oh. my. heavens.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I am a celebrity gossip freak. Last year while I was in Canada going to school to get my BEd, my greatest weekly expense was not presents for Ji. Nor was it subway tokens. It also wasn't for booze, smokes, drugs, music, clothes, casino debts, gigolos, make-up, manicures, facials, chocolate bars, flowers, tech gadgets, Tide, Kleenex, or pencils. Nope, I forked out cash on a daily basis to buy Us, People, In Touch, and every other gossip rag on the racks.

While overseas, I am prohibited by really, truly high prices from buying imported magazines. I'm talking, like, ten bucks for something it takes me 15 minutes to read. So, I gulp through my stolen weekly dose when I drop by the English bookstores downtown, and I read my gossip online. I'm not particularly shy to admit that I don't read any news sites on more than a monthly basis (though I do scan the BBC headlines when I load up the cbeebies kids' site for Ji - check it out, it's awesome, and it contains no advertising, unlike all that crap American shit online). When I was a jobless housewife (sorry for yet another aside, but not that there's anything wrong with staying at home to take care of kids; been there, loved it. It's just that I wanted to work and was waiting to leave Malaysia and couldn't get a job because we were just about to move to Bangkok, and the move kept getting postponed and I was really frustrated with the situation, and all we did was swim and sunbathe in the morning, eat hot dogs for lunch, and then wait for Phet to get home at 7 pm, and then watch endless episodes of Futurama. Actually, in retrospect, Futurama was the highlight of those months. But to reiterate: I ain't saying watching babies isn't a job and a goddamn hard one and a goddamn rewarding one. Phew.)...sorry, when I was a jobless housewife, I used to read Metafilter, but now I have no time for intellectual debate and wittily crafted links to post-industrial-russian-art-by-Japanese-anime-artists-who-fought-in-the-vietnam-war.

No, I have separated the wheat from the chaff. My daily hits are as follows: first, Ashley's weblog,because it's awesome and I know the person who writes it and she sometimes mentions me and this week she even posted a picture of a magazine article she'd taken photos for and the photos were taken in my kitchen!; socialitelife for an excellent daily round-up of celeb news; gofugyourself for high-larious clothing commentary, and perezhilton for amazingly long, personal-opinion insights into gossip. Now, today, Mum, Cathie, and Emma took Ji to Hua Hin. Hua Hin's a beach town south of Bangkok and they'll be there for a few days. Which means - hurrah hurrah - extra gossip surfing time for me! After I got home from watching The Cinderella Man tonight (veddy good) I scrolled down the Perez Hilton site and saw (gasp!) the following:

Check that out! A thank you to recent visitors, including those from Bangkok. How many people do you suppose surf the Perez Hilton gossip site on a daily basis FROM BANGKOK? I bet only one person does, and that person is ME, ME, ME. How cool is that? [Bangkok-29-September-2005]