My resolution not to be a pregnancy blogger fails to apply on Twitter.
- Stupid TV; last week Miranda on SATC was as pregnant as me, and now she’s sporting a basketball belly. #hapu #
- Still unclear as to why I volunteered to teach a twice-weekly night class for the next three weeks. #
- If only midwives were like fairies in Enid Blyton and could be found just beyond the garden gate, ready and waiting. #
- Thank you all for midwifery advice and DMs. I have a search system but it is proceeding slowly, accustomed as I am to DMing and emailing. #
- Work email keeps telling me my mailbox is over its size limit. Time for some fat acceptance, work email! #electronichoarder #
- Does being pregnant make one a prude? Colleague was telling story of a friend’s recent saucy adventures & I asked him to stop. #notlikeme #
- Rewrote my lecture on the figure of the film gangster. Always puts me in a good humour, that topic. #
- The bean doesn’t like Michael Bay: at home after being overwhelmed with nausea 1/2hr into new Transformers flick. Stupid rapid-fire cuts. #
- We had our first scan this morning. That was quite an experience. The words “live pregnancy” sounded both weird and good. #
- Neither @knedd nor I have spied any time-travelling assassins, so it looks like the baby won’t be the next Hitler. Still, we remain alert. #
- Judge Judy-Keyboard Cat-Rhetorical Question mashup via @accordionguy: http://bit.ly/Bgdbo #
- It is my considered opinion as a scholar that Demetri Martin is not only amusing, but also looks good in a pair o’ jeans. #
- Man, The Bachelor just shamed me out by turning “I” into a first-person possessive: “Stephanie and I’s relationship”. #
- Also, why do people say “myself” when they mean “me”? #
- Also, these contestants seem to have pretty low expectations of how a dude should treat them. He has to be nice and look cute. #
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Ha, yes, we saw Demetri followed by The Bachelor too. What an ace combination.
Stephanie’s glassily frozen forehead frightens me and very possibly Jason too. Perhaps that’s why he lost his grammar grip, although I suspect I am being too charitable.
I think the I and myself thing are related: people seem to think I is more highfaluting than me, and the same with myself. Perhaps it’s as a result of being scolded for saying “Jason and me live in Seattle” as a child. Ergo, me: horrible grammatical pileup. I and myself: classy and aristocratic.
There seems a strange disconnection on The Bachelor between the contestants’ (and the bachelor’s) much-avowed desire for passionate love and a settled life and the strange, almost glacial way they interact with each other. While I haven’t followed every series, only occasionally do I recall something like televisual chemistry between the characters.
The other thing that intrigues me is the way in which a revelation of having been married before is still generally treated as a major upset within the drama. I guess it’s something of a counter-narrative to the version of courtly love that’s being peddled.
Yes, divorce is certainly a screeching needle across the record of Happily Ever After. Being the States, I suspect there also might be a religious aspect to the horror of it all.
The thing I find most disquieting is the way the girls only ever seem to be concerned with how good they’ll be for Jason. Whether he’ll be good for them never seems to enter into it. (Or maybe all they need is for him to be cute, as you mentioned earlier.) This is particularly worrying given that Jason has a child. Stepparenting is (I hear) bloody hard work at the best of times and not the skipping across a beach hand in hand and the kissing of the angelic sleeping face the girls seems to think, if they think about it at all.
And yes, all the interaction is so codified. They seem to select the most anodyne attitudes possible and repeat them ad nauseum. Jason is so cute. I adore children and am so ready to leave the (Sodom and Gomorrah of) single life behind. Can’t wait to meet Ty. Love Seattle. Not surprising, I suppose, since any hint of dissension or discontent sees them swiftly booted out the door. But of course that makes the search for any hint of anything real peeping through all the more rewarding.
The religious element is interesting. It may be a reflection of the circles in which I move, but no-one I know would say “I pray that…” in relation to their wishes or their wishes for me without qualifying it first (unless they were evangelising me). In programmes like this it seems to be par for the course.
There is a theme I think in relationship reality TV of the contestants not being able or willing to speak up about what they want. In Rock of Bus, for example, one contestant didn’t want to get up on stage with Bret Michaels and some strippers and pole-dance because she knew her children would be seeing some of the show later. Bret went into quite a sulk about this, complaining that she was unable to relax or have fun.
It probably helps to be the secondary caregiver or non-custodial parent on reality TV. And I agree with you–watching for the moment when the cracks appear in the codified behaviour is what gives these shows their crack-like quality.
The religious element is interesting. It may be a reflection of the circles in which I move, but no-one I know would say “I pray that…” in relation to their wishes or their wishes for me without qualifying it first (unless they were evangelising me). In programmes like this it seems to be par for the course.
In so many cases in US programming (and writing and etc) the default assumption is that everyone involved is religious, and considering the statistics that’s not unreasonable. Religious within strict bounds, of course. There was a lovely moment on a home visit on the last Bachelor when one of candidates owned up in front of the bachelor’s family to being Baha’i. If she’d pulled a chicken out of her handbag and speared it through the heart with an inverted crucifix they couldn’t have been more horrified (despite their glassy smiles).
I remember the Baha’i revelation! I don’t think the family had heard of that faith at all. You knew that + being divorced was the nail in the coffin for her, whereas the winner (was it Tessa) had (if I recall correctly) a Catholic mum.
I contributed–unintentionally and without any malice–to the fragmenting of a dog breed mailing list to which I used to belong some years ago by asking people to keep the tone secular and not to include stories about faith or “pray for the troops”-type posts, unless specifically related to our dogs (praying after vet surgery, for example). I think I caused quite a bit of offence on the mostly-American-member list, which was not my aim. For some of my fellow members, there really didn’t seem to be a way of writing online that didn’t involve discussing ideas through a filter of personal faith. I found it taxing.
Oops! I find the most trying aspect the automatic conflation in so many cases of have no religious belief with have no moral code. Although I’m not overfond of the name the Brights chose, I very much sympathise with their mission to disentangle a naturalistic worldview from the question of morality.
Yes, and in the dualistic world-view of evangelical Christianity it really is Jesus & the angels or the speared chicken & crucifix. I’ve seen a similar reaction locally when finding out someone is a Muslim (although it’s usually being a Muslim and an immigrant, as opposed to the Muslim families who’ve been in the neighbourhood for sixty years).
Although I suspect that’s less a Manichean-stylee religious viewpoint and more the equally tiresome conflation of Muslim with terrorist. Presumably if the locals haven’t got around to jihad in sixty years they’re unlikely to start, whereas the new ones Need To Be Watched.
There are certainly a few Muslim student hotbeds around my workplace, but they are hotbeds of talking about cars, socialising and the world’s most beautiful women.
Dangerously seditious stuff.