I’m Not a Cat Lady

I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, Day 4: Janice the Crazy Old Aunt

 

Well, ratings were down a whopping 43 percent last night, but there was some basketball game or other on ABC so apparently it doesn’t really count. Moving on: We open with a preview of the big Heidi and Spencer Dilemma. LouDi self-importantly confessionals, “I didn’t want to send a message that you can quit and quit and quit, act like a jerk and be given a second chance.” Isn’t it, like, a fourth chance at this point? Ange threatens to leave if they come back. Then, we have the requisite recap of last night.

And finally: Hi there, it’s Myleene in a bright yellow frock and Damien in a teal shirt. “Green’s your color,” she flirts. They remind us that either J-Dick, Frangie or Torrie are out tonight. They also remind us that the Wastrels want to come back, in case we weren’t paying attention 30 seconds ago. We flash back to footage we’ve seen a dozen times already of the two of them lying through their teeth about how they and the devil got it so wrong last time and how repentant they are. At this point it’s transparent that network strings are being pulled to keep them on the show—Heidi’s in all the promos  dangling from a harness in her stilettos, can’t waste those!—plus, MTV will be airing a marathon of all the episodes so far this Sunday. Aha. Deals have been made, yo. This is business.

The campmates deliberate. J-Dick tells us she wants them back because she thinks she’s the only person in the universe who could reform Spencer. We already knew she was delusional, but really. “They were horrible people,” argues Ange. “They’re not horrible people, they just made some horrible decisions while they were here,” rationalizes Sangie, who’s gone tribal with some black markings on his cheeks. Long Tall points out that Heidi is a good competitor and the ladies need all the help they can get. Daniel the Papa Bear suggests that they let them back in but set “boundaries.” LouDi argues there’s no point in that because Spencer has already declared he's The Villain. Frange points out—quite rightly!—that it’s unfair to the others: “They’re taking up space from people who really wanted to be here, who’ve been working from Day One, Minute One.” “It’s been 2 days,” LouDi pipes up. “Those two days have been our days in the jungle,” argues Frange. Wait a minute. According to my calendar, we’re at Day 4. What’s going on here?

Long Tall tells us he likes Spencer because he reminds him of P Diddy. Way to name drop. And besides, that’s a good thing?

Next, we find out that all the girls have a crush on Papa Bear. He’s helpful with the chores. While washing the dishes, he and Bebe have a little bitch about Torrie’s and J-Dick’s nonexistent work ethic. Cut to J-Dick lying provocatively on her side making cow eyes at Papa Bear. She asks him if he’s bored. “I’m never bored, he says. J-Dick’s all, Omigod, me too! Flutter flutter. The irony flies over her head.

Flashback to Papa Bear’s surprise arrival and everybody going ooooooh! We just saw this footage in the opening recap! Do we really need to go over it again? Clearly, the producers figure that Kids Today are watching this show while twittering and facebooking and sexting and ipoding and probably getting high and stoned all at the same time, so they have to keep going back over every little detail.

Now we get a montage of J-Dick hocking loogies all over camp. “Something is definitely dying inside of Janice’s chest…” begins Ange, “…and I think it’s something from the Studio 54 days,” finishes Frange. These two kill me. We are treated to scene after scene of J-Dick hoisting up the material and letting it fly. It is horrible. Sweet Torrie feels sorry for her because she’s sick and “if she needs to get it out, she needs to get it out,” but when she dares to broach the subject, J-Dick chews off her head:  “We’re camping, Torrie! That’s what people do when they camp!” Frange isn’t buying it, telling us that even natives of the rain forest would say “no, mmmm-mmm, you got to go over there.” She wants to build some Section 8 housing for J-Dick and her grossness. Ha!

Oh my eyes! Dawg saunters into camp completely shirtless, a walking sack of oatmeal. It’s time for the next food challenge. Papa Bear and Long Tall go in against Bebe and Torrie. They line up for the rules. I always thought Daniel Baldwin was tall, but standing next to Long Tall he looks about as stately as Gimli the Middle-earth Dwarf. The trial involves crawling through a swamp underneath a bamboo grid and retrieving some spongy puzzle pieces. It’s pretty boring so they recap the hell out of it while it’s happening. Instant recap! For all you brain-challenged viewers at home.

Back at camp Long Tall congratulates himself for using the smack talk and winning again. He declares that “Patti and Torrie are gamers, you can just send the other three home.” Back to Damien and Myleen, who invite us to vote for one man and one woman to go head to head in a food trial next week. “Pick wisely, the girls need to eat, come on the sisterhood!” Myleene cheers. Nice thought, Myleene, but dream on. We’re given a demonstration of the trial, a Houdini number involving a water tank with locks and chains and–yes!—slimy critters. We can’t see who the demonstration model is in there but it looks like J-Dick. Has this already been recorded? Did she volunteer earlier to do a walk through? Damn I'm confused.

