I thought I hated Reality TV. Then I discovered I actually watch Reality TV.
A lot.
All those home improvement and decorating shows I record so I can fast forward to the last five minutes to see the completed fabulousness? Reality TV Category: Renovation.
What, you did not know there are so many different styles of Reality TV they had to divvy them up into categories? Me neither! Wikipedia has a nice summary. Turns out I am a junkie and didn’t even know it.
Documentary style, celebrities: Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List. You either love Kathy Griffin or you hate her. I am on the love side of the fence because she makes laugh and laugh and laugh. Many of the celebrities she makes fun of in her stand-up act despise her but they should really thank her for showing the world celebrities are normal people who sometimes say and do things that are not perfect. Who else could tell the world Barbara Walters prefers AstroGlide to K-Y Jelly, proving once and for all she is not a Stepford Journalist but in fact an actual human being?
I also used to watch The Osbournes when it was still airing original episodes. A celebrity making millions whose family fights all the time and dogs poop in the house? LOVE IT. It works so well because even with all the yelling and the occasional physical scuffle, they all clearly love each other.
Documentary style, professional activities: DogTown and Dog Whisperer. I just discovered these a few weeks ago. I caught one episode of DogTown and was immediately hooked on seeing neglected pooches get behavior (and sometimes medical) makeovers, then go to a good home. HOOKED.
Dog Whisperer follows DogTown here so I checked it out to see what all the fuss is about. I was skeptical. Some guy who can train a dog in one meeting? I don’t think so.
HOOKED. I love this show not because he is a great trainer – excuse me, pack leader – but because he proves time and time again there are no bad dogs, just bad owners. He trains the owners to be calm, assertive pack leaders. When former MTV deejay Downtown Julie Brown asked if her dog’s behavior was her fault, saying “Tell me, Cesar, I can take it,” Cesar Milan said, “Yes.”
It turned out Julie was not as prepared to hear that answer as she thought she was.
I dabble in the Self Improvement/Makeover category with shows like What Not To Wear and the occasional Supernanny when I am in the mood for watching a train wreck, but since Queer Eye went off the air, my heart just is not in it.
Speaking of Supernanny, if Cesar Milan ever wants to branch out into Child Whispering, his pack leader training techniques are equally suited to training parents to raise well balanced children.
Just a thought.
I have one complaint about the home improvement shows I used to devour like Get it Sold and Sell This House, where they take a house that has been on the market for some time with little buyer interest and transform it on a minimal budget. The goal is to, obviously, sell the house. Sometimes it sells by the end of the show, sometimes it does not but “buyer interest is high.” I think I liked it so much because the makeover did not always result in an immediate sale. You know, like real life.
Then one day these shows – both of them, on different networks – made a seemingly small change that completely ruined things for me. They cleaned and painted and did small renovations like knock down walls or revamp a small bathroom and after all of that was done and everyone was exhausted, they said, “Oh, by the way, we also want you to drop your asking price by $20,000.”
WTF? Okay, that still fits in the guidelines of a show about how to get your house sold but the original format of both shows was all about how to stage your home for a quick sale. They never mentioned the asking price. If the price is an issue, why put in all that work? Lower the price and if it still doesn’t sell, then do the staging. I felt robbed. They sold me this show:
| Hypothesis: staging leads to faster sale of your home. Experiment: stage a home that has been on the market for some time and see if it sells shortly thereafter. Variable: staging. |
Then they added a second variable, asking price, and pretended it was still the same hypothesis. GAH! That is like claiming exercise alone will help you lose weight, but then you exercise AND change your diet, lose weight, and claim it was all due to the exercise.
Did I mention I felt robbed? And don’t even get me started on Hidden Potential, where they show three incredibly crappy houses to potential buyers with computer generated graphics to show how they can be renovated, the buyer chooses which one they would buy, and…the show ends. Did they buy it? Did the renovations really cost what was projected? Did the bank really loan them $50,000 more than the appraised value based solely on renovations they say they are going to make?
