ms. malaprop – Page 12 – Wrekehavoc.com

Category: ms. malaprop

the waiting (is the hardest part)

Posted on April 24, 2008 by wrekehavoc

on sunday, the pump that pumps water out of my utility sink in the basement broke. sounds minor except when you stop and realize that this pump pumps the water from the washing machine up and out of the basement. and that would be the only room in the house that actually has professionally installed carpeting.

yeah, you see where this is going.

to make an extraordinary story short, i called a few places to find out estimates for work, as i did laundry and the water is now inhabiting a portion of my basement. (note to self: G-d does NOT want you to do laundry. Ever. Again.) the plumber came out straightaway and installed a new pump so that i am free to do laundry again (yay?). however, i have not yet heard back from one company (chem dry.) and today, a person from service master was supposed to come by and give me an estimate between 11-1. i rushed my kishkes around all morning to make sure i was back by 11. and i have been waiting by the phone, waiting by the door. i wanted to shower, but i was afraid i would not hear the people when they came. i am, to borrow a phrase, a member of the great unwashed.

guess what?

it’s 1:30, and not a peep.

i called service master, and the man who answered the phone will be over my house in 20 minutes. ::fingers crossed:: ::eyes rolling::

maybe i am misguided, but i always believed that when i am about to potentially engage someone in some sort of business experience that will cost me probably a few hundred dollars, the person might actually have the decency to show up when he says he will. if he can’t, i will understand just as long as he calls me and lets me know that he is delayed/can’t make it. it’s called communication.

i still am reeling from the time when i tried to get a plumber to my house. it took three tries…and he never showed. well, i take that back. one time, he showed up … hours past the time when he was supposed to show. at 7pm. PM. as in, Post Mortem.

and this is not the first time something like this has happened.

i am so pissed off that i have wasted the better part of a day. waiting.

on the bright side, one stellar human being, one marvelously amazing lady, brought her dehumidifier over my house last night. this woman is the yin to my yang in hebrew school carpool land; i take her daughter there, she brings my daughter back. she is one of the nicest, kindest, and funniest people i’ve met in the past year. yesterday, she pulled up in her car with her eldest in tow and brought me some yummy chocolate-crunch matza. in passing, i mentioned my basement.

and at 8:30 pm last night, after her various carpooling duties, exercise classes, and mom jobs were through, this saint of a person (who of course is a red sea pedestrian, like i am, so she can’t really be sainted, i think) schlepped over this two billion pound dehumidifier, a machine which as of this cranky typing has already required to be dumped out twice. and things are a bit dryer downstairs.

all because of her.

when passover is done, i am SO baking them a cake. or two.

i just won’t start now, though, cos as i start mixing, i’m sure the service master guy will show.

of course.

gee whiz

Posted on April 24, 2008 by wrekehavoc

thanks, grandy, for the award:

never had one before! i’m so honored 🙂

guilty pleasure monday: making time (creation)

Posted on April 21, 2008 by wrekehavoc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtPeEt8-oDM&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b&hl=en

i know, i know. you’re expecting another song from 30 years or so ago to be primed for the guilty pleasure monday pump. to be sure, picking on 1970s songs is like shooting fish in a teacup… or something like that. to prove i am an equal opportunity offender, i’ll pick something that i bet 95% of readers will look up from their keyboards and say ~~wtf~~ huh?

let me jog your memory in case you’re experiencing a senior moment prematurely. how many of you saw the wes anderson movie rushmore? (bet you didn’t remember that owen wilson was the co-writer of that screenplay. he’s pretty, he’s suicidal, and he’s very talented. can you say dream date pour moi?) perhaps you’ve lost the plot, but you could not forget the kickass soundtrack. (okay. well, i didn’t forget the soundtrack. BS and i actually wait at the end of every picture we see to read the music credits.)

i get it. you’re still not with me. okay.

the creation was one of the more underrated bands of the sixties. they started out mostly sounding like a cross between the kinks and the who during the mod era. they experimented with making pop art while on stage. eddie phillips, their lead guitarist, experimented with a violin bow and his guitar long before jimmy page made it famous.

unfortunately, they never had tremendous chart-topping success, which is just plain odd to me. if you listen to making time, it just s c r e a m s hit. just goes to show you – if you don’t have the right promotional people behind you, you can be a bloody genius and you still won’t gain financial success.

ah well.

i wonder if the surviving members got royalties from the film?

