In which a slightly shameful fifty percent of the week’s tweets are live-tweeting The Bachelor.
- It has been a very quiet weekend for 50% of the home front, while poor @knedd has been out working Saturday and Sunday. #
- Yesterday’s symptoms either harmless or impending miscarriage. Blood test said the former, but still a nerve-wracking time. #
- This week my brain & time are overrun with more contact hours. Someone’s got to teach international students about historical modernity … #
- Once again, the evening’s zoning-out duties are done by 66% of the household (hat-tip @Eric_Olthwaite for correction of figures). #
- Must also praise lovely office mates for taking my mood-swings in their strides and sending me texts and making hot drinks. Biz as usual. #
- Is the Flavor Flav clock of immunity yours to keep for ever? #
- I will tell you the truth. The nausea of my early pregnancy is overshadowed by the feeling of wellbeing that follows my giving up alcohol. #
- Weatherston “spent nearly two hours in the witness box today, but…covered only his early life, education, and career.” http://bit.ly/zCC9q #
- I guess if he really is a narcissist then this is akin to a dream come true. Uggggghhh: http://bit.ly/5xclP #
- Molly seems to be seeking the current approval of her parents for past mistakes #thebachelor #
- Occurs to me that #thebachelor is more or less a slice of [TV] upper-upper-middle-class Americana. #
- Naomi’s dad is a Christian and her mum is a new-ager. David Bain sez, don’t pick her, #thebachelor. #
- “How do you propose to a girl if you can’t meet her parents?” Reminds me of Mindy, Rock of Bus: “I’ve never even been engaged!” #thebachelor #
- There he is again with the possessive subject pronoun: “Gillian and I’s”. Also someone’s dad said, “and mine’s”. #thebachelor #
- I do approve the use of “women” as opposed to “ladies”. #thebachelor #
- Good lord, next week they are going to New Zealand. Don’t think they’re going to the cities, but. #thebachelor #
- Have been composing, with @knedd, family-friendly lyrics to Killing in the Name of. Having some success with Helping in the Kitchen. #
- Also, cluck cluck I won’t do what you tell me and Picking Up My Toys Now. #ratm #
- Watching 色，戒. Tony Leung is surprisingly swarthy. #
- Have been laughing at this all day: http://bit.ly/UgSFQ #
- Very pleased to learn upon waking that @sockington is okay. #
Powered by Twitter Tools.
DandyID
Blogger
Flickr
last.fm
YouTube
Twitter
Vimeo
Twitpic
Tumblr
Facebook Pages
Linkedin
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Jason gets the prize this week for the sarcastic gloss he put on “Today I learned that Hector loves Jesus” and his hilarious dove eulogy. At last, the human peeking through the bachelorly mask. But the mask was firmly in place when Naomi’s mother asked him what he thought about reincarnation. You could almost have believed his polite response rather than his actual thought of “Wackos! Wackos! Reverse! Reverse!”
Actually, though, it’s starting to make me sad. Gillian’s story of a family profoundly affected by her mother’s depression; Molly’s anxiety to please her parents; Naomi’s obvious scars from her parents’ divorce; Melissa’s history of horrible boyfriends showing her low self-esteem. I don’t want to laugh at them any more.
Mmm, Tony Leung. Teh yum.
I wondered initially whether Naomi’s family were playing up their Californian-ness for the cameras, but I think that really was them. Each of the women had a slightly amplified or challenging family situation, enough to be outwardly normal but cause sufficient internal stress that going on a reality show to find love might seem like a good idea.
Visiting a potential partner’s family to confirm your impression of the person seems to me back-to-front thinking. You could cheer for Naomi’s normalcy in the face of her family but instead she got rejected.
Molly’s family and their hat box filled me with dismay and alarm.
I’d wondered about the families contributing to the decision to look for love on TV too, although I wasn’t sure after pondering whether their situations are in fact worse than most people’s. It’s certainly presented as a fairly unremarkable thing to do, with Melissa’s parents’ refusal to participate instead cast as insanely reclusive. It seemed an odd thing to me for Jason to expect Melissa’s friends all to have a relationship with her parents: is that normal? I can see it if she’d known them since they were at school, I suppose.
I’d written something about Molly’s family but deleted it as it made things rather random. I found the golf and the country club and the “conservative dad” positively terrifying. The determined wackiness of the hats failed to conceal the cold steel of a bunch of Bush voters. I can’t actually see that Molly and Jason have much in common and can only put her continued survival down to her prettiness.
It must have been infuriating for Naomi to hear platitudes about her not being ready despite her avowals to the contrary, especially when it seemed pretty clear that that wasn’t the actual reason at all. I think Jason was particularly spooked by her desire to adopt: his non-verbal reaction when she first mentioned it was hardly positive. Saying that on TV, though, would hardly have been politic.