Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Watching MTV reality shows is a bad, bad thing.

So I was watching The Paper last night. It's a new MTV reality show about a high school paper and its staff. I'm guessing the paper is slightly better than the two-sided flier my high school printed once a semester and called a school newspaper. But I'm not sure. The only actual paper stuff I've seen was a discussion regarding gray scale, for which I care not.

One of the main characters (people? is it only a character if it's fiction?) is the new editor-in-chief, Alice or Alex or something like that. I know it starts with an A but I can't remember her actual name. Amanda? Anyway. The majority of the other people on the paper basically talk shit about A the entire show. She's a total Andrea Zuckerman but without the punch, so I can kinda understand but mainly it sucks. She seems oblivious to the chatter going on behind her back, which I guess is the point of "behind her back," although there are a few staffers who are a little too free with the bitch talk when she's in the vicinity. And half of the peeps who talk bad about her behind her back discuss their undying "friendship" to her face.

My question - this is high school? Was my high school like this? I remember having petty dramas and what not but the back biting? I don't remember that at all. So either I was a saint (highly unlikely) or I was the A girl in my high school. If I don't remember trash talking others ad infinitum, does that automatically mean I was trash talked? According to The Paper, you have to be one or the other. I wasn't one so I must have been the other? Is this faulty logic?

To be fair I have little to no memory of high school left and only flashes from the years before that. I remember driving a little too fast to clubs to try and get in while there was still free cover, a few too many parties, getting in trouble for saying "fuck" a lot, discovering poetry a la Norton Anthology (I read in the back of class while others were reading the book I'd finished a week ago), and completely giving up on fashion at school by the end of my senior year and resorting to t-shirts and jeans every day. Everything else? A blur. There are bits and pieces from stories people have reminded me about but pure, organic memories? I've got very few.

I think all of the above really reaffirms my decision last year to not attend my high school reunion. And The Paper? I pretty good reality show after all.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just to prove what an old fogey I've become: I don't know what channels MTV , VH1, E! or BET are on.

Should I be embarrassed? I'm torn.

Tina said...

I don't think that denotes "old fogey" status so much as a person who is DEVOID OF POP CULTURE. How do you survive? Don't you lose all sense of self when you don't have The Hills inspired witticisms in your everyday conversations?

Anonymous said...

Alas, pop culture is what tides me over until spring training.

For instance, I didn't know Angelina Jolie was pregnant until last weekish or so. It was earth-shattering.