::scratches head::

::gets depressed thinking about it::

just listen to it, okay?

centerfield

Posted on April 19, 2008 by wrekehavoc

this may come as a huge surprise to you folks out there, but i’m a terrible human being. seriously.

and it’s all because of softball.

i grew up with two older brothers; thus, it stands to reason that i had no choice but to learn how to play baseball. if i wanted to go out and play with them, that’s what they were doing. i learned to catch and throw and bat early on, and i wasn’t half bad. sadly, they didn’t let girls in little league back then, so my career was confined to the camp softball team, where i was the only girl who made first string and played on the traveling team.

i managed the boys baseball team in intermediate school, which taught me the fine art of baseball scoring. it also taught me that 13 year old boys like to put their cups over your face and yell air raid!!! thank G-d i had no idea where the cup went back then — how did i not know is a wonder unto itself, considering the aforementioned brothers. but it’s a blessing that i did not know where that plastic thingy had been or else i would have had a few projectile vomiting episodes.

when high school rolled around, i was set to be on the team when i ended up with my thumb in a cast, thanks to an overzealous gym teacher who set me in on a game of kill the guy with the ball. as the only girl, with the JV football captain, the JV basketball captain, and other athletic boys playing, i knew i had to be twice as tough; and i had the ball — i really, r e a l l y had it. i was woman, hear me ROAR! but then, too bad for me: it was pulled out of my death grip, leaving me with a thumb that actually was bent in a position that G-d had never meant it to be.

(i’ll never forget the gym teacher yelling at me: c’mon wreke, take it like a man! i thought, uhm, hello? i’m a GIRL. a girl with a thumb hanging off? fortunately, one of the boys told the teacher that i should probably see the nurse.)

a cast made pitching difficult, and after awhile, i realized i was not ready or willing to make the time commitment to softball. besides, they ran a zillion laps, and while i was a decent sprinter in my day, i was never a long-distance runner. check, please!

so fast forward to today. i have not played any softball in a long while. (i used to play with a team on the mall that played around the washington monument, but 9-11 put a major cramp on all of that anyway.) i have to live somewhat vicariously through my own children, poor things.

BC has been playing for a few years, playing being an interesting choice of words. if she’s covering third, she’ll greet you as you run to the bag and probably offer some hors d’oeuvres. she may even start drawing in the dirt with her free hand if it gets too dull out there, which it does, as few girls seem to be hitting very much yet. i cheer her on, in between bouts of hysteria as i watch jools, who could be running onto the highway, climbing onto the school rooftop, or dousing himself at the water fountain with the older boys.

but it’s hard.

i watch all the girls as they stand and wait for the ball. somehow, i think they all expect it to magically make a path precisely to their person and then leap up into their gloves. run up to the ball and get it? i think not! pay attention to the game? if i feel like it and i’m not busy looking at the dandelions.

i can see now how i had a clear advantage in this department: i had brothers, brothers who taught me that i had no choice but to either go after the damn ball or else get the hell out of the way. additionally, some of the boys on the camp team didn’t like me just because i was a girl. but i was there to play, not make friends. and i played, and sometimes, i would even get a little grudging respect, which felt very, very sweet.

as i am a woman who attended a womens college, this is going to sound odd: but i wonder sometimes whether we do ourselves a disservice through gender segregation? if i had stuck only with my girl friends, i would never have gotten tougher, and not just in sports, either. i’m not discounting at all the contributions of girl friends — lord knows, i adore mine. but at a young age, there was something of value spending time with boys.

back in my day, they segregated the school playground: boys on one side, girls on the other. in one of the very few times i ever got in trouble in my entire scholastic career, i was banished for a week from the playground because of a terrible, awful thing i did: i played with the boys on the boys’ side. i am glad that this is no longer a practice at BC’s school. i suspect she is not playing with the boys at her age, if only because she hasn’t grown up with older boys. that’s ok. as long as she has the opportunity, i can live with that.

oh, and my punishment? well, they wanted me to sit on the pavement every single day for a week. in one of the great deus ex mama moments ever, my mother, a teacher at that school, suggested to the principal that my sentence be commuted to the library, where i could at least sit and read for the week. which mercifully, i did. (she thought it was a stupid rule, too, i guess.)

i love that BC is active and playing and having fun. and the girls on her team are so sweet! but there is a part of me that wonders whether the girls are so passive on the field precisely because they are just playing with other girls.

please, G-d, tell me i’m wrong or that a change is a’comin’. i don’t think i can take another season of daisy chains.

