And now for something completely different...

So I am taking the advice of Julie, the knitting preacher, and I have put away the scale for a little while. It was just depressing me, so this week I'm going to keep chugging away but not talk about it here. Putting too much emphasis on it is really kinda making me nuts. So here's something different: I started reading a new book yesterday entitled Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman. It is actually quite good! He's doing some social commentary, but it's incredibly witty. So far he's talked about Billy Joel, the fake relationships we also strive to have, and the effect of The Real World on the youth of America. I would like to say that I do love Billy Joel, and it's precisely because he isn't cool. Chuck is so right on that one. Billy seems to live outside the bounds of "coolness" at least from a musical perspective. His songs are incorrectly classified as "light rock" when they deal with some very real issues, namely loneliness. A tip of the hat to you, Mr. Joel.

And as to The Real World, I agree that the heyday of the show has passed. The characters are not "real" in any sense of the world, but sterotypes that need not be represented. But I must say that I do remember lyme disease-ridden Irene getting slapped in the face by the token black guy as she was sitting in the taxi waiting to go home. There's always the goodie-goodie, the race-obsessed one, the gay one, the mean one, and a few others like that. It's not about what people are like when they're real, because not one of these people are actually real. They have molded themselves into what they think MTV wants them to be. Klosterman posits that a whole generation has become these sterotypes in response to the tv show. What do you think? True or not? I'm still trying to decide.

But I cannot wait to see what Chuck has to say about Saved by the Bell.