My grandmother had a standard line when any of us bothered her with an unforgivable statement or question ("Can I have ¥10,000 to get to Nagoya to see a heavy metal grunge punk band no one's ever heard of?"), which was: "By talking like that, you just hacked off several years from my life span!"
Her words came back with a nostalgic rush the minute I saw Julia Roberts in "Eat Pray Love" utter, "I wanna go someplace where I can marvel at things," immediately after discarding a husband who adored her, splitting up with a young, hunky musician who couldn't live without her and finally deciding to take a year off from a lucrative career as a hotshot New York writer and travel the world. Surely, this moment would have hacked off at least a decade from my grandma's life, had she still been around to witness it.
I felt a massive deterioration in the white blood cell supply myself. Maybe it was the sight of Julia Roberts gorging on numerous heaped plates of pasta in Italy and though she says she's getting fat, every shred of evidence points to the exact, skinny-jean opposite. Maybe it was the way every other character in the movie was so intent on doing her favors and fixing her up with interesting, doting men. Or maybe it was how she flitted through rural Asia in perfectly streaked hair, thousands of kilometers away from the nearest L'Oreal salon.