garden state parkway boogie

Posted on April 15, 2008 by wrekehavoc

the Post offers up a mini travelogue of New Jersey diners… well, those up Route 130, anyway. it’s amusing for me, as i have passed a zillion tour busses at Mastoris a gazillion times and i have eaten with my parents, kids, nieces, nephews, etc., at the Americana. (nice to know that the place i’ve taken my kids is the place with the good diner food. like there’s any difference?) i feel it’s part of my cultural legacy to take my kids to real diners when i’m up in the Garden State (home of my birth); otherwise, all they know of diners is the Silver Diner, a place for which i had high hopes but which i currently loathe.

when i’m doing the garden state parkway boogie in my mind, i think about my favorite diners. i remember olga’s diner in marlton, halfway between nowhere and somewhere. as i’ve mentioned in older posts, we drove to my grandparents’ in florida a few times a year, a 26+ hour drive back then. we’d start before dawn, and if we were really, really lucky, we’d stop at Olga’s for breakfast. yummy, yummy baked goods. all at 5 a.m. or whatever ungodly hour we showed up.

i think of the tick tock diner in clifton. i bet jimmy hoffa is gone because he ate here. i imagine that martha stewart has eaten here, considering she grew up not too far away. i know i’ve been here with friends; i think i stopped here with my cousin after we went on our ill-fated trip to studio 54. (i know. me + disco. what a combo.) i’m not entirely sure. it’s kind of a landmark of sorts of jersey diners.

all those diners on route 18 and route 9. you all looked alike. you all had similar menus. then, in the 1980s, you all renovated to look more like restaurants. all you did was end up becoming these mauve, stainless steel behemoths. i never understood why. perhaps it was your response to the reaganization of the nation.

in any event, i’ve eaten in them all.

but probably my favorite diner, bar none, is the somerset diner. every single rutgers student — and there are probably 50,000+ each year — has eaten here. come here at 3 a.m. and you’ll likely find it packed with drunk, formerly drunk, or the designated drivers of said drunk students, chowing down. having been among them, i am wildly proud to announce that i once ordered the happy waitress special one night at some insane hour of the morning. (it’s an open-faced grilled cheese sandwich with bacon, tomatoes, and fries, but memory fails. yes, i ate bacon once upon a time.) at the time, i was deep in my existential phase of english major life. (i was also probably deep into several fuzzy navels.) i remember looking the waitress in the eye and asking her: why is it called the happy waitress special? does it make you especially happy to serve it? is it lighter to carry? or is there some other deep reason behind the nomenclature?

see, there’s this thing about diner waitresses (or waitrons?). they don’t exactly have a sense of humor. they don’t exactly suffer idiot college students gladly. (nor should they.) that woman glared at me, holding the plate near my head. and glared. and glared.

i am very lucky that the happy waitress special didn’t turn into the drunk college student hair accessory.

in your eyes

Posted on April 11, 2008 by wrekehavoc

i’m writing this today because i have to. see, it’s my dad’s birthday, and i have to acknowledge this in print, as he is my most loyal reader. ever.

(hi, dad!)

i’ve written lots about my dad in this thing over the years, enough to make all his poker friends probably needle him if they ever saw this. in short, my dad has given me many, many things over the course of my life. three particular contributions, evident in this blog, are:

1) my love of music;

2) my occasional lefty windmill tilts; and,

3) my eyes.

yes, my eyes. those things you see at the top of the page. dad was probably wearing glasses in utero, (just kidding!) and by third grade, i was wearing them, too for my nearsightedness. i hated my glasses. i hated my glasses SO VERY MUCH. by eighth grade, i beggedbeggedBEGGED to wear contacts, and i did. i never looked back.

…until recently. jools has been digging spiderman comics; only, too bad for me: i can’t decipher the itty-bitty type. sorry, dude, i’d tell him, you’ll have to ask daddy to read tonight.

(actually, this was not necessarily a bad thing. you moms out there understand.)

lately, i’ve noticed that objects seem closer than they really are, and i’m not looking in a side-mirror, either. i’m hating the way BS drives, thinking he’s driving up the ass of the car in front of our’s. how on earth could this be happening to me! i’m only… er… a little over 29 35 39 the rainbow.

so today, i’ve gone and visited the eye doctor. and lookee, lookee:

i need reading glasses.

i can hardly wait to visit whole foods with jools so that he can help me pick out a pair. he’s an expert, as he tried on a zillion pairs of them one time when we were there. mommy, he asked with a rainbow pair perched atop his nose precariously, can i buy this pair?

honey, i replied, you have to be able to read to wear reading glasses.

