My Fair Lazy: One Reality Television Addict's Attempt to Discover if Not Being a Dumb Ass Is the New Black, or a Culture-Up Manifesto (25 page)

For me,
The Real World
filled a void and made me believe that I was hanging out with friends for half an hour each week. Even if we were in different places, I understood exactly where they were in their worlds. I was there, too.

The Real World: New York
is, or rather was, the utopia of reality television. The next season in Los Angeles was a fine follow-up with another totally diverse cast. They dealt with issues of violence and alcoholism and politics. And everyone still had normal names like Beth and Glen and David, and not one of them had been surgically enhanced. My passion for the show remained, but when it premiered, I’d managed to move back to campus, so I didn’t afford it the importance of season one.

I wondered if the show might lose a touch of its original magic in the third iteration, but then San Francisco premiered. There was an urgency to that season, as cast member Pedro passed away from HIV complications the night of the premiere. Conflicts were amplified by Pedro’s looming illness, and relationships were shattered when common ground could not be found. The house was rife with misunderstandings, and everyone was on edge from the first episode. If New York was the utopia of reality television, San Francisco was the perfect storm.

By the time the London came on, I was dating Fletch, who’d developed a distaste for all things MTV. He claimed that the show held no value, but I suspect he was just jealous he’d turned twenty-five and missed the opportunity to audition.

When the Miami season rolled around, I’d graduated from college and was working my first professional job. I mostly caught up with the show during the weekend marathons. Suddenly watching a bunch of college kids lying around on couches and bitching about who had moved their stuff stopped being “must-see” TV.
²¹⁶
With the exception of cast member Dan that season, the series ceased to interest me. I only kept watching because I was addicted.

I planned on quitting cold turkey when they went back to New York. I couldn’t relate to any of the cast members. Yeah, I laughed at some of their antics, but the show was intrinsically different by then. The first season was almost the next generation of
The Breakfast Club
. They were people who’d been tossed together and who’d forged uncommon friendships. Were it not for an in-school suspension, you’d never see criminal Bender and prom queen Claire making out in a file room or Claire giving basket case Allison a makeover. And in real life, you’d never find the flamboyantly gay Norman befriending Julie, the repressed Southern virgin who was so naive she assumed Heather B. was a drug dealer because she was an African-American woman with a beeper.

The further the feel of the episodes got from the originals, the less voraciously I watched. My interest waned as the number of boob jobs on the show waxed. The return to New York should have been the last season I tuned in, but then the Chicago season took up residence in spitting distance of me, and I had no choice.

And then the
Real World
went to Las Vegas . . . and that season was so distasteful that its hold on me finally broke. I’m not sure how episodes went from Julie camping out in a “Reaganville” for the night to understand the plight of a homeless family to roommate threesomes,
²¹⁷
but it did and I’d had enough.

I thought I’d successfully kicked my habit after the disease-infested, hot-tub-filled Las Vegas season in 2003, only to be sucked in by a snowy day, the appallingly amoral Denver cast, and the discovery of my cable box’s on-demand feature in 2006.

My Shame Rattle at being back on
The Real World
bandwagon was palpable.

Fortunately, it was short-lived.

I had enough self-respect to avoid Sydney, Hollywood, and Brooklyn, and when this latest season rolled around, I really believed I was home free.

So, what broke my resolve? What lured me back into the fold? What got me up on the Bunim-Murray horse again? I knew the show would never be as good as it once had been, so quality wasn’t a motivator. And I’d have laid money on the Cancún kids being the most vapid, self-indulgent group yet, wrapped in a cocoon of arrogance and ignorance and abs, none of which appealed to me.

What sucked me in this time?

Weather?

Weakness?

Want?

Nope. Welty.

Specifically
Eudora Welty
.

I’ve been diligently working my way through the classic novels list that my friend Jen put together for me. Mostly I’ve been reading them on my Kindle because classics are dirt-cheap that way.
²¹⁸

However, not long ago I found myself at the bookstore unexpectedly,
²¹⁹
and there were a few titles I hadn’t yet downloaded. I didn’t have my list with me, so I tried to remember what I didn’t have. I knew there was some book written by a woman with the initials E.W. but I couldn’t remember who or what. I asked for help.

