Where’s that gun – the one I need to shoot myself with?
Trying to get away from the give-away shows (Ellen and Oprah for example, who seem to find unlimited donors of houses, cars, trips, televisions, baby furniture – it’s too much, especially when I consider that ordinary game show prizes and prize winners make me cry), I landed on House Hunters. At least here people are paying for their fantasies and, while I am happy for them, I am not left sobbing into my t-shirt over their great fortune as if it were my own.
Where to begin?
First off, the arguing couples were enough to make a person (me) scream at the television.
“I want.”
“I don’t want.”
“Why do your parents need a room? They don’t live here.”
“There is only one bathroom sink. I wanted Jack and Jills.”
“The closets might fit all your clothes, but what about mine?”
“But you said we could have granite countertops.”
Worse than the bickering are the newlyweds, clinging onto one another like fresh leeches on succulent skin, oohing and cooing in nauseating rapture, light teasing and subtle sarcasm aiming toward inevitable torturous futures.
More distressing are the expectant parents, who keep describing themselves as “we” who are pregnant. Since when could men get pregnant? Since when did they walk around swollen to the size of a zeppelin, stretch marks wrapped around their bodies like an overworked game of snakes and ladders; feet no longer visible from a standing position; nights spent scurrying to the bathroom to empty their overfull bladders in time?
As if this isn’t all bad enough, I kept hearing more cute couple language that must have crept into our language when I wasn’t looking.
For example, I listened to a man today use the phrase “man cave” (and his desire to have one) so many times I wanted to find a shovel and dig him one. Sadly, I am afraid our society is over-run by men and women who have read Men Are From Mars... and have fallen for the ridiculously simplistic presumption that this sexist theory is one that all couples subscribe to. As the show went on, I kept imagining a philosophizing Plato, aged hands pressed over large ears, a tiny droplet of blood trickling from his nose.
Ultimately, I decided to wait for the next program, hoping this would be better. I had just spent an hour hearing about pregnant men, cavemen, and, I almost forgot, a woman who said “bad chi” so many times I began throwing salt over my shoulder. How could it be worse than this?
Well, let me tell you how.
Four times within the first fifteen minutes I heard this: “Grow our family.” GROW OUR FAMILY. They wanted to grow their family. With what, I asked myself? Water and plant fertilizer? In a test tube? With magic beans? What in the world does that mean? How far will people go to find cute and coy; to remove themselves, in fact, from the real responsibility of birthing and raising a family – because this is what this co-opted language means/demeans.
Oh my God. Bad chi? I’ll show you bad chi!
And house hunters? More like cave dwellers – where it seems to me these Neanderthals belong.
I shook my head and I reached for the channel changer. Anything would have to be better that this – even an episode of the Secret Millionaire.
Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water/Jack fell down and broke his crown/And Jill came tumbling after.