truth be told, i can barely read a thing at the moment, as my eyes are dilated. (i can barely even see as i type this. i suspect it’s riddled with typos.) i’m awfully proud to tell you that i drove this way. i shopped in trader joe’s this way. i made another lands end return at sear’s this way. and i picked up my clean comforter at la lavanderia this way. i would tell you that i drove the speed limit, but i couldn’t read the sign so well. so i just tried to drive s l o w l y and with traffic.

in short: i can’t see a fucking thing at the moment, and it’s all thanks to you, daddy! so happy birthday!!!

guilty pleasure monday: stuck in the middle with you (stealers wheel)

Posted on April 7, 2008 by wrekehavoc

i’m stuck in the middle of the 1970s in guilty pleasure mondayville. there is SO MUCH fodder from the 1970s that i could cite. i may cite it all yet. (i’m sure you can’t wait.)

in fact, i should probably nominate my brother larry to write a guest column for guilty pleasure mondays. there is no one else who likes really awful 1970s music more. (yes, if there were a museum for bad 1970s music, he’d be the master curator — only he likes most of it.) and besides, y’all need to meet larry. he is the smartest, funniest, and nicest one of we three kids.

now that i think of it, it may even become my mission to make His Laziness Mr. Attila the Hun my beloved middle brother contribute a guilty pleasure one day, if only because it will give me hours of fun. and a day off 😉

in the meantime, i bring you a song i absolutely adore and have done since i first heard it on my friend jeanne’s jukebox: stuck in the middle with you by stealers wheel. i actually had two friends who had jukeboxes in their basements; but as i spent a lot more time in jeanne’s basement, i had a much greater familiarity with her jukebox, filled with lots of 1970s hits — as it was the 1970s at the time — and, much to jeanne’s chagrin, her ballet recital record. yes, a parent in that house had a good sense of humor and stuck the 45 (remember those?) in the last jukebox slot. whenever i wanted to piss jeanne off, i would press it. she’d go spare.

but i digress. per usual.

i don’t think much else happened to this UK band after this hit, which has been covered by at least one jillion different groups; but a few years later, the lead singer, gerry rafferty, ended up with a few hits of his own; but this early 70s group put out a song with an unforgettable guitar riff… so unforgettable that sheryl crow stole it in all i wanna do. (lucky for my girl sheryl, i love that song. and considering her brilliant choice in first names — spelled correctly, no less — it is difficult for me to get too annoyed by the creative ripoff. instead, i will consider it an homage to this earlier work.)

but why, why, WHY did quentin tarantino have to go and ruin it all by using it in a lighthearted scene in that fun, rascally romp known as reservoir dogs?

yeah. i’m definitely asking larry to write a column. i need the time to get certain images out of my brain.

driver 8

Posted on April 2, 2008 by wrekehavoc

driver 8, take a break. we’ve been on this shift too long.

i’ve been single-parenting it since sunday morning. and i love my kids. but i’m so very, very glad that BS just called and said he’s on an earlier flight home today, possibly home by dinnertime.

the nice thing about single-parenting it is that the rules are all mine. if we want to eat chocolate for dinner, we can. (fret not. we didn’t.) if we want to make a tent and sleep in it, we can. if we want to sleep a little later, or wear crazy clothes, we can. dance party with the clash? sure. cos i’m the mom, and i say so.

the bad thing, of course, is that the kids cry for their daddy. they miss him and his regulated schedule, his soft laugh, his scratchy beard, his crankiness. every bit of him, they miss.

i do, too.

(here’s the visual: i am self-medicating. it’s mid-morning, and i’m eating two squares of dark chocolate. it will make me happy. don’t tell me it won’t.)

single-parenting has brought me some stellar experiences over the past few days.

1) the aforementioned dead bat who, by the way, is still very much dead. and still on the lawn, waiting for BS’s special way with a shovel.

2) jools. home. every. single. day. i know many of you do this voluntarily, but i am unused to a very active child, 24/7. we’ve been having a lot of fun together, making hummus and guacamole and such, but i haven’t been getting as much done as i need to do. still, no one is dying because my house is a mess, so i’ll lighten up.

