Out of the Loop.

On the table in the cafeteria, I spotted one of those celebrity magazines and thought it might amuse me for a few minutes. I didn't recognize anyone on the cover, so I started flipping through the pages--page after page of complete strangers.
Where the hell were Paul Newman and Jack Nicholson and Dinero? Where was Cher? There was not even a Michael Douglas or a Meg Ryan or a Bill Murray, never mind Jessica Lange or Shirley MacLaine or Lee Remick or--forget-about-it--Ingrid Bergman. A co-worker, a woman in her early forties, sat down across from me, and I waved the magazine in frustration. "Who are these people?"
She started pointing them out and naming them, one by one, and, still, only a few feint bells rang. I finally pointed at a picture of a woman who looked like she was on her way to a Halloween party.
"Who's this?"
"That's Lady Gaga."
"An actress?"
"She's a singer."
"Hmm," I said, flipping one page back and forth, "I seem to be out of the loop."
She laughed at me as I tossed the magazine aside. "You're way out of the loop."
As we headed back to work, I knitted my brows and kept murmuring to myself, "Lady Gaga?"
Well...so I'm out of the loop.... It wouldn't be the first loop I've been out of.
Back in high school, my best buddies gloried in buying illegal beer and spending entire evenings getting drunk--Yeah! Let's drink a lot nasty stuff until our bellies swell up and we can issue gigantic belches at the moon, then stagger around and puke on each others shoes! Yeah, yeah! What a blast!
I participated a few times, then told our beer buyer to get me two Cokes to supplement the cases of beer. I didn't abandon my friends, just the beer.
"The King of Coke," my buddies mocked.
"Better than that carbonated piss you guys drink."
We all laughed and laughed, they drunk, me sober.
The operative question is: Who's out of what loop?
The loop I'd love to be out of is the one where I work for a living.