Virtue is its Own Reward

Quick story - we were walking home from school yesterday and in front of the school we found an earring. It had dangling mother-of-pearl circles and it was obvious it was an earring someone would miss. My daughter was thrilled at finding it, but I explained to her that it looked special and that someone was probably looking for it. She could see my point and was a little disappointed, but agreed that someone must really love the earring so we should go to the office and leave it with Lost & Found.

So she gave it to the school secretary, who congratulated her for being honest and turning it in. She told her it was great that she did the right thing, and filled out a "wonderful ticket" - put her name in a jar for a drawing at the end of the week.

Typically, my daughter didn't say a word through all of this, just looked wide-eyed. Then we left and started walking home again. Before we'd left the block, she found a broken rubber band on the sidewalk and said, "Mom, it looks like somebody lost their treasure! We better go turn it in." On the way home we found lots of this type of "treasure" - a candy wrapper, a flower petal... By the time we got home my pockets were crackling with treasure. Those ten blocks between school and home got a nice cleanup!

I titled this anecdote "Virtue is its Own Reward," which seems odd if you consider that Wini was actually rewarded with a Wonderful Ticket. But I didn't mean her, I meant me. It's not like I went through some moral quandry about returning the earring, but I certainly reaped the reward of seeing Wini experience that feeling of having done a good deed.

The Next Stop on the Cheesy Reality Show Monorail

Big Brother is wrapping up, but the cheesy silliness of America's Next Top Model is already calling. I emailed my contact at UPN to ask if we can conduct interviews this cycle, and she enthusiastically responded that she remembered me and already had me on her list. It's nice to be remembered. The girl (Chelsea) sounds about thirteen years old on the phone; I picture her as fresh out of college with a Communications degree assigned to the lowest press contact position on the totem pole. It's not like the journalists are going to be trying to sneak in hardball questions.

Meanwhile, it's almost certain that Ivette or Maggie will win hundreds of thousands of dollars. Which is worse, the nurse who enjoys watching a patient "code" (i.e., go into cardiac arrest and die) or the young, immature Cubana who lives in her own insular existence of her shallow friends and their petty concerns?

What can I say about Maggie? She has vile personal habits, such as peeing on the toilet seat and not wiping it off for the next person. And yet, she doesn't feel comfortable using the same toilet as her fellow houseguests because they have germs. She says she's a nurse, but advises Ivette to put mayonaise on her burn. She thinks aspirin is evil. She thinks Janelle was lying about playing the flute of all things. She's got a lot to say about the people she hates, yet doesn't stand up for her own teammates when push comes to shove. In a conversation about the tragedy of Waco and the innocent children who were forced to live there as the offspring of cult members, she shrugged off their firey deaths, saying they were all "inbreeds" anyway. She isn't looking forward to going back to her job because she hates most of her patients, and is tired of "shoveling shit out of assholes." Oh, and her language is filthy; she routinely calls Janelle the C-word and refers to the bathroom as "the shitter." Lovely.

And then there's Ivette, who has turned out to be the most oddly intense houseguest since that guy who held a knife to another houseguest's throat. Ivette - well, this girl feels things deeply. Unfortunately, she thinks that gives her an excuse to act on every emotion that crosses that tiny brain of hers. Someone eats the ice cream before she gets to it? She's ready to burn the house down. She leaves her lotion in the bathroom and frets incessantly that one of the evil ones will notice it sitting there and tamper with it. She wins POV, and runs around the yard screaming "el tres final" and making an ass of herself humping the lounge chair cushions. When April tells her she's offended that Ivette would celebrate what amounts to April's demise (which is a bit snotty of April if you ask me - Ivette won fair and square), Ivette mopes, whines, and cries for hours. Yes, they had a verbal blowout, and Ivette can yap a mile a minute - but it was the endless aftermath of whining that truly defined Ivette as someone who just cannot see herself as having done something wrong.
What I really hate about Ivette, though, is her bigoted views about Kaysar. At her insistence, Kaysar sat down with her and discussed her problem with him. She told him that he didn't belong in the Big Brother house because he is devoutly religious. I'll spare you her arguments, but rest assured that they made no sense. I'm appalled that anyone growing up in the United States - which was founded on the principles of religious freedom - would espouse such a view. Add to her angry descriptions of Kaysar as, oh, a camel jockey would be the nicest epithet she liked to throw around, and you've got one ugly person. She and Eric had this bigotry in common; they liked to sit around and trash Kaysar, talk about burning the Koran, calling him Saddam and Osama. What's especially galling is that Kaysar had already shared one night in the house that his uncle had been killed by Saddam Hussein in a particularly horrific manner. The Republican Guard left his body on their doorstep with a bill pinned to his jacket for the cost of the bullet that killed him. So nicknaming him after his uncle's killer takes a special kind of cold hardedness that I'm glad I've never encountered in real life. Kudos (I guess) to BB for flushing out the worst cockroaches of humanity imaginable on this season of Big Brother.

Nearing the End

It's so depressing to have Howie leave the Big Brother house. I tried to think of some creative questions that would get past the CBS censors and provoke some sort of genuine response for a change. Beau's interview was crap; he skipped over his own hypocrisy and gave me snippy answers because he caught on to my disapproving vibe. I think Beau is one of the hamsters who thought that what happened in HOH, stayed in HOH. Wrong! The cameras were watching when Beau purposely flashed his teammates in the shower. Gah! I wish I hadn't been watching that night.


I've been in situations before where people band together against a common enemy. I've been in sticky roommate situations; I've lived in coed dorms and in student groups abroad. I have never, ever seen a group of people descend into such vile trash talk as this year's "Friendship." Not only do they tear down everyone in the house not on their team, the instant one of them leaves the room for a bottle of water they get their jabs in at their own teammate. They trust each other so little that they sleep together in a group every night, even if it means sleeping on the floor when there are a dozen beds to choose from. Deep down, each one knows they are untrustworthy...so they take no chances with letting one of their own be alone too long with the enemy.

I can't figure how they can stand each other. As bad as they are now, they were worse in the beginning, when Kaysar was the subject of their constant hatred. At least with Janelle, they hate her for ridiculous reasons like the fact that she's put on a few pounds and still looks like a drop-dead gorgeous leggy blonde. When Kaysar was still around, they mocked his religion. April flat-out told the others the praying was an act so that Kaysar could get more screen time - which is a perfect example of projecting her own inner motives onto someone else.

Ivette is confrontational, so she told Kaysar to his face that he didn't belong in the BB house because he is religious. It floors me that someone in this country can espouse that type of discriminatory views one moment and insist that Kaysar doesn't respect women the next. We never got an explanation as to how Ivette came up with her theory that Kaysar disrespects women, but that was the one statement that really seemed to get under his skin. Rational, respectable people don't like being told they are sexist bigots, Ivette. Meanwhile, what gives a lesbian holding a Catholic rosary the right to say someone else doesn't belong in the game because they respect their religion more than she respects her own? It's an argument so irrational and offensive it defies understanding. I can't wait to call her out on this when she's evicted - hopefully this week!