Love. Hate. See what I mean?
any day now. 
Michelle Obama is coming to town
You better watch out, you better not cry…oh wait, wrong historical personage. And a fictitious one at that. Oops.
First Lady Michelle Obama will be in Merced Saturday to address the first full graduating class at UC Merced’s commencement ceremony. I am truly excited for Merced. This is a Very Big Deal for podunk little us. I just hope we don’t screw it up.
What.
Oh, you want me to be a little more positive, do you? Well, let me tell you about my Wednesday instead and perhaps you will better understand my mood.
Word spread around town that UC Merced needed volunteers to work the graduation since it expanded from an expected 1,000 or so attendees to 12,000 after the First Lady announced she would address the Class. I volunteered along with a few others from the office and we all signed up for the 2:00 orientation on Wednesday.
Except we could not find the 2:00 orientation on Wednesday and nobody in the main administrative building knew anything about it, including the woman who signed us up.
Um yeah, the woman who made us give her our email addresses and had us choose which of the three orientation times we wanted to attend. That woman.
Luckily, a nice man who just happened to be passing by heard our plight and went out of his way to help us. He found out where we needed to be and took us all the way over there, which involved a Keystone Cops version of car parking when he realized we would be ticketed if we stayed where we were. Round and round we went through various parking lots – all full – until he finally had us park in the construction lot. Here we are:
Do you see the size of the rocks in which we are parked? More on that later. By the way, that is the same general direction the First Lady will be looking when she addresses the Class, only her view will include cows grazing in a pasture you cannot see just beyond the construction barrier.
So, we three - plus two spouses who were roped into volunteering - arrive rather late to a briefing given by…the police department? The room is a sea of students, among which we are the only adults. Or at least the only full-time working adults, other than the two police officers giving the briefing.
They are talking about busses. It takes me a few minutes to realize 1) they need people for “parking lot screening” at three off-campus sites around town to make sure attendees do not bring prohibited items onto the bus and hence into the event (coolers, roller skates, laser pointers…oh, and weapons), 2) they need people to man the metal detectors on-campus, and 3) I made a big mistake when I volunteered to help out.
Then they said parking lot screeners have to be there at 5:00 AM but people manning the metal detectors can sleep a whole extra hour because they don’t have to arrive until 6:00 AM. For a ceremony that begins at 1:30 PM.
WTF? Oh, and you don’t get to choose which job you will do. They are so short handed they will put people wherever they need them and you will get an email before the big day telling you your assignment.
It was at this point we five looked at each other and said, I don’t think so. We stayed after to let the officers know to take us off the list because the job was not quite what we thought it would be but guess what? We weren’t on the list. Not one of us.
When we told him who our contact was, he said, “Well that explains it,” but then I think he realized what he said and told us she was just one of many “traffic cops” not really associated with the event but directing people to where they needed to go.
Yeah, well there’s a five car pileup on her corner, buddy.
I don’t know what I expected to be doing as a volunteer. Food service? Ushering attendees to their seats? The officer said he was only in charge of the police department volunteers – he was about forty shy of his goal of two hundred – but thought there were many other volunteer opportunities through the UC itself. When we asked where to go for that, he said to contact the same person we contacted the first time.
The one who didn’t sign us up the first time and didn’t know where the meeting was when we arrived? That one?
We opted to get the hell out of there as fast as humanly possible. Except remember those giant rocks in the construction parking area? My car got stuck on the way out. Of course. Because that is how my Wednesday was going.
Thank god the construction boys were leaving for the day. One of them teamed up with my friend Nash and pushed my little Prius to safety. Meanwhile, my friend Janice backed her Jetta way the hell up to avoid any flying rocks and she and Nash took a safer route out of the parking lot of doom.
It’s going to be 101 degrees Saturday. I plan to watch First Lady Michelle Obama’s UC Merced commencement speech on my 42” plasma HDTV while sipping a cool beverage after sleeping in until 9:00 or 10:00 AM.
Posted at 09:04 PM in Current Affairs, Social Commentary | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)
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