As per usual, there have been a lot of celebrities in the news lately. It's all:

• Shia LaBeouf
• Philip Seymour Hoffman
• Justin Bieber
• Woody Allen

And I wonder if I should write about these things. Sometimes people expect me to have opinions, perspectives and profound thoughts that shed some new light on the drama. I've written about those things a couple of times in the past and the articles tend to get shared a lot and the blog hits go through the roof.

But it just doesn't feel right to me.

Because really, I can't explain why Philip Seymour Hoffman fell off the wagon after 24 years and why Shia LaBouf put a paper bag on his head. I'd just be speculating and rambling and really - I don't think it's any of my business.

I tried writing something about Justin Bieber a while ago. Something about how I, too, was once a 19-year old Canadian with questionable decision-making skills. But after I wrote it, I thought "so what?" This is not what I care about anymore. I deleted it.

Sometimes I wonder if all this celebrity media attention is not just a big distraction so that we don't have to sit quietly with ourselves and our own lives. It's way more fun to judge Justin Bieber than it is to deal with my own shit. Criticizing someone else's life means I have less time to notice the ways that I deal with the world. But spending my time condemning others is not really going to make my life -  or anyone else's - any better.

So what do I care about? I care about the stuff that we all go through. The stuff that is messy and complicated and in need of constant re-examination. The stuff that keeps us all up at night. I care about trying to figure out how to be an authentic person when so much in our culture is centered around image and status. I care about contributing to the world even though the problems are so much bigger than me. I care about finding different definitions of success. I care about life lessons I've learned from my dog.

I'd really like to avoid having posts on here that are like - "Huh. Yeah. I donno. Some people are weird, I guess." I'm just going to write about things when I feel I have something worthwhile to offer to the public conversation. I've decided that sometimes it's okay to just be quiet.

It's not that all celebrity commentary is trite. There are people who write about entertainment issues and do it really well. My faux little sister Mara Wilson is one of those people who does it thoughtfully, while offering insight and wit. But I realized that I can't do it and feel like my authentic self. I'm still trying to figure out how to navigate these waters of being me, and this particular channel is too turbulent.

Instead of writing something about Woody Allen and feeling like a fraud, I'm just going to stick to the things that are really important: how to survive almost being killed by a manatee.

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