Sometimes the best parts of the job are the readers

And I don’t mean that in the schmaltzy, “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you!” kind of way. I mean that a lot of the readers are crazy.

I don’t mean the disparage the readers of gossip magazines or gossip sites – obviously, I’m in no position to judge, and anyway, I read all that stuff anyway. It’s how I got my job in the first place. I love celebrity gossip just as much as the next person, as long as the next person can’t even go five minutes without hoping someone famous flashed a boob at a fancy even so they’ll having something to focus on for the next hour.

But, like most things, there are the normal fans and the not-so-normal fans. (And then there are the terrifying Margot Kidder emulators, but they’re actually not so terrifying and kind awesome in their craziness, that that’s not really what this is about.) And, unsurprisingly, most of the normal fans either don’t feel inclined or have better things to do than pop off a letter to a gossip magazine.

This was certainly a smaller issue 20, or even just 10 years ago. But, now, with the Internet and with 12-year-olds insisting on typing things even though they have no idea how to spell anything or even how to move their fingers in relationship to the actual keyboard, we get emails and comments and, I kid you not, fricking YouTube responses. And I know that not all 12-year-olds are crazy and that not all crazy people are 12, but let me say this: there is a lot of overlap in that Venn diagram.

Which is why we get many – many – letters and emails and comments that are addressed directly to the celebrities a certain article is talking about. With letters, this isn’t so much of a big deal – most of our readers don’t know how to directly contact the favourite (or not-so-favourite) celebrities, so they send their letters to us. And, actually, we do our best to reroute those letters. Occasionally, we will pass on emails to the proper publicists, but this is rare because if you think celebrities get a lot of mail, you should see the email inboxes of their publicists. It’s like the court scene from A Miracle on 34th Street except a million times more belligerent.

But the comments on our website? What, do they think that the celebrities we write about actually troll our site, looking for stories about them and then scanning the comments? I mean, sure, Corey Feldman might do that, and some bigger celebs might do that for the super giant celebrity news sites (People, TMZ, Us Weeky, etc.). However, while my mag is prominent, it’s not that prominent, so I’m really sorry, T!fanneee!!1! from Ohio, but I don’t think your message to Zac Efron about how you would love to take him to your prom is going to get to him.

I’m not joking. It’s all the time. I’ll write something about Britney having a new workout routine, and not 15 minutes later, Kortni from upstate New York is all, “Hi Britney!!!! I tink u lok SOOOO gud, 4 REALZ so dont let these h8rs gt u down, u no?? Com 2 NY so I cn c u!!!! xoxo Kortni.”

That is not an exaggeration AT ALL. If anything, I cleaned up the spelling and grammar a bit.

As if Britney Spears even knows how to use a computer and even if she did, I sincerely doubt that she is desperately searching through third-tier celebrity gossip websites in order to develop a healthy body image and to hear suggestions about her upcoming tour.

Usually, though, that’s it – a couple of lines that one of the gossip writers reads aloud to everyone in the office. We all laugh, we come up with a few hypothetical responses on Britney’s behalf, and then we move on.

But then… we get a letter. We get an epic. Not in letter or email form, no, but a die-hard fan of whoever we’ve been talking about has decided that they don’t want to send their 10,000-word ode to love and joy and insanity to Bop or Tiger Beat. No, they want to post it directly into the comments section of our website. And you know, as stupid as most of the comments are, we have to read through all of them. In their entirety. Before we can delete anything, company policy dictates that we read through it all.

We could get an intern to do this. We usually get an intern to do it. Our intern was out sick today, and when we don’t have an intern, everyone has to pull their weight when it comes to completing the bullshit tasks we normally pretend don’t even exist.

And that is why, today, I had to spend an hour – AN HOUR – reading through the crazy fan mail equivalent of Ulysses. Except it was even more dense and torturous. Oh, and unlike Ulysses, I actually finished it. And that is why I am still in the office, past 5 p.m. on a Friday, finishing up my goddamn story about Kevin Jonas turning 21 and how totally awesome that is, when I could be home, watching my Mystery Science Theater 3000 20th Anniversary box set, drinking mojitos and throwing darts at Kevin Jonas’s face.

And that, my friends, is why if I ever meet a certain Paulina H. from Minnesota – even if she is, as I suspect, a mentally arrested 11-year-old whose idea of typing inolves merely mashing the keyboard with her fists – if I ever do meet her, I will fart in her soup.