I located a clerk and said, “Hi, I’m looking for a classic novel but I can’t for the life of me remember who wrote it. I can picture her name, though, and her initials are E.W.”

The clerk immediately pointed me in the direction of a summer reading display. “You probably want Edith Wharton or Eudora Welty.” Wow. Incidentally, I’ve yet to stump a bookstore clerk, video store employee, or wine shop cashier with what I always assume are out-of-the-ordinary requests.

(You have no idea how much this impresses me. They should probably make a reality show about this. I’d totally watch.)

Anyway, I bought both Edith Wharton and Eudora Welty and figured I had my bases covered. As it turns out, Jen meant for me to get Evelyn Waugh, who, I should mention,
isn’t even a chick
.
²²⁰

I immediately fell in love with Edith Wharton, toggling back and forth between
The Age of Innocence
on my Kindle and
The House of Mirth
in paperback. Her style is deceptively breezy because her wit is so biting. In her novels, she painstaking catalogues the messed-up social mores of the Upper East Side glitterati.

This, in Jen-speak, means I totally develop a girl crush on her.

Wharton prompts me to send gushing e-mails to my agent, saying stuff like:

The strangest thought occurred to me today—without the vicious social satire of Edith Wharton, we’d never have had a Blair Waldorf. Personality- and circumstance-wise, they seemed to have an awful lot in common

Also, I think this may be why
Gossip Girl
is so popular with you gals in publishing—it is RAMPANT with nods to all kinds of books. For example, having Lily marry Bart Bass? Lily Bart? Sound familiar? And isn’t Newland Archer awfully similar to, oh, say . . . Nate Archibald? Same kind of character, too. And Wharton loved to make plays on names; ergo, Chuck Bass becomes Chuck Bastard in a minute. Or perhaps it’s a wink to Faulkner, because Chuck Bass is a motherless boy? (She died and now his mother is a fish.)

After going on and on about my brilliant discoveries to Fletch, I mention how Kate sent me a link to a twenty-five-page comparison of a certain
Gossip Girl
episode to
The Age of Innocence
, which prompts him to wonder, “Is it that you discovered this literary connection, or is this maybe one of those cases when you’re the last horse to cross the finish line?”

While Wharton helped me get in touch with my inner cognoscente, Welty made me want to slap babies. I specifically picked up Welty’s
Delta Wedding
because I liked the title and the concept appealed to me. According to the book jacket, this is a “sometimes-riotous portrait of a Southern family.” Since there’s almost nothing I dig more than some old-fashioned Southern dysfunction, full of mint juleps and creeping vines and creepy uncles and no-necked monsters, I figured I’d take to it like a kudzu to a telephone pole.
²²¹

What I didn’t count on was my developing an urge to maim myself and others rather than read one more frigging description of spready ferns and golden-winged butterflies and skies the color of violets and snow-white moons and
can something please happen because oh, my God, enough with the descriptions stop already!
²²²

I did a Google search to see if I’m the only one to have such a visceral reaction to
Delta Wedding
. As it turns out, I’m not. The consensus is that once one gets fifty pages in, the pace quickens, but I wasn’t sure I could make it that far without kicking my pets or something. Others suggested the reader take a piece of paper and draw a family tree to keep track of the sprawling cast of characters, which . . . no. If a book requires a Visio diagram to keep everyone straight, it’s too damn complicated. And then I saw that a
Kirkus
reviewer had described little Miss Pulitzer Prize’s prose as being “lucid yet tortuous.”

Which, ha! I knew this book was fucking torture.

In short?

It’s not
me
. It’s
you
(dora).
²²³

And then . . . I opened a dictionary.

I wasn’t aware at first that tortuous means “full of twists and bends— circuitous” and not “causing one to feel tortured.” Yet I stand by my opinion.

