No Good Excuse

Yesterday I disappointed my daughter; I told her I spent 2 1/2 hours watching back episodes of Paris, My New BFF. She couldn’t understand why I wasted my time. I protested, “It’s iconic reference research,” but she wasn’t budging on her position that I was stunting my brain development. Since my daughter is 13, I have to keep on top of all the tv shows that she may be watching in the future. Of course I just want to watch Lipstick Jungle and Grey’s Anatomy, but if I don’t understand which way the girls are growing, how am I ever going to get through her teenaged years? I don’t yet allow her to watch VH1 or MTV but she wants to and it is only a matter of time until she is streaming back seasons of The Hills and DeGrassi. She caught me watching Brooke Knows Best on my ipod the other day and I didn’t even have a response other than it was free to download.

OK, now that I have proved my reasoning I am going to just offer up the truth, I was curious. It was a fun show to watch in a perversely, slightly sickening way. I was watching a bunch of young ladies and two men dye their hair, throw themselves at men, and drinking themselves into a stupor to get to be best friends with a celebrity user. I laughed at their poor judgment and groaned a few times. I don’t blame Paris Hilton, I blame the girls that really cry about being her friend. I expect some of them signed up for the show to get their faces out there, but some of them are so over –the-top crazy about Paris that it is painful to watch. The girls that attempted to stick up for themselves were quickly vetted out. I have no idea why there were there in the first place; they must have stayed at the crazy bar a little too long, because I would never pick them to be anyone’s best friend.

I am going to stay on top of the idols of the day because they do influence my daughter’s life. The more mainstream these weird shows become, the more normal it will be for our youth to keep perpetuating the insanity.