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wrong, interrupted. (by reality TV)

Look, all year round I’m a casual reality TV watcher. Hey Bravo, I see you. I watch those Orange County/Orange skin whores. I watch Loch JewNess Monster Patti Stanger and her millionaire hookers. I like to watch the flesh melt right off the bones of Rachel “Mosquito” Zoe. I like to cry at Intervention, make fun of the toilet baby mamas on Teen Mom, and I’ll even watch an episode of The Real World here and there. W/e, right? For 3/4 of the year I’m fine.

But I’m about to enter the eye of my personal reality TV storm. I’m currently flirting with disaster as Celebrity Rehab is well under way. I mean look- Dr. Drew is an elitist prick and I don’t get why he’d pay H-List celebrities $250,000 to kick their drug addiction on television. I mean any drug addict with a vague sense of math would figure out how to work his system and maybe make a living off continuing to do drugs. Because this is what I would do- I’d go on the show, get $250,000. Then I’d “relapse”, and Dr. Drew would ask to have me back! Because relapses are exciting TV! And I’d make another quarter mil. Then I’d do Sober House, then I’d relapse again, etc. I could make 1 million dollars off of VH1 in less than 2 years. And all I’d have to do is abuse a little valium. I already have worse problems than that. No big deal.

But this season of Celebrity Rehab is different because long time love of my life/Pete Burns’ identical twin Heidi Fleiss is in the house. I love her. She is breaking my heart every Thursday night. With the damn parrots and Death Valley and all of that. I mean here’s a signal that you’re not 100% okay- you live with 20+ parrots and 0- people. In a desert town that, because of you, has a larger population of parrots than it does people. I already wrote about how much I idolized her as a kid so I won’t go through that again. But watching her sad, sad, parrot-laden life just tears me up. Come on Heidi! Come on kitty kat! Get it together! Put the white trash crystal away. Give it to that turd hat Kari Ann. She deserves it anyway! You may have gradually custom-built your face for meth but she was already born with one! Ugh, it’s so tragic. And of course, only one week after Celebrity Rehab concludes, Sober House is all geared up to go. And Heidi is in the house. Ugh. Heartbreaking. I mean my first and only other childhood idol, Ms. June Pointer, already died a crackhead. I can’t go through it again Fleiss. Please get it together. DO IT FOR THE PARROTS.

And then of course, the first and forever #1 reality show love of my life, The Real Housewives of New York, is right around the corner. At the same time and on the same night as Sober House! My brain is going to be SO WACK after watching these two shows back to back on my DVR. I never liked the whole “Team” craze, but I mean TEAM BETHENNY hello? Why is everyone always fucking with Bethenny? Making her cry? I mean look at this trailer:

http://www.bravotv.com/the-real-housewives-of-new-york-city/videos/an-explosive-season

What the fuck happened to the Countess? She went from loony pill head to RAGING TRANNY BITCH. What the fuck is she singing about? Someone drag her out of that recording studio by her gigantic penis. And Jill Zarin you little 2 ball bitch. Friends with Kelly… really? Is Kelly even a person? I think she has a balloon animal for a brain. I’d rather be friends with a community of homosexual mothballs than be friends with Kelly Bensimon. Gross!

I guess I’m glad to see that both Alex and Ramona have really taken some long overdue but positive steps to correct their hairstyles. Kadooze to that. But overall, this upcoming season seems like the hottest hot mess, and then some. And unlike Dr. Drew’s bullshit, Real Housewives NY doesn’t make me sad, so much as it makes me angry, bitter, incensed,  and irritated. So basically, I’m going to be an emotionally confused TV zombie until probably the beginning of summer. Like I am not already fucked up enough.

Listen, I don’t want to end this on a depressing note, so here are a few choice gifs I made from the Real Housewives NYC trailer. (If someone could take the second one and put it on a t-shirt and send it to my friend Megan, I would really appreciate it.)

Millionaire Matchmaker – wrong.

