"It was either a opossum, or a kangaroo."
-- Sweetie.
Today: The dangers of almost watching a reality show, and also, why you'd wish for chickens in the bathtub.
Sweetie watches The Soup, which I used to watch but I don't so much anymore because most days I begin to fall asleep at about 7:45, which technically means that I am already dropping off a little when I give Mr F and Mr Bunches their bath before bed, but I get woken up by "Cold," which is a game we play in which I dump cold water on them and they get cold water dumped on them.
It's not a very complicated game.
Also: They request it, so don't look at me like that.
Anyway, when I'm not falling asleep or definitely not torturing my 5-year-olds because, again, they like it, so get off my back, will you, I am, in Sweetie's words, "On the Twitter or whatever."
Which is true, but it's to my benefit because that means that last week I didn't watch the episode of The Soup that now gives her waking nightmares of the sort that led to her quote today.
The Soup, if you watch it a lot, lets you quickly gather all the information you need to know about reality TV shows, which is this:
They all work from some kind of Reality TV Show Bible that gives them various storylines to film.
Reality TV is, after all, supposed to be filming people doing their real lives -- just walkin' around, lookin' around -- but it doesn't film that at all because real lives are boring. You know what real life is?
What you're doing right now: You're reading a blog post on the computer. That's real life: You reading a blog post, me pouring cold water over the head of an already shivering 5-year-old who's yelling "Cooolld!")
(When you put it that way...)
So we're agreed that my life, what with the cold water and Twittering, would make a great reality show (TV PRODUCERS TAKE NOTE, and also: We will have to not tell Sweetie, as she nixes my every attempt to get someone to pay me to just live my life), but that your life is probably not a good one for reality TV, which is why when people who are not me get on Reality TV, they have to spice things up, which they do in one of several ways:
1. They Drop A Bombshell: Someone is getting divorced or married or pregnant, or divorced from a married pregnant person.
2. They Go Someplace, like sending Snooki to Italy to pay them back for that terrible night Yossarian had wandering around almost getting killed by Nately's whore.
Or, my favorite:
3. They Put A Chicken In It.1
1. Put A Chicken In It is TM me, Copyright me, and even :() me. It's my new phrase that I just now decided to start using to tell people how to spice things up a little. It'll be a self-help book from me if I ever finish that stupid pineapple story, "This Stupid Pineapple Is...", which I'll probably do some day, "some day" being probably Thursday or Friday. Also::()
is the emoticon I invented to express righteous indignation.
That latter plotline was stolen originally from an "I Love Lucy" episode where Lucy raises chickens because "Life in the country is very costly, [so] the Ricardos devise a plan to offset expenses." That plotline was resurrected, nearly two centuries after anyone stopped caring about "I Love Lucy" (seriously: It was a mildly-amusing TV show. Get over it, boomers.) when the Kardashians decided to raise chickens in their house to help save money, leading to possibly the best (but least significant) quote ever to be said on TV: "What's the deal with the chickens in the bathtub?"
Since then, countless other TV shows have decided to Put A Chicken In It, leading viewers to get tired of The Chicken Storyline, which required producers to up the ante and bring it even more Reality Style, which brings me to the episode of The Soup that haunts Sweetie's every moment, the one last week or so where a woman has an opossum living in her house because that happens.
From what I gathered by half-listening/half-Tweeting, a woman has her life filmed, and as part of that life, somehow there was poop in her shower which led her to look in a cupboard under her kitchen sink, where she found nothing, but upon standing up from peering into the cupboard the woman found herself
FACE TO FACE WITH AN OPOSSUM!
THAT DEFINITELY WAS NOT JUST PUT THERE BY AN OFF-CAMERA PRODUCER!
I felt like drama-ing up this post a bit with that.
I thought maybe I had misunderstood the point of the clip, but Sweetie confirmed I was in essence accurate: This woman has a life that is being filmed for some reason, and there was an opossum on her kitchen counter.
Rather than doing what I did with that information (1: going back to Twitter 2: trying to defend myself against the onslaught of feelings that maybe "Cold" isn't, after all, such a great game 3: wondering whether the people who watch that show are really so stupid as to think that the opossum would somehow be able get, undetected, from the bathroom to the cupboard then to the kitchen counter, always being one step ahead of the woman), Sweetie instead stored that information in the part of her mind that makes her see things, which led to the following two actual conversations I had with Sweetie this past week:
The first was after her return from the health club where she'd been working out:
Sweetie: On the way home, I almost hit a opossum.
Me: It wasn't a opossum.
Sweetie: It was either a opossum, or a kangaroo.
And this one, which occurred when I left the door from our family room to our garage open to encourage Mr F to begin getting into the car while I went to find Mr Bunches, who had wandered away:
Sweetie: Why is this open?
Me: So Mr F would begin getting into the car?
Sweetie: I don't want the door open! Things could get in!
Me: Like what things? [mentally picturing maybe wolves or perhaps some sort of alien]
Sweetie: Opossums.
Me: We don't even have those around here.
Sweetie doesn't believe me that opossums don't live in Wisconsin, which brings me to this question: Should I write an opossum, or a opossum? Since the o is silent, after all which, when you think about it, is kind of cool. How many words start with a silent O?
Not many, I'll bet. Or, for all we know, all of them do but we just never heard it.
2 comments:
"Cold" sounds like waterboarding only without the board.
I'd say "an opossum" but English is a weird language so who knows.
I used to watch "The Soup" but then I moved in 2009 and didn't have cable so I couldn't watch it and then when I moved again in 2010 and did have cable I just forgot about it and now can't make myself remember that it's on.
But speaking of, I need to remember that tomorrow night on PBS is "Raccoon Nation" about raccoons thriving in urban areas. Sweetie probably wouldn't want to watch that or else she'd worry about raccoons invading the house and/or car.
Actually, the "o" is not silent. Being from the south and having an uncle that used to like to eat opossum stew, I know these things. Commonly, we do not pronounce the "o," but, really, we're supposed to. It just makes the word to awkward to say, though, so people leave it off. In that respect, it should be "an opossum."
Is your wife having issues with marsupial identification?
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