Thank you Noah Baumbach, though I’m not exactly sure for what. I’ve seen the trailer for your new film “Greenberg.” Ben Stiller is an interesting choice to speak for we sourpuss Gen-Xers. He was, after all, the auteur of “Reality Bites,” the 1994 ode to post-grad melancholy that beset so many of us. We sounded like middle-aged kvetchers even back then. But now we have legitimate reasons for whining. Here we stand, our final decades before us and in our wake, the wistful recollections of our misspent youth (cue anthemic 1980s alt classic, preferably Morrissey or Kate Bush). “It’s weird, aging, right?” Greenberg asks his fellow furrowed-brow friend as LCD Soundsystem soars in the background. It is especially weird aging in Los Angeles, where this film is set. It is hyper-transient, poignant for the same reasons that it is the perfect place to reinvent yourself. And ideal for those who can’t bring themselves to grow up. I, for one, am staying.

Viggo Mortensen gave me a bag of potato chips. It was a small thing, really. But as I walked down the hall, away from his hotel suite, reflexively putting chip after chip in my mouth (I wasn’t even hungry, but it seemed like the thing to do.) I was once again struck by the weirdness of Hollywood celebrity. Junkets, in particular, emphasize the perversity of it all. All those attractive people housed in individual rooms in one luxurious hotel for a weekend of relentless scrutiny by decidedly less attractive throngs of other people. Each encounter between the two groups so excruciatingly choreographed that even the most benign instance of authenticity – say, a movie star handing a reporter a bag of potato chips – suddenly feels profoundly intimate. As an individual, Viggo came off as pretty grounded. A serious artist, but without a lot of vanity. I couldn’t help notice that he had little tiny holes in the armpit of his shirt. It was endearing. Make no mistake. Viggo knows how to work those cheekbones, but for those of you who saw “Eastern Promises” you know he’s not afraid to show his less flattering side. And I mean that quite literally.

Robert Pattinson, the face that has launched a million Life & Style magazine covers, is pretty scruffy up close. At a crowded Friday press conference on his latest vampire angst-fest “The Twilight Saga: New Moon,” he was a bit unshaven and wore the same flannel shirt I’ve seen in a dozen paparazzi shots. Yet that brunette meringue of a coif– itself a work of genius — remained flawlessly unkempt. And there’s something to be said for his British brand of  self-deprecation. Quite charming. Pattinson, it turns out, is a little irritated that his brooding teen vampire in the “Twilight” series is being perceived as a sort of “animated Tiger Beat.” “I’ve never played it thinking, ‘Oh, I’m in a series of guhls films’ or doing something just for guhls,’” he said to a group of sweaty grown-ups hanging on his every word. Hmm. I wonder what those legions of hyperventilating 12-year-olds have to say about that. (Btw, here’s my story on this in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

It’s something that fascinates even the the most sophisticated cineaste. “Sex” on screen, particularly when the logistics of the thing make you turn your head like the Victrola dog, plugs into something prurient in everyone. This month in a new column in Los Angeles Magazine, I share the back stories from mainstream actors who make a living faking it. It’s interesting to hear the psychological gymnastics that take place between couples when one has to have “sex” with a stranger. Suspension of disbelief, indeed.

Though I’m not breathing ash this week — mercifully, I’m up in San Francisco — I can still smell the charred air that seems to characterize Los Angeles in the fall. And I can’t read about this latest, and staggeringly vast, inferno without being reminded of my own drive into the black clouds and the burning skies. Back in 2003, I spent a night in a Red Cross shelter chronicling the stories of the San Bernardino County evacuees of that so-called “Old fire,” though most of them could hardly grasp the devastation they’d just survived. I didn’t sleep. My lungs ached from breathing so much soot. And I’ll never forget how wounded the sky looked. It felt as if the world was coming to an end. My heart goes out to all the folks fighting this one. (Photo by Los Angeles Times photographer Robert Gauthier)

For last two months, I’ve been lucky enough to get paid to laugh. Literally. And here’s the result of all those heart-felt guffaws. A young scruff named Harris Wittels is the star of the article, and deservedly so. But so many others are right up there: Donald Glover reminded me of a young (more sophisticated) Eddie Murphy. Anthony Jeselnik is spectacularly dark and has mastered the power of the pause. And Brody Stevens made me laugh harder than I have in years. I’ll be chronicling the weirdest, most progressive, most interesting bits of it over the next few weeks. Stay tuned. (Photo by Christina House for the LA Times)