Throughout my childhood and preteen years, I watched my friends pathetically obsess over silly toolbag celebrities.  With each new issue of Tiger Beat, Teen Bop, and Behind the Scenes of New Kids on the Block, Volume 43, eight year old girls all across the lands known as Central New Jersey and the Bronx, New York were learning to rub one (or fifty two) out.  I’d go over to these douchebag girls’ houses and find the walls of their rooms plastered with photos of Mark Paul Gosselar, Devon Sawa (LOL who the fuck, right?), Candace “Jesus Saves” Cameron, and other cardboard cut-out looking pop culture idiots. The combined star power of these boring sacks of vanilla celebrity jizz was -273 degrees Celsius. That’s right, 0 Kelvins.  Absolute zero. At the time, I was eating like 15 pudding pops a day, all of which were hotter than these losers.

This is not to say I didn’t have my own celebrity preoccupations. Oh I had them. It’s just that by my third birthday, while most toddlers were still learning to wipe their asses and operate Velcro, I was pissing in toilets from here to Disneyworld, tying my silver high-top Converse shoelaces at record breaking rates, and launching my first independent study into the value of the badass. Sorry Soleil Moon Frye, your dog is cute but you’re as exciting as dentistry school. Sorry Uncle Jesse but your mullet-y rat tail and leather vest aren’t hiding the fact that you hug children and play a lame air guitar. I was looking for some real glamor, some real talent, some real drug abuse, some staying power. So for me, the 1980s were all about The Pointer Sisters.  Crimped weaves 10 feet in the air, sequins, catchy pop tunes with covertly perverted sexual lyrics, crack cocaine. Those were some bitches I could plaster on my walls and admire. Even in 1985, a mere three years after my birth, I knew who to worship.  I was picking celebs for the long term, and I still love those legends today. 400 year old Ruth Pointer could beat the shoulder-padded shit out of Lady Gaga with one high note and a pinky finger to the eye.

Well the 80s turned into the 90s and so came the summer of 1993. I was in a great mood.

1. I was the boxball champion at camp, thanks to my indefatigable move wherein I would quickly advance to the service square, spin around, and pelt the playground ball at my opponents’ knees, knocking them out of the game and onto the ground.

2. I was going into 5th grade and I was going to rule the school.

3. My friends and I had recently made our heinous camp counselor cry over some notes we wrote about her and hid in the bunk, like “Melanie is a bitch.” Come on, 10 year olds making 19 year olds weep? Talent.

Anyway, I got home from camp one day, watched my usual Designing Women/Amen television lineup, flipped to the evening news and saw this photo:

Heidi Fleiss, Hollywood Madam, arrested for hooker distribution and looking glam as shit. Cute and glam! The first bitch I ever saw rocking a Porsche. My new idol. I followed her case for the whole rest of the 1990s. I watched all the trial coverage. I asked my counselor what prostitution was, then I asked the 6th and 7th grade boys on the camp bus what sex was. I wanted a full understanding of the case. I thought about how if I wasn’t 10 years old and I could drive and wear adult size clothing, I’d get myself some power suits that were one size too big to make me look even skinnier, black pumps, and big black sunglasses. Damn I loved Heidi Fleiss. Still do. Parrots and Pahrump, Nevada laundromat, meth habit, and scrambled egg face. I never thought it was fair that she went to prison for so long! Why would anyone lock up glam like her in a federal prison? She should have been running life for god’s sake, or at least hosting a daytime talk show. When she finally went off to prison I was sad. Like physically sad, I’m 99.999999999% sure I cried. At this point, however, the trial had been going on for several years and I learned that my admiration for Madam Fleiss was not going to be accepted by society (i.e. my mom and my bland-as-whole-wheat-pasta, Jennie Garth-loving friends.) So I shut my face and tried to move on.

