Unreality Check; Or, How I Spent My Spring Vacation

Any of my regular readers will tell you that I am a busy, busy girl.  To prove it, here is a partial list of things I've done with my time off this week:

• Spent way too much time on the interwebternets
• ditched left my kids at day care on alternate days for "quality" time with the other kid
• Finally saw A MOVIE with GROWNUP PEOPLE at my friend Robin's hizzouse (holla!)
• Discovered a GREAT $10 red wine at the above and NO, I will not tell you the name of it
• Sat and stared into space more frequently than I care to remember
• Sat and stared at the clutter and chaos I call my house without lifting a finger to do anything about it
• Washed pee sheets (see previous post)

What do all of these have in common?  They are productive uses of my time.  Even the staring blankly into space served a purpose, which was to remind me that I saw the cat hork up a hairball in that very spot not too long ago and I forgot to scrub up after removing the solid chunks because Celeste was evincing way too much interest in the evidence and it needed to be disposed of toot sweet, preferably in a cement vault whose defenses she couldn't breach.    Unfortunately, I also have to fess up to a terribly embarrassing truth, which is that I also did the following:

• Watched part of an episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians

I know! I know!  I'm really, really ashamed of myself, too, and you are talking to the girl who had a standing date with her roommates each week to watch Chains of Love on UPN.  It's bad for my self-image as an aspiring Bobo, one with an advanced degree and the college loan bills to match, but I am a sucker for reality TV.  I will willingly admit to spending an entire half-hour?  hour?  enthralled by an episode of Ace of Cakes (you know, the one where they make the birthday cake that looks like a meatball), and this is a show about people who spread frosting on cake to make a living.  I don't claim to be a Survivor aficionado, but I like it and usually watch about every other season, and I'm always thrilled when PBS coughs up a Frontier House or Colonial House so I can cloak my love for voyeuristic trash in a thin veneer of historicity. 

So as you can see, I am not immune to the siren song of the unscripted program.  But, geez, even *I* have standards, low though they may be, and KUWTK fails to meet even that lowest of thresholds.  My main requirement is that the people involved in the show actually have something to do with themselves, whether it be to attempt to cheat on their partners guilt-free or climb the social ladder in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world.  A successful reality show has some kind of hook -  that other slice-of-family-life show The Osbournes was incredibly compelling because of the so-warped-they're-normal vibe it had going on.  What do the Kardashians do, aside from mangle the spelling of perfectly fine names like Courtney and Chloe?  Well, judging from the fifteen minutes-minus-commercials that I watched, the Kardashian women, um, go out, text people who aren't on camera to the exclusion of talking to the people in front of them, and bitch about other family members when they leave the room.  The busty one thrusts her chest forward like a pouter pigeon and sulks a lot, and the tall one lumbers off to the corner to sob quietly when the busty one gets mad at her.  On this they base a reality show???!?!?  Hello, development execs, they run this show 180 days a year, give or take, in every town in America - it's called high school.  The only notable difference between KUWTK and, say, sixth period study hall, is that the famille Kardashian throws around gobs of disposable income while they engage in these ultimately not-terribly-interesting behaviors.

After watching half an episode of this show, I felt like clawing the eyeballs out of my sockets the way Oedipus did after realizing he'd schtupped his mama, it was that revolting.  It doesn't help that throughout the show, Bruce Jenner - Bruce Jenner!  The Olympic hero!  The man on the Wheaties box! - wanders in and out appearing totally oblivious to everything except his radio-controlled helicopter and what he looks like.  It doesn't help that I've been watching the series Carrier on PBS, which shows people, most of whom are barely out of high school, struggling to cope with life and love and career and families and relationships, all while getting paid squat-diddly and, oh yes, putting their lives on the line for their country at the same time.  When I snapped off the TV I felt like I'd lost about fifty IQ points and a whole lotta self-respect (and again, you're talking to the girl who watched AND enjoyed Joe Millionaire ).

I'm thinking of suing E!.  I want those fifteen minutes of my life back.