This past summer, I interned with the website of a major news network and received an unexpected initiation into the world of celebrity journalism. Though I was assigned to the website’s science and technology section, I often aided with celebrity-related stories, which seemed to exist in infinite abundance.

“Lee Ann Rimes was photographed yesterday wearing super short shorts,” an editor would announce at the 8:45 editorial meeting. I would sink into the couch, deflated by the prospect of spending another intimate morning with the “Celebrity Short Shorts” slideshow.

At first, I kept a positive attitude about the celebrity stuff, and reminded myself that I had to start somewhere (even if that somewhere was Hilary Duff’s appearance on Gossip Girl). When asked to write captions for a “Gemini Celebrities” slideshow, I didn’t panic, and instead used the opportunity to test out some long-running suspicions about astrology. When asked to burnish the “Who Wore It Better?” slideshow with some new additions, I took comfort in thinking that I was at least sharpening my sartorial acumen in the process.

It wasn’t long, though, before I became jaded by the work. I began to spend a lot of time in the bathroom, using it not for its intended purpose but as a respite from the world of celebrities. I cherished the half-hour I had in the morning before work, when I could sit on the toilet — fully clothed — and read The New Yorker in peace, my mind cleansed of Amy Winehouse, Jon Gosselin and Bubbles the Chimp.

What I found most perplexing and unsettling about celebrity news was its enormous popularity: People, and lots of them, actually cared about this stuff. They wanted to know if Madonna’s arms were looking freakishly sinewy, or if Jack Nicholson had been spotted carousing in the French Riviera. These stories, to my unabated surprise, were always among the most popular on the website.

These days, though I’m no longer a participant in celebrity journalism, I can’t help but marvel at the phenomenon of celebrity worship, even if it is only a chunk of us who do the worshipping. I don’t want to suggest here that our obsession with celebrities is in some way endemic to our culture, nor am I interested in making sweeping cultural claims based on an isolated summer experience. I know that most people don’t give a crap about Britney Spears’ weight issues.

I just want to understand why anyone cares at all about celebrities’ lives.

The guess I would venture, with very little psychological, sociological or otherwise scientific grounding for it (Malcolm Gladwell would be proud), is that this obsession arises from our desire to observe and confirm similarities between ourselves and celebrities — a desire that itself arises, I would say, from another, deeper desire to achieve fame (or, maybe more precisely, the elevated social standing which accompanies fame).

Things get weird, however, when we try to do this, because while celebrities may be like us, their lives aren’t at all like ours. Thus, we end up with features in magazines insisting that celebrities are in fact “just like us,” when the very fact of these features tells us otherwise: No one snaps our photos, we realize, when we buy coffee or do our laundry or walk our dogs.

Of course, this is just a hunch founded on conjecture, not on empirical observations, so make of it what you will. It’s equally possible that we obsess over celebrities for the opposite reason: To keep them apart from, and not bring them into, our lives. Maybe, just as some read literature to escape from the banality of everyday life, others read US Weekly to achieve a similar effect, to place celebrities in a world removed from ours. If this is the case, then demystifying celebrities’ lives ruins the fantasy — not that, as I found out this summer, the two can’t exist in tandem.

One day at work, I was walking to the cafeteria for some coffee when I found myself staring down a long, narrow hallway at Lauren Conrad, LC, the star of MTV’s The Hills. As I passed her entourage — a pack of girls all coiffed, made-up and extremely fragrant — I made a meager attempt at making eye contact with Conrad before practically flinging myself against the wall to avoid being trampled. “Very friendly,” I grumbled, and walked on.

When I returned upstairs, the office was abuzz about LC’s appearance. One girl, Lily, an intern in the entertainment section, was so stunned she could barely breathe.

“I think we made Lily’s life,” one editor said to me. “She peed in the stall next to LC.”

I walked back to my desk, found my copy of The New Yorker and made a beeline for the bathroom, the one place I knew I ran little risk of encountering LC or anyone else from the hills of Hollywood.