Anyway, I continue to hold onto this resentment. I am angry that this whole arrest/prison debacle has turned the most glamorous, powerful women ever into basically batshit crazy roadkill with seven cheeks and a 15-foot upper lip.  Then one day in like 2008, I turned my TV to Bravo and caught a show called “The Millionaire Matchmaker.” Basically here’s what happens, a gigantic Jewish woman who is 7% human, 93% Abominable Snowman recruits a bunch of lame, ugly, usually Persian millionaires in Los Angeles into her “Millionaire’s Club” and sets them up with some poor women looking to fuck their way to the bank. Only she calls it a “relationship” and a “dating service” and a “matchmaking tradition”. I call it, “If Heidi Fleiss only had Bravo’s Andy Cohen on her side.”

Patti Stanger, Millionaire Matchmaker... What the fuck is this??

“Millionaire Matchmaker” is some bootleg Heidi Fleiss copycat shit, only no one’s going to federal prison because Andy Cohen probably fucked all of the closeted male FBI agents by now and Patti Stanger threatened to eat them for lunch if they messed with her.  This show is basically a bunch of pseudo-rich people choosing a hooker from a pool of pre-screened hookers through an organization run by a Jewish broad. Sounds familiar! Why doesn’t someone arrest this Stangmatic Robot Transformer bitch and cancel her terrible program already! Is it because Patti Stanger tells the grown men and women in her club “No sex before monogamy!!” on television and the tard-watching viewers of America believe they’ll listen? Is it because she forces the men to rush their chosen hooker women through some bullshit 30-minute happy hour so they can go back to some vodka warehouse and take vodka showers and fuck in a pool of vodka? (Real episode.) He paid for her drinks first, it’s not prostitution!

Screw this show. I don’t get it. All Fleiss had to do was call her service a “Matchmaking” service and she would have been free and clear and not subject to lesbian prison rape? I’m probably going to write a letter to Bravo because I want to see who the hell Stanger had to threaten to blow over with her breath in order to get her business approved. This is bullshit.  Heidi Fleiss is my American hero.

My irritation has ADD.

I can’t nail down one new thing I hate! I’ll figure it out soon but until then, follow me on Twitter – twitter.com/medicalgohst (yes the o and h are reversed).

sex and the city – still wrong.

An Open Letter to all of the middle-aged, gradually shriveling-up women who, 9 years, 19 miscarriages, and 9,000 cosmos later, still think you are actually in Sex and the City:

YOU’RE NOT.

-Redthnapper

p.s. Your tacky blonde highlights do not make me think your pubes aren’t gray.

mistaking caffeine for crack cocaine and vice versa – wrong.

According to my calculations, caffeinated beverages and FDA approved foods do not currently contain any kind of the freebase cocaine product more commonly known as crack. Likewise, I have never seen an episode of COPS where the aging prostitute with shmeared blue eyeliner stains on her cheeks and one shoe was caught smoking cappuccino gas out of the suspicious looking (and smelling) pipe she’d been hiding in her vagina. While these two factoids may seem isolated, I’m here to tell you that they’ve helped me approach an important epiphany of which I’m about to share with you. Caffeine is not the same thing as crack. Crack is not the same thing as a caffeine.

Unless you are between the ages of Fetus and 2 months old, there is absolutely no excuse for you to spaz out like a crazed maniac with rabies after a cup of coffee. I don’t mean to deny that 17 cups of double espressos at 3am might impede a good night’s rest. I do mean to imply that any grown person who has a cup of coffee after lunch and immediately proceeds to act like somebody just shot a potent eight-ball up his/her asshole needs to actually have someone shoot a potent eight-ball up his/her asshole. I mean are you serious people? What kind of home did you grow up in? Was macaroni and cheese drugs too? Were you not allowed to wear your D.A.R.E. t-shirt because it was too risque? Did you take your first drink at age 42? Was it a wine spritzer? Was it Zima? One cup of coffee shouldn’t make you all jittery and unable to concentrate on anything. You shouldn’t have to sprawl out on a cold bathroom floor for thirty minutes to puke and/or sweat it out.