3) BC’s cough. BC has had a cough since sometime last year. (when the pediatrician asked her last week how long she’s been coughing, she answered: since first grade. and she was dead serious.) nothing has stopped it; not inhalers, not singulair; not voodoo dolls. (heh. just kidding. i think.) it’s really beginning to bug her; sunday night, it took her quite awhile to settle down to sleep because of it. i finally put my foot down and told the pediatrician that we need to visit a pulmonary person.

but then, we had to do the medical limbo. for some reason, the pulmonologist can only accomodate people with our stellar insurance (and that’s not sarcastic talk — it is the insurance gold standard around here, and a PPO to boot) in their leesburg office. huh? so i have to pull madam out of school and go through rush hour traffic to get her to the doctor’s office in about two week’s time. yay.

but wait, there’s more: oh, can we add sinus waters study to our pediatrician’s chest x-ray order? a wha?

but dutifully, i get the pediatrician’s office to fax it. i call to check it has made it. apparently, the pediatrician checked the wrong box — it’s an x-ray, not a CT scan. (oh really? you’d think the doctor would know that, the receptionist said. i guess he’d know that before i did, being a real doctor, unlike me.) and around and around we go again.

all the while, jools is glued to nick jr. because i suck as a mom.

so today, for fun (and before the wednesday afternoon carpooling duties hit me), we will go for the aforementioned x-rays.

i can hardly wait.

4) yesterday, a magical experience where a friend of BC’s insisted that she had cleared an afterschool playdate with her babysitter. pleasepleaseplease let BC take the bus home with me. pulllllease!!! i said i would drive BC over and just check with the babysitter, since we had not yet met, much less cleared anything. the babysitter was rather surprised at the idea of a playdate; we apologized and moved on.

5) while driving home from said non-playdate, lecturing BC about why i don’t just send her on the bus with any friend who insists that a playdate is ok with the adult-on-duty, i saw a police officer with a laser, and it was pointed at ME. and whoomp: there it was. 37 in a school zone. i have actually made it to my advanced age having never gotten pulled over for speeding. i’m an excellent driver, you know. and now, i’m speeding, albeit not wildly, but technically speeding nonetheless. don’t cry, mama, BC said. you can’t cry in front of a police officer.

oh girl. yes. you. can.

the officer took my license and registration and went back to his motorcycle to call it in. julian kept asking me what was going on. i muttered and muttered. leave mama alone, i heard BC bark at jools. i muttered that my husband and his brother, a police officer, were probably going to laugh at me over this one day. i pictured it in my mind’s eye: yeah, my wife is such an idiot, she doesn’t know what to do when she’s pulled over for a ticket. i muttered because it kept me from crying over my very first traffic infraction at age 40+.

the officer returned and started telling me about prepaying the ticket versus the court date, etc. etc. suddenly, a voice shrilly commanded from the backseat:

exCUSE MEEEEEEEEEE!

it was jools. oh shit. now i’ll get ticketed for some parenting violation, too: this woman has rude children. lock her up.

please officer: i’ve been home alone with two kids for a few days, and i’m a little wound. can you take pity on me and just ticket me over the car and ignore the fact that my young son doesn’t grasp the concept of decorum? pleaseohpleaseohplease?

excuse me, i said to the officer. okay, jools, what do you want?

no, i want to talk to the policeman.

doubleshitdoubleshitdoubleshit. i peered at the officer through my window. is it ok, sir?

sure. what can i do for you? he asked jools.

my uncle mikey is a police officer! he announced to the officer.

is he really? the officer asked. where is he a police officer?

in new jersey, i replied.

BC pulled the facts together: my uncle mikey is a police officer in NEW JERSEY!

well then, he replied, i’m going to give you a warning, thanks to uncle mikey. he crossed out my court date and wrote W A R N I N G over it. slow down, okay?

yes, sir. i took a deep breath as he walked away from my car. karma pulled through for me. all those times i let people in instead of cutting them off; all those times as a patient and courteous driver — it all came back to me in the guise of a kind police officer.

and it also made me thankful for my brother-in-law. my husband has only one brother. lucky for me, he happens to be a terrific person who happens to be a police officer. he risks his life daily, and he’s a person we are all very proud of in this family. and i bet he has been in this situation before and he has been kind. i just know it. he has a good heart.

i waved at the police officer as we drove past; he waved back in that serious, Adam-12 sort of way. i bet he has an insane sister-in-law, too.

last night, jools got a honkin’ big bowl of his favorite ice cream. and BC finished her solid chocolate easter bunny.

my rules, cos i’m the adult-on-duty. and i think that’s fair.

three is a magic number

Posted on March 30, 2008 by wrekehavoc

yes it is. it’s a magic number.

and in my case, things come in threes. not always fabulous ones, but three. no more, no less. you don’t have to guess.

