this is the story...

A brief history of me watching the Real World:
The first Real World I watched was Las Vegas (season 12). I was babysitting and heard that a girl from Hunter (Irulan) was on it. This was a salacious season. I believe the first eppy had hot tub makeouts. (Don't worry-- I had already put the kid to bed.) After that, I looooooved Real World San Diego (season 14): I had an enormous crush on Randy, and Frankie alone (who was dying and extremely afraid of boats) made the show worth watching. Then, i tried to watch Austin, but I think I got bored... shortly after which I left for college and no longer had cable access.

The new Real World (Brooklyn, season 21) consists of:
1) a transgender woman
2) an Iraq war vet trying to be a singer-songwriter
3) a gay dolphin trainer
4) a black beauty queen
5) a Mormon who everybody thinks is gay
6) a guy voted best abs in the Northeast
7) a girl who previously identified as a lesbian but now has a boyfriend
8) a white hip hop dancer (who frequently takes classes at Broadway Dance)

This is honestly the best Real World cast in a looooong time. They've gone beyond filling niches or just choosing the 7 hottest people and found extremely interesting people who have a lot to teach each other. But at some point between when I stopped watching and now, they made the show an hour, which feels uber-long. The other problem is that because there's not a structured format where every week is different (like in many competition reality shows), I feel like they just edit together all different parts of their living together and pretend it happened sequentially. So the episodes feel a little all over the place. Anyways, I really do want to stick with this season... besides the fact that the cast is great, there's the added bonus of them being in NYC and stopping by places I've been.

comftastic-looking

Is it weird that I really want these extremely long socks? I don't even like wearing socks all that much but they look cute for dancing around the house...

afternoon thoughts

You know when you're a kid and you hear adults make reference to things like "balancing your checkbook," "doing your taxes" and "having an orgasm"? And you're like, 'Well, that sounds like something I might do when I'm older, but for the time being, I have no idea what you're talking about.' Well, the time is looming when I think I'm going to have to do my taxes. And whenever something like this comes up (e.g. getting health insurance, paying off my student loans), where the grown-up thing is to just figure out what to do and do it and the childish thing is to pretend you're still 15 and let deadlines pass causing massive catastrophic problems I can't possibly foresee, I usually choose the latter. I feel like I've heard that April 15 is the deadline somewhere... can someone do them for me? I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I'm having a very CalvinandHobbesian moment right now. Gosh, can't wait for the mom-ments on this post.

On a completely different note, Revolutionary Road proves that even Titanic-size love doesn't last. It's probably better that Leo drowned before his whole life went to shit.

There was a time when I followed pop music like it was my job.

I know the TRL finale was a while ago (sometime in late November to be less than exact), but I just got around to reading this great blog post from Idolator about what TRL meant. I really can remember rushing home after 7th grade to watch TRL. I didn't particularly like Carson Daly, but I liked pop music and I was always excited to see who'd be guesting and who'd come in at #1. I also remember I had closed captioning on my TV at the time (for God knows what reason; I was a weird little kid), so I learned every word to songs like Kid Rock's "Cowboy" and Destiny's Child's "Bug a Boo." I still know a large chunk of these lyrics. All of my attention was rapt from 3:30-5-- This was before I even had my own computer in my room, so I was staring straight at the TV, reading lyrics, idolizing pop stars. Nowadays, if I end up liking a pop song, it's usually because the artist was on SNL or So You Think You Can Dance? but it's not as easily trace-able and I tend to learn about what songs are popular long after they would've come and gone on the TRL charts.

nitpicking an otherwise interesting (but flawed) article

I got a belated chance to read the Tina Fey article in Vanity Fair. It focused almost entirely on the way she looks... shocking considering there are like 95 Annie Liebowitz photographs of her, all dolled up.

Weird part on Fey meeting Palin backstage at SNL:
'“She asked me where my daughter was,” Fey says. (Alice had been there earlier at the rehearsal, pointing at the monitor showing Palin and thinking it was somehow her mommy, even though Mommy was with her.)'

Is it just me or does that sound kind of condescending to Fey's daughter, as if Maureen Dowd thinks she's an idiot for mistaking Palin for Fey. This is a little girl (a 3-year-old) who's grown up watching her mom on TV. I am sure she has been in a scenario where she has been with her mother while Fey has also been on the TV screen. Is it really that shocking that she would see an image of a woman who looks remarkably like her mother on TV and think it was her?

Notable Quotable of the day

"In the finale, Ted tries to make it rain... and not in the cool way."
-Nick Banker, on why "How I Met Your Mother" is a chick show