Colleen Taylor

I know the whole growing-up-as-Hollywood-royalty-by-being-the-daughter-of-Goldie-Hawn-and-Kurt-Russell thing might add to her apparently awesomely blissful personality, but the latest cover story in Elle Magazine kind of made me like Kate Hudson.  Which is saying a lot, because I've always just thought of her as that annoying "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" girl.

The article's tipping point for me:

"Let me give you an idea about Kate," [Kate Hudson's lifelong friend Jen] Meyer says. "You go spend a day with her, and you'll go into her house and she will be in a bikini, having just been lying out, walking around with the most perfect body you've ever seen in your life. She'll be saying to [her son] Ryder, 'Honey, we're going to go on a bike ride in just a few minutes; Mommy's just making you a banana souffle'-- no cookbooks out-- and, at the same time, go, 'Oh my God, Jen, you have to hear this,' and she'll go over to the piano and play a perfect song she just wrote like it's nothing.  You go, 'Okay, that was amazing,' and she runs right back to the kitchen, gets the banana souffle out-- it's the greatest banana souffle you've ever had-- and she throws on her helmet and gets on the bike with Ryder."

Um, Kate Hudson, can we seriously be friends?

I have to say a highlight of my birthday was the McLaughlin Group's January 2nd episode**.  Well, specifically, John McLaughlin's "macro-prediction" for the year ahead:

"2009 will be the year when it will gradually dawn on U.S. policymakers that the cause of the global economic crisis is globalism itself. The premise that, as we shifted jobs to developing countries, new jobs would develop here to replace them is false. It is not possible to shift production jobs and service jobs to low-cost countries without hollowing out the purchasing power of the middle class."

My heartbeat actually sped up as I watched him say this, because I am so excited for this kind of real talk to be getting airtime and coming from such a respected person. I hope he's right that the next 12 months will bring a sea-change in way we perceive the pros and cons of our increasingly "flat" world. 

**I'm 25 now, which is safely and unabashedly grown up, so I am going to refrain from making any "Oh, ha-ha, isn't that so nerdy and boring of me" apologies/jokes. Because on the real, John McLaughlin is awesome, and is definitely on all my fantasy birthday/dinner/cocktail party guest lists.

I love Esquire Magazine's "What I've Learned" feature. 

Also, I was a total late bloomer in realizing how awesome Clint Eastwood is. I knew that he was a bit abnormally accomplished in the artistic sense as a jazz musician, actor, director, blah blah blah. But I learned in conversation only a couple of weeks ago that he has been super active in local politics for years (like, getting his hands dirty and going to meetings, not just wearing Vote or Die t-shirts) and was for a short time the mayor of Carmel, California. I mean, did you know that?

Seems to me that Clint Eastwood is just a man who has really taken life by the horns and has fully inhabited the space that he's in-- and from now on, anytime he's talking, I'm listening.  Some of my favorite bits from his "What I've Learned" appearance:

"Like Sir Edmund Hillary talking about why you do anything: Because it's there. That's why you climb Everest. It's like a little moment in time, and as fast as it comes into your brain, you just throw it out and discard it. Do it before you discard it, you know?"

"The Korean War was only a few years after World War II. We all went. But you couldn't help but think, Shit. What the hell?"

"That's why I [ran for mayor]. 'Cause I thought, I don't need this. The fact that I didn't need it made me think I could do more. It's the people who need it that I'm suspect of."

As everyone around me is coming down with a cold, I am so hoping that Helen Gurley Brown is correct when she wrote in her aforementioned book, Having It All:

"If you sleep enough, exercise a lot, take multivitamins, have work you adore and no secret need to be sick, you very likely never will be-- not even a cold."

Crossing my fingers and taking Emergen-C!