Back at camp, oh no, there’s a jungle thief. Ange can’t find her shower kit with her hair pick in it. God knows you don’t want to deprive a sister of her pick. She finds it in J-Dick’s pack. She knew it. “Yep, bitch got my shit.” The whole camp is up in arms, everybody’s missing something. Torrie’s lost hair ties, a pair of underwear  and her towel. Cut to J-Dick in the shower, oblivious, washing her weave and hair. Then, Long Tall: Who took my pillow? Cut to J-Dick sleeping, oblivious, on Long Tall’s pillow. He ain’t happy. “People’s skin is just getting thinner and thinner and thinner,” Frange explains, “and Janice is just starting to pop some people.”

Bebe sits Long Tall down to impart some worldly advice. She tells him her husband ran against a woman like J-Dick once. Here’s what you have to do with a woman like that: Roll your eyes and call her a crazy old aunt. Crazy Old Aunt Janice. Sounds like good politics to me!

Now, a weepy montage. All four women on the chopping block tell us one by one how much they love it there, how much they’ve learned about themselves, and how they’ve all gotten so close over these two jungle days. A piano plinky-plonks in the background. Everybody gets farklempt.

We’re live. Myleene and Damien head into camp with the results. American has voted. But first: LouDi, which woman do you think should leave? None of them, says LouDi, because we’re family and “I’m wacky Uncle Lou.” Nice self-image there, Lou. Sangie tells us that he’s been in the jungle” a very very very long time, so this is just an extension of my life.” Nobody asks him to elaborate on this bizarre statement, we just move right along. Bebe keeps tugging on her ear like Carol Burnett every time the camera’s on her. Time for the results. J-Dick announces, for no apparent reason, “I’ve gone insane.” Thanks for clarifying. Then she’s told she’s safe. “Oh maaaan!” Frange is safe. Torrie and Ange are not.

We go back to the last dinner from the night before. The continuity of this show is, as Long Tall would say, wack. They discuss the Wastrels again and talk about how they’ve all bonded like a family. Long Tall breaks it down for us: Lou’s the oldest brother, Daniel’s the old uncle. Janice is the loopy auntie, Sanjaya’s still young (so what is he, cousin? nephew?),  Frangela are the funny aunties from the other side of the family, Patti is the mother, he’s the cook, Torrie’s the bombshell, and Dawg is the white hip-hop kid. You know, because we all have one.

Frange guess that it’s going to be one of them who gets eliminated. A tree frog is pelted by a raindrop. The public has decided that the very first celebrity to leave the jungle is: Ange. Bye Ange! We hardly knew ye. J-Dick bellows: “No! No! No!” Was she hoping it would be Torrie? We’re treated to another demo of the Houdini challenge and invited to text our picks. As they read the text numbers out, Janice rasps, “Not Janice!” I pick up my phone and text: Janice.

photo courtesy of NBC

Sour Milk

Yesterday, I finally went to see Milk, and it made me remember why I never go to the movies anymore. You've had this conversation, right? How you haven't gone to see a movie for ages and you're not sure why... You think maybe it's because you're so busy these days you can never block out the time, or maybe the movies have become so expensive that you think twice or three times before committing to go, or just that the movie you want to see always seems to playing a bit too early or too late to fit in with your schedule that particular day.

I know, for me, it's a combination of all of the above. And then I finally got it together to get my ass to a movie theater, and the real reason I don't go as often as I should came back to me in a rush. It's the people. The general movie-going public is a nightmare.

Last night, in a chock-full theater, I got stuck next to two ladies somewhere in their upper sixties. I'm guessing, I didn't look at them too closely when they arrived—late—and grabbed the last two remaining seats in the room. And they proceeded to ruin the whole movie for me. They were fine for the first 45 minutes, apart from some too-loud exchanges during the opening sequence—I think these broads were there at the time, so there were barks of recognition during the Castro-Back-in-the-Day montage.

But the hell began when they finished the popcorn. After placing the bag on the floor, the lady next to me began methodically to reach down, rummage around the bag for the leftover dried kernels, and, with her arm raised way high in the air, drop them into her mouth from her fingers. And then she crunched them with her mouth open. It sounded like someone smashing a sack of rocks against a wall. It was disgusting. She did this over and over again, slowly, deliberately and with great relish, crunching and cracking and smacking her lips, for about an hour, taking a short break now and then to lure me into a false sense of relief, only to lurch forward and start all over again.