After throwing my paperback across the room for the umpteenth time, I decided to rest my brain with a little television. That the television just so happened to be tuned into the premier episode of
The Real World: Cancún
was kismet.
²²⁴

Which is really just an extremely TORTUOUS way of saying that back in
my
real world, I agree with Stacey about the belly dancers. “Yeah, I don’t want to eat a big plate of lamb with half-naked ladies showing off the kind of six-pack abs I’ll never achieve by eating big plates of lamb. And yes, will you please recruit the troops?”

Stacey’s in charge of rounding up our friends, so it’s my job to make the reservation. When I call, the hostess asks me if I want a regular table or if I want to sit on cushions on the floor. Naturally, I choose the floor.

We arrive around seven thirty to find that other than Gina, Stacey, Tracey, and me, the place is completely empty. At seven thirty. On a Thursday. We find this vaguely troubling.

I tell the hostess we have a reservation, and she looks all pensive for a moment, like she’s not sure if she can squeeze us in. Perhaps they’re expecting a tour bus of diners at any moment? Eventually she brings us to a spot in the front window. Our table stands about a foot off the ground and is made of some kind of hammered metal. There are a few layers of Persian rugs underneath, and it’s surrounded by a dozen pillows in various shades of crimson.
²²⁵
We all stand there for a minute, quietly negotiating exactly who has the best knees and strongest back and is most able to climb up, over, around, and under to get into her place in the far corner. Tracey’s back surgery was more recent than Gina’s knee replacement, but somehow Tracey loses and gets stuck in the corner. Personally, I feel like I’m having hot flashes
²²⁶
and insist on the end, since there’s better ventilation here.

Wanting to stay as authentic as possible, I order a glass of Turkish white wine, which tastes similar to a Sutter Home 2007 sauvignon blanc. Like,
remarkably
similar.
Suspiciously
similar. I’m not sure if this is a ruse or if shitty wine is an international phenomenon.

As Stacey’s the only member of our party who’s been to Turkey, we ask her to order for the table. Which isn’t to say that I find this menu intimidating. I can totally navigate it myself. There’s lamb, lamb, more lamb, and some chicken. Certainly I understand why there’s no pork, and secretly I’m disappointed there’s no turkey. I realize turkeys probably aren’t indigenous to Turkey, and yet a part of me wishes I could say I had Turkish turkey.

Come on. It’s funny.
²²⁷

Regardless, I’m now a huge number-one-fan-with-a-big-foam-finger of Mediterranean food, and I’m learning that places like Turkey and Palestine and Israel have a ton of overlap in their cuisines, if not in ideology. They all pretty much feature the same kinds of dishes with slightly different labels, which makes me wonder if the whole Middle East schism isn’t some ancient, elaborate “tastes great” versus “less filling” scenario gone terribly awry.

We get a big sampler platter of hummus, stuffed grape leaves, olives and feta, and tabouleh, which is a finely chopped salad of mint, parsley, onion, tomato, and cracked wheat. I’m normally fussy about tabouleh because sometimes the wheat has the consistency of tiny rocks, and I feel like I’m eating sand.

We also get a plate of manti, a Turkish ravioli, filled with meat, tossed in tomato sauce, and drizzled with yogurt. Stacey said in Istanbul the manti were teeny—smaller than a dime—but these are the size of a quarter. Everyone at the table pronounces them a tad Chef Boyardee. Despite all my recent culinary education, that’s still not necessarily a bad thing in my book.

The service is surprisingly slow considering we’re the only ones here. Our dinner takes forever to arrive, and when it does, it’s only adequate. The
idea
of the components appeals—the kebab format, the way the vegetables are grilled, the spice blends—but I’m unimpressed with the execution. It’s still palatable, though, so I imagine if I were tasting well-made Turkish food in a restaurant that wasn’t completely deserted, I’d go crazy for it.

The accommodations, however, are less than . . . accommodating.

“Is anyone else’s ass sweating?” I ask.

“Those etiquette lessons are really paying off, eh, Jen?” Stacey teases me.

“Seriously, is anyone else getting boiling hot sitting on all these damn rugs?” I wonder.