Here I am. A whole paradigm away from the excruciatingly hip Echo Park enclave we vacated last winter. I’m starting to feel (even more) ridiculous in my skinny jeans and rock Ts. “The Artist’s Way,” a book I sneered at three years ago, is now resonating with me. Deeply. I’m considering a tattoo. Perhaps the words “MY LIFE IS HAPPY AND FULFILLED” on the palms of my hands. That way, even when I strike a despairing pose (head-in-hands, for instance) I’ll literally be face-to-face with my future, manifesting only good things. Cough. Surely some of you know what I’m talking about here. Why else would The Atlantic tout on its cover, a piece on the world’s most comprehensive happiness study? (Turns out friends and relatives are what’s keeping you alive.) And why else would I receive three emails in a week, by three unrelated individuals pointing me to that over-achiever Gretchen Rubin and her Happiness Project? It all comes back to the economy, I’m afraid. When we can no longer afford to shop our pain away, when an afternoon in Target isn’t the blissed-out experience it used to be, (all that plastic. so wasteful.) we are forced to turn inward. Hey, can someone turn a light on in here?

So now that Barbie’s gotten all tatted up and Dora the Explorer has suddenly outgrown animal rescue, opting instead for adventures at the mall, I’m starting to feel nauseatingly out-of-control. As the mother of a wee female, I’m especially aware of her budding self-image. And naturally, toy manufacturers are my new nemeses. These corporations have a special talent for sexualizing inanimate objects. Peruse the aisles of Toys R Us and you will see thousands, nay millions, of pairs of Angelina Jolie eyes beckoning in the guise of newborn babies, candy-colored ponies and those bite-sized “Sex and the City” wanna-bes that call themselves “Polly Pockets.”What was the conversation that spawned the updated “My Pretty Pony?” They wear toe shoes and windblown skirts. There is something prurient about them. These toys are designed for 3 year old girls, remember. Back in the day, the heavy-lidded, bullet-chested Barbie was to blame for warping our ideas of beauty. Hell, Barbie looks positively chaste compared to the miniature floozies — of every species — elbowing each other on the toy store shelves today.

Though I have no research to prove this, I’m certain the relentless grind of daily newspaper journalism indelibly warps the cerebellum. “Deadline” — or as former L.A. Times film critic Kevin Thomas (and former Mae West personal assistant) fondly called it, “The Motherfucker” –rigidly structures one’s experience. It keeps you cornered and firing on all cylinders. It gives every day a swift kick in the pants. It dispenses with formalities and hones a razor-like focus. Or (And?) it makes you an adrenaline-junkie rife with crippling neuroses to which you are completely blind. Deadline activates that tiny but powerful portion of the brain known as the amygdala, where our survival instinct lives. Without it, I’ve felt nauseatingly aimless. And so, I’ve redirected all my investigative powers, my need-to-be-a-know-it-all to other areas. Small claims court, for instance. And I’ve become a budding genealogist. Turns out all those cancer deaths on the Italian American side of my family in Appalachia were all due to a toxic landfill – one of the top 25 most toxic places in the U.S. — that sat just two miles from their neighborhood. That sad fact was unknown to me until my buy-out. See? There is an upside to the death of newspaper journalism! More self-knowledge! Yay.

It’s been ten days now and I’ve officially got a crush on Obama. Now I’m checking my Blackberry for those earnest emails, slightly wounded that he hasn’t called. (Though, good president-elect boyfriend that he is, Obama promised in his last note to “be in touch soon about what comes next.”) I realize now that all my talk of Obama burnout was just the long-suffering liberal bracing for the inevitable disappointment. But the night he won, I sat in front of my TV, watched the crowds dance in the streets and wept in spite of my cynical self. Every day closer we move toward January 20, I grow more giddy. And that’s really saying something considering Inauguration Day is also my 40th birthday. Even as the jobs evaporate, the nation’s debt balloons, the foreclosures skyrocket and my 3-year-old’s tantrums rage on, I’m feeling effervescent! Obama restored my faith on Nov. 4. And though I know he’ll make mistakes, his election marks my generation’s coming of age. Obama, born in 1961, to a mixed race, mixed nationality, divorced couple, is one of us. (Obama inhaled!) Granted, he’s a more brilliant, better-spoken one of us, but nevertheless a member of that earnest and self-effacing Lost Generation born in the 60s and 70s who grew up with a profound sense of mankind’s darker traits. Our childhoods were marked by melancholy and tumult, both personally and globally. For my part, I was conceived around the time of the My Lai massacre and the signing of the Civil Rights Act. When I was in utero, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated and Chicago police pummeled student activists outside the Democratic National Convention. And I was born the day Richard Nixon was inaugurated. Turning 40 the day Obama becomes President feels about right.