It was so vile and distracting, I wanted to lean right over her, grab the bag and shake out the kernels all over her head. During particularly violent smacks and crunches I started making little noises like "Oh dear!" or "Oh my God!" and looking straight at her, but no, she was too far gone in her euphoric mastications to notice.

Towards the end of the film, she started reacting to the dramatic foreshadowing of Harvey's ultimate demise with a staccato outbursts of "Ah, ah, ah!" and announcing three times to her friend "Uh oh, this is when it happens!" in the later scenes with Dan White. I was ready to lose it and shushed her right in her face, which she seemed to ignore. Then she and her friend started openly discussing the action during the film's penultimate, climactic scene, and I that was it: I hollered, "Ladies be quiet for God's sake I mean it!"

They cowered. And they shut the hell up. But that was it, too late, the movie was ruined. I have no idea if it's as good as everybody says it is. I know Sean Penn nailed the mannerisms and turned in a sensitive, sympathetic performance, and Emile Hirsch was, what can I say, fabulous. But I was never really able to get into it. Thanks, bitches!

So WHAT?

There’s something that’s been bothering me for a really long time now, and it’s about time I shared.

It’s the way everybody has started using the word so. They’re using it all the time. People of all ages, from coast to coast, north to south, overuse this word, but it is especially prevalent in among the under-thirtysomethings, i.e., Generation MySpace.

Spacers are using the word so instead of um or y’know and sometimes but, and what’s even worse, it always comes out in a really flat note an octave or two lower than the rest of the sentence. It makes everyone sound vaguely Chinese. 

It can be delivered in a long, barnyard sound, with extra syllables thrown in--seeeyyoooowwwwww--or a short, sharp yelp, like an airhorn blast, or Homer Simpson’s “D’oh!”

So gets arbitrarily tacked onto the end of a sentence; used to string sentences together;  sometimes it is the sentence. You’ll hear it bleat from the sticky glossed lips of young women everywhere yabbering vacantly on their cell phones. “Sooooo. Yeah, where are we meeting later?” “I just got out of work, so.” It’s used to fill in a void, to provide  a declarative end to an uptalker’s statement (“I don’t think he’s going to show up? So...”). It can suggest an apology, a challenge, or a studied nonchalance. Whenever someone on the street is coming towards me yakking on their cellphone, I place a silent bet with myself that just as just as they pass by, they’ll say it. And about 9 out of 10 times they do! Are they doing it on purpose? Am I causing it? I’m not so sure anymore. 

I hear it absolutely everywhere. I’m walking down the street and this guy behind me says to his friend, “I like Shake Shack but there’s usually a wait but it’s worth going online to check first, so.” I’m  at the hair salon and I hear a hairdresser instruct his client, “Just shampoo and leave it in, you don’t really have the kind of hair that needs layered conditioning, so.” 

And I just want to scream, “So WHAT???”

It’s driving me a little bit crazy, in case you haven’t noticed. In fact, it’s been tweaking my nerves for well over a year. I’ve always been sensitive to other people’s verbal tics. Like, I once knew a guy who ended all his sentences with “… but still.” As in, “I thought he was going to call me at 3, but still.” And this girl who had a stutter, so used to run up to every sentence with “But though...” Sometimes she’d get stuck: “But though, but though, but though...” God bless ’er, she couldn’t help it. But there was this other girl with a broad, flat California accent who had a way of ending “-ing” words with “-een”. Once she listed all the activities she was looking forward to in an upcoming action-packed vacation: “We’re going hikeen and fisheen and bikeen and golfeen and horse-back rideen and swimmeen and kayakeen…” I had to stop being friends with her, it was so annoying.

Now I am being driven crazy every day by this irritating Tourette’s-like tic that the whole world seems to have adopted. I hear the superfluous so whenever people on reality shows are talking to camera. I hear it on the radio and TV news whenever people are being interviewed. I hear it said by the British—seeewww; the Australians—soooooiiee; the French, the Arabs, the Pakistanis. Everybody has their own unique little phonetic flourish. I’ve even heard it scripted into commercials, movies and TV shows. If you want a classic example, check out this clip from The Office, when David Brent makes an ass of himself with The Dance. See if you can count the sos.

And I love The Office. But still... But though... It’s sooooo annoyeen!!

UPDATE: Now this is a perfect example. I love Emily Gould,  I really enjoy her writing on gawker. As this clip started I thought, God I hope she doesn’t say it. We get three-quarters of the way through, no so. And then, ack! Out it comes. For no reason. It didn’t need to be there.

Can’t everybody stop? Pretty please?