Every time I’m around one of these morons I feel like I am suddenly the lone grown up at the Babysitter’s Club sleepover of my nightmares. I imagine all these adult coffee-tards in flannel PJ sets that are covered in teddy bears (no offense to teddy bears), talking about zits and hickeys and giggling guiltily as they stuff their faces with the chocolate-peanut butter spread they found under someone’s mom’s bed. And then I picture me, sitting in the corner, holding a bottle of Grey Goose and staring at everyone in disgust and confused disbelief. “You can’t have vodka because COFFEE makes you JITTERY?” I yell to them, over and over again. “Kristy? Mary Anne? You won’t even TRY it? You had a Cappuccino and it raised your heartbeat to 239 bpm? What if I mix it with Gerber Baby Apricots or breast milk? What if I let you drink it right out of some lady’s tit?”

And then I’d probably end up knocking the bottle back alone and punching myself in the face repeatedly. This is what I get for attending a sleepover that doesn’t involve penetration, early morning horror, and a clandestine escape.

Just grow up people. Have a cup of coffee and then just sit still! Or shoot some crack in your eyelid, bug out, and try to swallow your own face! Stop getting these reactions twisted already. And remember this mantra next time you see me and your caffeinated beverage in the same room: “COFFEE ISN’T CRACK AND IF I ACT LIKE IT IS, I’LL SOON BE SHOT BY AN ANGRY JEW.”

poorly thought out chivalry – wrong.

Everyday I ride an elevator up to the 20th floor. This elevator stops on floors 12-21, so logically, I am often standing in the back on my way down to the lobby.  An amazingly bright, worthwhile cast of characters often joins me in this claustrophobic box that takes me to and from the largest gaping hellhole where which I wallow in suicidal thoughts on the daily. Pseudo-buff (see: FAT) Guido lawyers with porcupine spiked plastic legos for hair in silk purple ties, short stubby dudes in tattered khakis who will likely spend the day plugging and unplugging computer cables while pretending to “network” something. And the people who work on my floor: personality devoid zombies who feel entitled to pass themselves off as human because they can walk on two feet instead of four. It’s a real treat.

Here’s the thing. Let me reiterate. I’m at the back of the elevator.  So let me say this. If you have to slam me into the elevator wall and/or hold me up for 14 minutes while you do some sort of idiot shuffle where your backpack ends up inside someone else’s asshole in order to let me out of the elevator first, then IT IS NOT CHIVALRY. Give it up.

First of all Guido lawyers, it is obvious to me, BROS, that while you may put on some crazy chivalry show by tripping over your shiny clown shoes while you unsuccessfully try to let me out of the revolving door first, I am well aware that you are the same dudes who roofied and raped several girls while you shat your way through the University of Indiana Fratville. And after one beer and a slightly oversized piece of chicken marsala, you would rape me too.  This is actually not chivalrous behavior at all. So your day glow orange face is idiotspeak for “heinously transparent contradiction with McDonald’s hamburger meat for a brain.”

I mean are you serious with this chivalry bullshit? Next time you find yourself sharing a street with me where there is an imminent possibility that some irritated Frenchman might dump urine out his 8th floor window then by all means, walk on the inside and make yourself the target. But last time I checked, we aren’t in a commercial for “White Diamonds” by Elizabeth Taylor or “Diamonds are forever or until I eff your best friend with the fake tatties” commercial by DeBeers. Last time I checked, I was fully able to gather the strength in my pale and measly arm to open a cab door by myself. Last time I checked, I wasn’t interested in getting a close-up sniff of your Axe-drenched stankass armpit as you hold the door and awkwardly make me crawl underneath it and eat your deodorant crumbs. Last time I checked, I was smarter/faster than you and not interested in interacting with you at all.  So I’d really appreciate it if you would let me pretend you don’t exist as is my preferred way of dealing with annoying tools such as yourselves.

*Note: You should still always warn a girl 5-7 seconds before you impregnate her tonsils.

business – wrong.