1) BC, jools, and i were getting into the car when suddenly, i heard squeals. EWWWWWWWWWW! and NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! i looked quizzically at my kids, who are pointing to a tulip, which has not yet bloomed with flower but which has blossomed with a dead bat beneath it. no, not a mouse. not a rat. not a squirrel. not any of these woodland creatures. a B-A-T bat.

animal removal is not part of my contract.

2) woodland being the day’s leitmotif, BC, jools and i decide to take a nature walk behind BC’s school. we walk all the way up a huge hill, then down a steep one, dodging the woodland creature poop, and visiting the creek. i say visiting because i know better than to tempt fate: i will not take my kids too close to a creek when it’s chilly out and fate is laughing at me, daring me to tempt her. no one is getting soaked on my watch. nature’s no fun when you can’t interact with it, BC complains.

too bad, i counter. fate freaks me out more than nature does. i know fate is waiting for me, waiting for that perfect moment, waiting to hit that perfect beat.[note to self: bronski beat definitely qualifies as a guilty pleasure moment. be sure to annoy people with that down the road.]

we move on to the schoolyard playground and play. i am responsible for snack at brownies, and i figure we can play for a short while and then leave with just enough time to drop BC off for her scouting fun. only, too bad for me. i just give my two minute warning to the kids when jools says: uh. is there a bathroom here?

uhm. there is. when school is open. do you need a bathroom? i ask.

uh. it’s ok. i am just a little wet.

i do the mom eye roll. r e a l l y?

uh, well no.

the dude who has been day-trained since, well, since a long time, decides to let the rains fall, metaphorically speaking, just at the moment when i need to pack the kids up and rush them over to the brownie meeting where i must deliver a child and some snack. on time.

crap.

we race home, change, race back, and all’s right with the world. well, for most of the world. not the bat, who is still there, pushing up a tulip.

3) i decide nature is overrated. we are inside now, and inside we will be until tomorrow. for reasons i don’t really understand, jools decides to punch a seedling i have growing in the sunroom. the day before, he took out his little boy scissors and decided to trim some of the leaves of the seedling. leaves it didn’t need to leave. and now, he has given it a whack, something i didn’t know you could do to a tiny plant. it would just have never occurred to me.

i figure the boy is mad at nature. mother nature deposited a bat in our front yard. mother nature neglected to call him in time, so to speak. so whack, take that, mother nature! if only the boy understood: it’s not nice to fool mother nature.

i have a feeling we ought to stay indoors for the rest of the week.

sick city

Posted on March 27, 2008 by wrekehavoc

i look a little like this when i’m sick.

after weeks of little people coughing on me, trips to ~~petri dishes teeming with germs~~ the pediatrician’s office, and an evening in cold night air, i’ve come down with a dilly of a cold, preceded by a day of never-ending bloody nose. mmm. you want to come and have a cup of tea with me, i’m sure.

so i’m bummed. i was going to have lunch with some old friends, but i want to share love, not germs. i’m going to nap, but when i’m sick, i spend time just vegetating. last night, while surrounded by tissues and attempting to breathe, i watched a new show, i know my kid’s a star, starring danny bonaduce. i admit that there are times when i am addicted to reality tv like the next person; i remember the early series’ of real world on mtv (you know, before people on the show slept with other people on the show — at least, not on camera.) and i loved watching the osbournes in spite of the fact that the kids made me crazy with their spoiled behavior.

but this show pulls reality tv into a shameful place.

all parents think the sun shines out of their kids’ backsides. and now, there seems to be a serious wave of stage parents who must see their children more as a mealticket instead of as their loving offspring. young people who started out as child film, tv, or movie stars are imploding all around us: britney spears, lindsay lohan, even mccauley culkin. and yet somehow, these people overlook that. they claim their kids want this. and maybe the kids do.

you know, my kids want to eat candy all. day. long. it’s my job as a mom to say no, not just to be mean, but to teach them and protect them.

honestly, i didn’t see a talented kid in the bunch, anyway; but that didn’t stop parents from spending serious money and time on making their kid a star. except for one, all of the parents were clueless about how the business of hollywood works. and it’s abundantly clear that one parent, rocky, is pushing her star fantasy on her child. she clearly needs to be on camera and won’t let her daughter practice alone. the pressure she puts on her kid is unbelievable: let’s buy that dreamhouse.

why not just let the kid get barbie’s dreamhouse instead?

reality tv is exploitative; and if you’re a grownup and you sign up for that, then fine. but there’s something incredibly creepy about the fact that these are children. little kids who are going to be humiliated from coast to coast. it’s wrong.

i’m going to go take some cold medicine. to blot out the pain.