Television

I got stuck in a radiology department today because my doctor's office had failed (twice) to remember to fax over orders and found myself eerily glued to the tragedy that is early morning television.

Unlike retards who think the Price is Right equals memorable television, my childhood consisted mainly of reading novels. There was something inherently eerie about the plastic cheerful people who told us both empahtically and nonchalantly that a serial child rapist with a machete was on the loose and then would switch to talk of a what a celebrity's baby was wearing. I have no taste for it. I still don't.

I would've gone for reading material, but all they had was Cosmo. After reading an article wherein the likes/dislikes of some nobody television actress were laid out in detail (she likes the beach and her dogs, she doesn't like bad people and her biggest fault is drinking too much coffee) the TV seemed like a way to swerve imminent death by head explosion. Mistake.

Things I learned from watching television from 8-9am:

1. People are morons. But I learn that from about a gazillion other things, so let me be more specific.

2. We prize women who are bright orange. This reminds me of a girl I went to school with. She had platinum blonde hair and bright orange skin - one of the finest examples ever of every surface of your body being aesthetically altered by a bottle of chemicals. Normally I wouldn't hold this against her, but she was kind of a bitch. I didn't know those anchorwomen, but they were bitches too.

3. During the commercial breaks these commercials came on for what to deliver to your sweetie on V-day. One was for a teddy bear and the other for a pair of pajamas.* In the ads, a girl receives either of the above items in the office. All of her girlfriends are extremely jealous and say affirming things like "I wish I had a boyfriend like that."** The next scene is then the girfriend clicking champagne glasses next to classy guy who sent her that classy package and then the door suggestively closing with a "Do Not Disturb" sign. Final pan: the boys in the office scrambling madly to order their own teddy bears. I'd like to think this ties in neatly with the first scene, and that the jaelous pumpkin women will soon be getting their own deliveries and lots of intra-office sex violations will ensue, but maybe that's just kind of lobbing them one. Also, the whole thing was porn quality.

But sadly, I suspect that many fine Americans have found themselves drawn to that website today in order to charm the pants off of some shallow office girl who worries more about looking good in front of her office mates than whether she should REALLY be having sex with that guy.*** Alternatively, the website probably does pretty good business drawing in shallow office girls who aren't having sex with anyone but still need to impress their colleagues by having things delivered to themselves. Actually, I have a lot more respect for the latter category.

4. Coldplay won a Grammy. Okay, whatever your feelings on that (and really, do you need to have any?) I have complete and utter contempt for awards of any type. I'm a little tired of the "everyone should win so let's invent more and more types of awards so everyone who's licked some serious arty ass can get something." To be fair, this extends to other types of awards as well.

Anyone who knows that Amsterdam won a Booker Prize knows that the people who pick these winners are getting drunk and doing the following: 1) They load a revolver with one bullet. 2) They put all the names of the nominees (who were selected from a fishbowl filled with every "edgy" person who wrote a book whose title is only one word) on a target in some back room of the Library of Congress; 3) they pass the revolver around to each person who takes a shot at the name they want to win (usually based on the amount of syllables in the one-word title rather than reading it); 4) the person who gets the bullet in a name wins; 5) if no one hits a name with a bullet, the prize is then based on the choice of the person who might have stuck the gun to his head during the whole process to be funny.

The Nobel Prize? Yeah, there's a lot of humanitarians' wives that are basically screwing their do-goody husbands to the top.

5. Apparently, peanuts are really important. So we get kind of upset when we can't have any due to a salmonella outbreak. So upset that we send the FBI in on them wearing bullet-proof vests because it's not like the FBI has anything better to do than scream "Hands in the air!" to a bunch of peanut warehouse workers. Also, really dumpy women who run food banks are now worried children will starve. My question is why are children eating primarily peanuts? I'm sure this fine country has lots of other staples to offer them. Like corn syrup. Or all those long words on the side of the candy bar I'm pretending not to eat. Did the woman have to get that upset that private donors will not be shipping her disadvantaged children gallons of peanut butter? Unless ... yeah, she's probably been eating all of it.

Not that I don't feel sorry for her. I once got really addicted to peanut butter this one summer. I really have no idea what the deal was, except that I was swimming 3 hours a day and like to eat things out of jars with spoons.**** It got to the point where I started packing on pounds and my father had this intervention where he kept taking it away and hiding it (because he couldn't live without it either - takes one to know one) and I kept finding it and eating it and putting it back. Then he would find the empty jar and get really upset - worse than when the cleaning lady found that bottle of vodka under my bed - and I'd have to hear a long lecture about how much of a good thing is not really good. All of this was ineffective until we got mice and Dad started using peanut butter on the mouse traps. That pretty much cured it after I almost broke a finger or two.

On another side note, things have not being going very well for me lately (not in tragic events - just mounting daily annoyances) and today I tried to commit suicide by Reese's peanut butter cups. It did not work, probably because that's not really peanut butter. My taste buds know the real stuff.

*This disdain does not extend to those cakes you told me you were going to have delivered to my office when you were in NOLA last weekend.
**It should be noted that all of these women are orange.
***Although if she knows she should be having sex with the guy, looking good in front of the office mates is clearly alright.
****I am aware that the Booker Prize does not apply to Americans, so you can see just how much this winner-selection is completely arbitrary! I mean, why not have it somewhere slightly more British?
*****Like many others, I have also experienced this same issue with Nutella and it took an entire 12-step program for that one.