I hate business. I wish I had enough energy left in my angry little self to write an epic ten-pager about “business”, and how it’s all so ridiculous and petty and stupid and killing my soul. And my friends’ souls. By the millisecond. Sure, you could watch The Office and get the picture – it’s legitimately amusing and certainly does a fine job of lambasting a lot of office types that deserve to be lambasted. But The Office is funny, and while no one is making their dreams come true one Dunder-Mifflin ream of paper at a time, it doesn’t seem like anyone is consciously shriveling away into numb, zombie-esque dust.

I am the first to admit that I have no idea about what is meaningful or important. I’m sure people who go into fields like social work and veterinary medicine (for the right reasons) can consider themselves involved in meaningful work. Same goes for those running rape prevention centers and suicide prevention centers and syphilis prevention centers and whatever other prevention centers are being run.

I don’t know what kind of working person I am. I don’t consider myself to be a lazy artsy fucktard, waiting tables by day and splashing acrylic paint on a canvas and weeping over my own creativity by night.  I do know that me sitting behind a desk pretending to give even one fucking shit about anything that I’m supposed to be doing is a waste of my life. Who the fuck invented business meetings? How do some people sit in a room and talk about paper quality and brochures and invoices without stabbing themselves up their noses and ripping away their sinuses? And when you force me to join in on those meetings, how could you possibly think I would ever care? And how have you convinced yourself that you care? I’ve had a fake business smile/persona for less than five years and it is already cracking like a middle-aged white lady.

This shit is not okay. Conversations about “Marketing” are not okay. Not only is marketing not a science, it’s not real! All successful “Marketing” really equals is being inherently interesting or relevant. It’s no fucking secret that fat ass Midwestern lardchunks + drunken me at 3am are going to eat some Taco Bell, with or without your damn chihuahua. And even if it is the chihuahua- who cares? Who cares about any of this? Why does it matter and why do I have to be trapped behind a desk in a stuffy, dirty office surrounded by socially inept freaks, pretending to care, in order to avoid being homeless?

I have this idealized notion of temp work in the 1980s, because I was a very astute first grader and very tuned into nuance (plus I watched Working Girl repeatedly and shat myself with pleasure each time). It seemed like there was all this lame temp work going around, but it was being filled by a community of people who totally saw through it, who could laugh about it at lunch together, who met up after it was over for drinks and comedy shows and bad plays and terrible poetry readings and basically were able to use their day money to pay rent and their free time to do whatever kind of projects they loved. They didn’t have to get INVESTED in their 9-5 bullshit. No one expected the aspiring writer or singer or even law student to fucking give a shit about whatever they were typing up or filing. They left at the end of the day and that was that – they helped out soul-less corporations and soul-less corporations gave them enough money to not have to sleep in a pile of dirty snow in Tompkins Sq Park. The end.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this except to say that I hate the recession, I hate how we’ve all tricked ourselves into thinking that making postcards and pricing popcorn and tallying sales figures in Micro-fucking-soft Excel is what we love. We have all but given up on doing anything that might make us happy for fear it will also make us homeless. Is this okay at all? Is it wrong for me to both whine about hating my job and simultaneously whine about not wanting to live in my 2-door Hyundai Tiburon? I feel like those are both valid complaints with no real answer. It makes me sad and increasingly depressed to watch my talented, interesting, funny friends wither away behind barely middle-class salaries and awful managers. Sure, most of my friends don’t hate their jobs as much as I do, but I don’t know too many of them who wouldn’t drop their jobs like a pair of herpes infected balls if they had the chance to pursue something they really loved. So fuck you business. Fuck fucking you.

first response pregnancy test – wrong.

I like to submit my writing to publications as often as possible, because rejection is fun and it’s good to be reminded how worthless I am on the regular.  Below is my most recent rejected submission – an “Open Letter” to the First Response Pregnancy Test Advertising Team – openly rejected by “Kelly the Intern” at mcsweeneys.net, because it just wasn’t her style. I’m sure she’ll be graduating high school this June in a beautiful gown from Forever21 and a toilet baby of her own. I hope you enjoy it more than she did!

