I’ve lived in New York long enough to not care about celebrities, topless woman being pulled in horse drawn carriages and angry cabbies who drive like chickens with their heads cut off - okay, I still care about the latter. But last night, while eating dinner at a local Ethiopian joint, I had a moment. Maybe it was because she was so beautiful in King Kong, or maybe it’s because I actually think he’s one of the more talented actors out there - it could have been a combination of the two, or the three, since there’s a baby on board, but when I’m sitting at a table next to Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber, it’s hard not to notice, a lot, and eavesdrop often. I heard stuff, but not anything worth repeating, or not anything I’d repeat, and I didn’t listen as much as I first thought I might, but that’s because this is the real world and these are real people, and that’s where the story begins and ends. But still, it was a nice moment, being so close to the woman that the third King Kong fell in love with, and part of me secretly wished I could ask Liev for some comp tickets to Talk Radio on Broadway. Honestly, what the encounter reminded me is that we’re all human, and that no matter how stressed I am about finishing my book, or editing my sex ed videos, no matter how much it matters to me, in the scheme of life it only matters so much.

I had this interesting thought about death the other day. About how we all buy this movie ticket into our lives, and how we don’t know exactly where we’ll begin our adventure. We pop into a movie that’s already being shown, and we’re all actors that have been cast in the middle, or perhaps if Al Gore is right, towards the end of the film. And we create our own role, and then we act it out for as long as we can, which means until we die. When we die our part of the story is over, but the movie continues production. Sometimes we leave things behind about ourselves, and sometimes we become more well known after our expiration date, but most of the time we come and go without much fanfare. And for some reason, seeing Liev and Naomi reminded me of this. Maybe it’s because they have this untouchable air of celebrity, and by seeing them in an Ethiopian restaurant under a scaffolded street in the West Village I realized they’re not so untouchable, and not so larger than life, and at times they eat with their hands too. And this is important to see because sometimes we (meaning I) get so caught up in our own lives that we forget that in the grand scheme of things, we are but one of the many tickets purchased for this ride.