Entertainment

Someone Should Check on Blake Lively

by Quinn Keaney

Unlike most young actresses who achieve fame and decide to use that power for the greater good in the form of clothing lines at Kmart and truly awful (albeit short-lived) singing careers, Gossip Girl alum Blake Lively took a very different route. If you haven't checked it out already, Blake Lively created lifestyle website Preserve, which will most likely either haunt your dreams, enrage you, or both. The site is home to the bare necessities of life, like $40 "artisan salt collections" and a $120 "tree swing for one." It's home to photos filtered through Instagram so many times they look less like images of $90 "everyday bowls" and more like the nightmarish hallucinations you had that one time in college when you accidentally befriended the stoner outside your dorm (no? just me?).

You know what else Preserve is home to? Want to know the real cherry on top of Lively's foray into being the slightly unstable, hipster version of Martha Stewart? Her blog posts. They put all the "off-the-shoulder butcher aprons" she hocks on her website to an incredible amount of shame and provides readers with a variety of fun reactions, most of which all boil down to one terrifying question: "Is Blake Lively okay?"

In her latest post, "Happy Bee Day," Lively tackles turning 27. For Lively, this wasn't merely a birthday, or "b-day" as the kids are calling it, but a "Bee Day." As in bee, the insect. Why, you might be wondering, is Blake Lively, beautiful actress and owner of such incredible hair, worrying about a bee? Well, it all started after a photo shoot she was doing for the site...

I felt an electric shock of energy — was it excitement that I was about to turn another year older? Was it nerves? Why did it feel like agony? I like getting older... I think.

She thinks. She THINKS. I mean come on, Blake. Don't leave us hanging on such a cliffhanger!

Does your butt quite suddenly (and painfully) deflate when you turn 27? Because mine hurt like hell …then my neck, back, legs and forehead. And oh my hands! They were shriveling. It felt like I was being shot by dozens of tiny invisible darts. I felt like the Wicked Witch, melting, melting, burning, melting.

I pray that my butt will never deflate no matter what age I am, since it is not a balloon but rather the product of one too many burrito bowls at Chipotle. Lively apparently does not go to Chipotle and is also really starting to freak me out with that Wicked Witch imagery.

I don’t know enough about insects to say if they were wasps, honeybees or Mother Nature’s miniature flying tasers...Now, I was a Monty Python sketch; running at top speed in no particular direction, whipping my arms and hands around like I’d just discovered they were growing out of my shoulders without my previous knowledge. There was a terrible sound piercing the air too… I was later informed this sound had emanated from my very own mouth.

Um. Uh. Did Blake Lively just suffer a psychotic break?

What better way to recover than throw a fake 27th birthday party for myself? I looked for the nearest vanilla cake and decorated it. Step one of therapy complete...I made a flower interpretation of a sundae (complete with spoons, two gumdrops squished together to look like a cherry and baby’s breath acting as whipped cream.)

Yeah, she definitely just suffered a psychotic break.

It wasn’t until I covered the counters in coordinating candy sprinkles that I stopped to acknowledge: my butt will deflate more and more, my hands will shrivel and permanently prune, but I will never, ever grow up. It took a swarm of bees to remind me that a b-day is nothing but a number. Each day I choose my age. Today it’s 27, going on 2. How old will you bee today?

*crickets*

To give Lively the benefit of the doubt, her website has to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek. No one can be this unhinged and be married to the perfect human specimen that is Ryan Reynolds. David Cross, the actor/comedian husband of Lively's friend Amber Tamblyn, somewhat confirmed it when he wrote a piece for the site poking fun at bearded hipsters under the pseudonym Sir Willups Brightslymoore titled, "Flower Beards: Summer’s Hottest Trend? Or Death Sentence?"

Other than that, Preserve continues to be a conundrum. Go for the curry-flavored ketchup, stay for the crazy.

Images: Getty Images; Preserve (2)