. I enjoy reading about the spooky new life of Katie Holmes and her bottled baby. I look for Maggie Gyllenhaal and Michelle Williams. I have come to love the understated normalcy of Jennifer Garner with Violet, her daughter. They are always photographed, but they are never doing anything except playing in the park, going to the market, meeting the horses, and now, swimming in the ocean in Hawaii. They are never dressed particularly well, nor do they seem to care that they are being followed by paparazzi. They just look happy, sort of boring, and somehow unaffected.
All this is to say that while I was not relaxing on the acupuncture table, I wanted to go to Hawaii. But since I am not in Hawaii, and I am not Jennifer Garner, I channel the curious cognitive dissonance produced by gossip tabloids (you don't exactly want to be the celebrity but yet...) into watching Alias. The series started out exactly like the "They're Just Like Us" feature (my favorite) in Us magazine. Sidney Bristow, caught between her life as a graduate student and the thrill and burden of being a double agent who has to kill a lot of people at fabulous parties, needs a vacation.
