Saturday, June 03, 2006

so here i am, on this freakishly hot saturday afternoon, awake much earlier than i planned to be and the travel & living channel is on, for background noise. then, on comes this show, called Faking It. the concept of the show is interesting. the objective of it is to take someone out of their comfort zone and train them to be something they otherwise would never be for 4 weeks. at the end of it, they are judged. a previous episode has a mousy librarian training to be a bar top dancer. today's episode had a nerdy web designer train to be black belt. so i was watching the show on and off while surfing and chatting. i seem to have a real problem focusing on one thing but that's aside the point. this guy, i think his name was bob, was very happily married and equally comfortable in the other aspects of his life. however he took himself out of all that and packed to spend a month away from it all, which i must say is rather admirable. he had a few trainers to help him to pass off as a black belt. obviously there was a trainer for the karate, a drama teacher to teach him the nuances of doing a bruce lee, amongst other people. all of these people wanted him to go beyond learning the moves and making the right noises and actually change his attitude and mindset, from being a desk bound mouse to someone more garang. which is to say, someone who was totally not him. i mentioned that he was happily married. that obviously is a result of his wife being happy with him and wanting to spend the rest of her life with him, because i'm sure web designers don't earn that much nor was he particularly good looking. my point is, what if he returns to her at the end of this potentially life changing gig, a totally different man? what if, as a direct result of that, they divorce? what was meant to be entertaining [for the audience] and positive [for him] could then backfire and ruin a marriage. the big point that i am going in circles, trying to present to you, is that reality shows fuck lives up. ok, to be fair, they could enforce relationships too. but do all these people, too caught up in their quest for 15 mins of fame and maybe deeper pockets, realise the impact that would beset them even before the ink has dried when signing their privacy away? take, for example, survivor. only one contestant takes home the one mil prize money and what happens to the rest? they go home with sandfly bites up to their eyes and considerably thinner. and i'm afraid that's all there is. don't even get me started on the winner. actually, i won't cos i'm getting lazy. and on that note, i bid all of you a happy weekend!

the textual siege.

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