I'm not perfect. No one is. That's why it bothers me when people who have done nothing to break the law are criticized for their actions because they don't conform to the status quo. People are thin sliced (to steal from Malcolm Gladwell) based on their looks and reputation while we ignore the actual reality.
Take Howard Stern for example. The man has never had a DUI, never ran a dog fighting ring, never shot himself in the leg while carrying an illegal firearm, never beat his wife, had a love child, gone to rehab. Nothing.
His greatest crime as far as I can remember is explaining the human body over radio waves. Wow. That however, led to hearings in Congress. How hard is it to arrange a hearing in Congress? It can't be that difficult. Seems to me the most important things they had to worry about until recently were steroids in baseball and people saying bad words.
On the other hand, why do we still care about people like Amy Fisher? The girl shot her boyfriends wife in the face and we reward her by giving her an hour on VH1 every week on "Celebrity Rehab." The term celebrity now includes everyone who has ever made news apparently.
We line up to watch Amber and Gary literally hit each other on national television while a young child sits on a mattress with no sheets in the other room. The cameramen can't intervene because that would disrupt the "reality" of the show. I don't think I could last 15 minutes on location without calling one of those kids an asshole.
Some say Stern created reality television when he began broadcasting portions of his show on the E! channel. They may be right, although Stern takes credit for pretty much everything on television.
If reality television was actually real, maybe we would spend less time watching it because we'd realize other people's lives are just as boring as our own. The Real World is not a place where you live with seven sexy strangers in a ridiculous house rent free with no obligation to society. The real world is when you live in a studio apartment and work six days a week and drive a used Honda.
"You're not dying, you just don't have anything better to do." Probably the most underrated line in Ferris Beuller's Day Off but it may be the most meaningful one. Your life isn't boring, you're not depressed. The reason why you can't focus and sit around and wonder what the hell happened to yourself is because you're trying to be something you're not. We all think our lives should have played out like a John Hughes movie, but none of them did, because those were all movies. If John Cusak showed up in my parent's driveway holding a boombox to try and win over my sister my dad would have kicked his weird ass off our lawn. It doesn't happen that way. This is the real world.
It's time we stop worrying about what the "Real" housewives are doing and start worrying about our own. Talk to your old neighbor, take a walk around the block, go to the park. Do something, it's a lot more interesting than you think.
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