It’s been a hard week to say the least. I started this blog to get a break from the hard news, because there’s joy to be found in talking about celebrities, entertainment, and all that glitters. It’s nice to think about their lives instead of our own problems, and to realize they’re no different than we are, they’re just pampered and catered to and have access to the best of everything without having to pay for significant amounts of it. There I go getting down again, damnit.

The celebrities can’t isolate us from everything. There are things that happen that affect us all, that change things in a way that can’t be buffered or ignored. Matt Damon remains my favorite celebrity, so I wanted to talk about him, to focus on him and his sexy voice, and to try to let him talk me/us through this crappy week. US Weekly has some quotes from Matt, given before the Boston Marathon bombing, about what the marathon meant to him. When he was a kid, Matt’s dad ran the marathon and he was there to see him through the finish line. Now I’m getting teary imagining that poor kid who didn’t get the chance to see his dad finish. Matt’s words that have a lot more significance now, just like that photo of a sweet 9 year-old boy holding up a peace sign. Anyway, here’s what Matt had to say about it:

The piece, excerpted from a new book, The B.A.A. At 125: The Official History of the Boston Athletic Association, describes the Promised Land star’s earliest memories of the marathon, which he calls “a sporting spectacle like no other, overwrought with nerves and excitement.”

“I’ll never forget standing there in the crowd with my brother, Kyle, as we looked first for [famed marathoner] Bill Rodgers, and then, in the very same race as some of the most talented runners on earth, our smiling (and grimacing) 40-year-old dad,” he says. Later, he tells of how Kyle followed in their father’s footsteps and joined the festivities as an athlete, leaving his own sons to watch from the sidelines.

“To this day both my father and brother have their bib numbers archived with their most prized possessions and describe their experiences as some of the most emotional moments of their lives,” he writes. Of the varying participants in the race, he says: “These people are champions.”

Those words have taken on a new poignancy in the wake of the Boston attacks on Monday, April 15. Following the explosions, the Bourne Identity star, 42, released a statement to Entertainment Weekly in which he expressed his condolences for the victims in his beloved hometown.

“My heart goes out to the people of the city of Boston,” he said. “My thoughts and prayers are with the families who lost loved ones in such a senseless and heartless way.”

[From US Weekly]

Maybe we need to cry. Maybe there’s no other way to process bad things that happen, and it’s not normal to act like everything is fine, which is my default setting most of the time. I just want to focus on the good things, on people helping each other and offering their homes, their support, anything they can do. All around the world right now there are parties, birthdays, engagements, weddings and births. The good times far outweigh the bad.

Getting back to Damon, there are some lovely far-range photos that came out of his vow renewal over the weekend. We don’t have those photos as they’re exclusives, but you can see them here. Everyone was dressed in white and the effect is striking. Lucy’s wedding dress was designed by Naeem Khan, and People has a photo of it on the runway. It’s beautiful and Grecian-looking. That’s what we prefer to focus on, nice stories, but some weeks there aren’t enough to go around and that sucks.

These photos are from the Berlinale in February. Credit: WENN.com