*******

Dear FRPTAT:

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in the procreative community. It seems to me that a number of its members, namely those with less than ideal parental (and might I suggest mental?) qualifications, decide to throw caution to the wind and condoms in the garbage and whoopsie, out comes a baby.

For example, teenagers are perhaps too busy basking in the glow of their own wildly miscalculated invincibility to worry about what might happen when they get busy with each other. Think Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston, Jamie Lynn Spears and her Barely Literate Baby Daddy, the drugstore cashier you run into at 3am when you are maybe searching for a pregnancy test yourself. Unsettling, I know! And as dedicated advertising professionals, I am sure you pay close attention to all the hottest, freshest television programs on the dial. Have you seen the Discovery Health Channel’s mesmeric reality series called “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant?” In an alarming twist of events, this program’s title is neither a metaphor nor is it a behind-the-scenes look at the making of a Wes Craven picture. It is actually a show about ladies who do not realize that they are with child until what they assume is a severe case of constipation turns out to be – well – not.

Know this, First Respondents. As a woman, I appreciate you doing all you can to help me know if I’m pregnant the second it happens. I don’t doubt that the blessed genii in your chemistry labs will soon afford me the ability to detect my pregnancy pre-fornication – perhaps several hours or even days before a future suitor and I consummate our regrettable one night stand!  Unfortunately, I’m not quite sure I have the same confidence in your advertising personnel, whom I believe are largely responsible for the above-mentioned pregnancy debacles.

Let me explain. I recently partook in an all-night television marathon, during which I binged on “The Real Housewives of New York City” and “Keeping Up With the Kardashians”. Picture it. There I am on the couch, methodically flipping back and forth between Bravo and E!, E! and Bravo, like a basic cable zombie. Your commercial appears on my screen, and it’s advertising your cutting-edge, rapid-detection, aptly named First Response Pregnancy Test. A lovely looking lady glides into the frame. She emits a kind of maternal sagacity that only those experienced in child rearing, and therefore stick-urination, could emit.  Whatever she says, I will take her word for it. I trust her. She looks intently into the camera, secures my attention, and tells me, “You know, there IS such a thing as being a little bit pregnant.”

Come again?

What?

No. No way, you deceptively sagacious, fraudulently maternal freak. There is actually no such thing as being a little bit pregnant. You are lying. Find me one doctor, one scientist, one woman in labor who can define what being just “a little bit pregnant” could possibly mean.

Listen, it may be the middle of the night, and I may be drunk off Robitussin and Linzer tarts, but I know a dangerous lie when I hear one. Thankfully, I am also not as dumb – ahem- uninformed as some of my counterparts whom I described to you earlier in my letter. You cannot tell a fourteen-year-old girl who grew up behind a meth lab in the barren New Mexico desert that it is possible for her to get just a little bit pregnant. No big deal, it’s cool, it’s just a little. Well, she saw your commercial and is now scheduled to give birth at someone’s junior prom. The woman who mistook her pregnancy for an irritable bowel? Let’s just say it takes a special kind of mother to confuse her birth canal with her back door. The kind of mother who thinks she’s either going to give birth to a boy, a girl, or a jellyfish.

Please stop airing this misleading commercial immediately. I am begging you. You are confusing stupid future parents everywhere. America is getting dumber and you are perpetuating the cycle- one urine-soaked stick at a time! I don’t know if you think this commercial is a funny joke, or if its production coincided with your copyeditor’s vacation. What I do know, FRPTAT, is that you may be the reason why our babies are dropping out of school and into toilets.

Yours truly,

redthnapper

my next mentor – wrong.

I see this billboard everyday. Everyday I do a triple take.

Uh, these people look like crackheads. The girl on the left in particular looks like someone recently rescued her from a sewer off Downing St. in Flushing, Queens. They definitely don’t appear to be people whom I should entrust as my mentor.

Dear William Paterson University – not interested.