Our gossip columnist spends all day in bed scouring the wires for the hottest dish, doing her best to keep her mind active and focused on the troubles and scandals of other people. Reading about celebrities keeps her from getting overwhelmed by the feeling that that there really isn't any point in bothering anymore. Is there?

After two years of trying to get people to pay attention to her, for like twenty minutes a day even, and feeling like no one would care if she just disappeared off the face of the earth, Katie Couric has decided to do just that. Due to poor ratings, she's leaving CBS Evening News well before her contract was supposed to expire in 2011. Couric knows no one wants her around, so she's just going to go away now. She's not going to make everyone uncomfortable by staying where she's not wanted. She's going away, and she's probably looking forward to it. The nice thing about being alone is there's no one around to hurt you.

This week Rob Lowe finally discovered that the idea of the human race being an elevated species with the capacity for compassion is an urban legend. Lowe blogged on the Huffington Post about how people he thought he could trust might be saying horrible things about him for their own personal gain. It's strange that Lowe believes such a common occurrence deserves a blog post. It's best to assume that the minute you leave a room, everyone just drops what they're doing to talk shit about you. They huddle together to laugh about the weight you've gained, how some of your hair is falling out and the rest is clumped and dirty, how they heard you need to take four Ativan just to walk from your bedroom to the kitchen to see if there's any food you might be able to swallow. Sometimes it feels like the whole world is talking about you and how they wish you would just die already. People are vampiric and the human heart is a cold black rock.

Self-defense courses have it all wrong. Physical assault is easy to endure. There should be classes that teach you how to protect yourself from people who claim to love you and want to make you happy. The class would teach how to defend against people who con you into giving them your heart just so they can crush it under their boot and leave you to spend the next few years on your hands and knees trying to scrub the bloodstains out of your carpet. Mary Louise Parker, who once gave her love to Billy Crudup only to have him leave her for another woman when she was seven months pregnant with his child, could be the instructor. Parker has just announced that she's not going to marry her "Weeds" co-star Jeffrey Dean Morgan after all. Clearly, Mary Louise Parker knows what people are capable of.

In December, married actors Sean Penn and Robin Wright Penn fell under the illusion that they deserved better than the meager intimacy and infrequent intervals of contentment they'd managed to create together, so they decided to divorce. After several months of searching the landscape outside of their home and finding only malevolence and disease, this week it was announced that the couple has called off their divorce, choosing to settle for numb, passive companionship over desolation.

Silda Wall Spitzer, wife of disgraced former governor Eliot Spitzer, is rumored to have known about her husband's dalliances with hookers but didn't care, because who is she to condemn someone for making a desperate grasp at just a few brief moments of tenderness? He paid thousands and gambled his entire life just to have a stranger consent to laying her touch upon his ruined skin, for just a handful of hours in an anonymous hotel room. Clearly, Mrs. Spitzer must have thought, it's what my husband needs to make it to tomorrow. How can I deny him that? How can anybody?

"Silda Knew About Hookers" - NYP
"Sean Penn, Wife Withdraw Divorce Papers" - Yahoo! News
"Parker Ends Engagement, AP Told" - Baker City Herald
"Housegold Betrayal" - HuffPo Posted by: Bob Powers      I’m a fan of Bob Powers