In Los Angeles, when it drizzles outside people can’t drive. It’s as if a flash flood hit the city and everyone forgot they had windshield wipers. Driving becomes a hazardous game of stop and go and stop so fast you almost hit the car in front of you. When it’s sunny outside the traffic is worse because no one can see through the glare of the rays. To put it bluntly, LA drivers are the worst in the world. Every day is a casual Sunday afternoon and mad rush Monday morning combined. It’s because the tourists drive so slowly, they’re looking everywhere but the road – trying to spot celebrities or other roadside attractions, like films being shot, or paparazzi going mad. And the Angelenos are in such a hurry to be everywhere so five minutes ago that they play a mad game of Frogger jumping around the tourists. It makes for schizophrenic traffic that moves at both the rabbit’s hop and the turtle’s pace.

Los Angeles also has a nasty caste system. It doesn’t matter what industry you live in, there’s an upper, middle, lower and of course, a super fancy class. Super fancy is reserved for the celebrities. They have an all access pass. Wherever they go, whatever they do, they’re taken care of like little trust fund babies with silver spoons.

Now one would think the uppers should be similarly treated and generally that is the case. But not always. The uppers always have trouble being taken seriously if a celebrity shows up and trumps them.

The middle class knows they’re in the middle, but desperately want to be on top. So they’ve learned how work it. They know the events, the parties, the hot new clubs. They’re more in the know than anyone (the uppers only go to upper events). They’re the ones who use their bosses’ names to get in the door or make a reservation three weeks in advance to eat at the hot new restaurant. As I said – they work it. And they work hard at it.

But in my opinion, the cool kids are at the bottom. That’s because they don’t care about the nasty caste system. Or they’re not even aware of it to begin with. They hang at the dive bars. They go to Big Wang’s because drinks are $3 and there’s a buffalo wing eating contest. They don’t fight to get in the door of the hottest new club. They don’t need to be “seen” at the “it” party. All of the bogus stuff that Los Angeles is famous for? That’s the stuff that the people at the bottom are blind to (either by choice or by happenstance). I would love to be a proud card carrying member of the bottom ranks, but I’ve lived here too long, learned too much, and quite frankly, met too many people to be able to pull that one off. I’m just not that cool. So I have to look in through the glass door. It’s a sad fact. But I live in limbo, refusing to participate in any other class.

Which brings me to my agenda and the LA Times. I used to hate it.

Since I absolutely deny the fact that I exist within any of the classes described above, I’ve just created my own little world which revolves around politics (or world affairs), health, fashion, family, my twin niece and nephew (just because they’re so damn cute), travel, trends and I know this sounds crazy, but gift buying. Somehow I became obsessed with buying the perfect gift at a very early age (nine – I saved $40 to buy my mom a watch at Spencer’s gifts and she wore it for twenty years) and now it’s become an obsession. As I get older the gifts get more expensive, this is quite a burden. And each year I have to outdo myself with each gift I give someone – it’s absolutely maddening. Anyway, it’s pretty obvious which things are serious and which are whimsical.

NOW it’s time for the LA Times. Imagine today’s newspaper. Think about the front page. What would be there? War in Iraq, Collapse of the Stock Market, Pakistan, Gas Prices, the Presidential Election. All very relevant, important things happening in the world today. Well, take a look at this (and here I have to mention that today is the first day of a Writer’s Guild Strike –in both Hollywood AND New York):

USA Today leads with: Pakistan and Gas Prices. (Writer’s Guild Strike in Life Section)

New York Times leads with: Pakistan and Citigroup Slump. (Writer’s Guild Strike in Business Section)

Washington Times leads with: Pakistan and Presidential Race. (Writer’s Guild Strike in World Section)

Wall Street Journal leads with: Citigroup Slump and Pakistan. (Writer’s Guild Strike in Media & Marketing Section)

Los Angeles Times leads with: Writer’s Guild Strike, and of all bizarre things…. Costa Rica’s Mail, a nation without street signs or numbers tries to sort out a new system???

Now you get it. The LA Times does not report news. But in a city of such strange dimensions, I’ve learned to love the paper for its bizarre reports and inimitable stories.

Question #1: Who moves his actual HOUSE from Santa Monica to Santa Clarita? You know there’s something called buying and selling, and the house I saw on the side of the freeway….

Anyway, as he rolled his house on down the road the wheels started to come loose from the trailer. He made some emergency repairs, halting traffic for some time, then got back on the move.

Question #2: When the WHEELS come loose from your self-built trailer, don’t you maybe, call a professional to come help, thinking “maybe I didn’t build this so well,” instead of puttin’ them back on yourself?

Next he got to the Western Avenue Bridge and guess what? The house was too tall to go under, so what happened? The roof was sheared right off.

Question #3: don’t you check the height of your house against the height of any overpasses BEFORE you decide to move your HOUSE from Santa Monica to Santa Clarita yourself?

At this point professionals WERE called and it took over three hours to get the house unstuck from the bridge. Then they moved it up to the Cahuenga Pass where there was enough room to park it on the shoulder of the freeway while they figured out what to do next.For the next 10 days this guy tried to get permits and figure out a way to move his house off the freeway and get it back on the road to Santa Clarita. And guess what was happening to the house during these 10 days? Wow, you’re smart – of course! People were vandalizing his roofless house.Apparently during the 10 days he couldn’t figure out a way to move the house on his own because this morning, the 11th day, CalTrans finally hauled it off on THEIR own, at HIS expense.

Question #4: while your house sits on the side of the freeway with no roof, wouldn’t you immediately call some professionals to move it, as, oh, maybe, someone might break in?

SECOND: And this is far more serious… Actress Isabelle Caro is on billboards all over Milan, nude, showing off her 65lb frighteningly thin, anorexic body in an effort to bring eating disorders to the forefront of Milan fashion week.

Skin and bones on the runways, ie the “size zero” debate has been ongoing for the last two years and is something I’ve even written about for publications like the London Evening Standard. It is far more debated in Europe than America. In fact, in Milan models under the age of 16 are no longer able to walk the runways, nor are models with a body mass index of less than 18. And I believe London followed suit.

Having grown up in the world of classical ballet I witnessed more than my fair share of eating disorders. I even started my college education wanting to study them at the neuroscientific level. I always wanted to see them from the body dysmorphic point of view – to see what a girl with an eating disorder saw in the mirror.

Isabelle, at 65lb and probably about 5′ 6″ or so, has admitted that her body is grossly disfigured and wants to share it with the world, and yet for 15 years she has suffered and cannot stop. What is it that motivates her? I have always wanted to understand on both an emotional and scientific level.

But I have too mention another note about eating…and please do not think that I take any sort of radical weight loss disorder lightly. I do not. Whether it is too much exercise with too little food or extreme bulimia by way of syrup of ipecac and and a regimen of laxatives. All are horrible disorders, painful to live through, painful for loved ones and hard to overcome. And many never overcome but live with.

But I would be negligent if I did not mention these statistics:

It is estimated that 1% of the U.S. population is anorexic and 4% suffer from bulimia.It is estimated that 66% of the U.S. population is overweight or obese.

We’ve got to fight both sides of the eating disorder problem. Eating disorder doesn’t just mean anorexia or bulimia anymore. It also means overeating, lack of exercise, poor diets – all leading to massive health problems: heart disease, diabetes, high cholesterol…  The U.S. has many forms of eating disorders to deal with, problems that European and Asian countries don’t necessarily have to fight.

So please, when you think about what’s happening in Europe, remember we’re a different country with a different set of problems.