My kids are weird.
Whereas most children their age spend their uncommitted time
engaged in such useful pursuits as texting, playing video games, or listening
to music, mine watch television. Which doesn’t seem so weird unless you consider what they’re watching.
Normal kids between roughly six and fourteen years of age
tend to gravitate toward the panoply of programming offered by Disney and Nickelodeon
– your typical mindless drivel which appeals to the automobile restricted
segment of the kid population and includes such favorites as Austin and Ally, iCarly,
and Big Time Rush.
Conversely, I routinely find my two daughters raptly engaged
in the various reality-based programs featured on the Food Network and
HGTV. As a concerned parent, I want to
know what my children are watching.
After all, I don’t want them exposed to unhealthy, age-inappropriate
ideas concerning home décor, or worse, have them begin making food choices
ill-suited to my wife’s culinary skills.
As a consequence, I often find myself watching these shows along with
them.
The cooking programs aren’t of great concern in that my
daughters have such blasé, unadventurous palettes that they are disinclined to sample
any dish which doesn’t contain their two favorite ingredients – peanut butter
and jelly. And while many of the home
improvement and real estate oriented programs are benign, I do have concerns
about certain of the HGTV offerings such as Million Dollar Rooms, Amazing Water
Homes, and Extreme Homes.
Each of these tends to feature an insanely wealthy couple
searching for their own personal Shangri-La.
Less intriguing to me than the bizarre dwellings, however, are the
equally odd couples who own or want to buy them. The duos often feature a troll of a man who
has used his extraordinary wealth to attract a much younger woman way out of
his league on the attractiveness scale.
For the most part, the women have the intellect of an eggplant and are
doing all they can to spend their much older husband’s fortune before he dies
and the prenuptial agreement kicks in.
These men will do almost anything to keep their partners
happy because they know they have no other shot at an intimate relationship
with a woman of equal caliber or such a high social security number. As a result, they get towed around by the
nose, looking as clever as cardboard, while their women commiserate with the
real estate agent over the insufficient size of the indoor pool, the ill-conceived
heliport, and the awkward position of the afternoon sun as it strikes the
life-size statue of Zeus.
It’s no wonder these unlikely bedfellows are attracted to
homes matching their quirks in that most of the featured dwellings seem to have
been designed by eccentric lunatics with no budgetary constraints and certainly
no sense of proportion or style. Can we truly
consider a person sane who is desirous of living on an island, has enough money
to buy Guam, but instead chooses to build his dream home on a flat patch of
dirt in Oklahoma City which he then surrounds with a moat?
Enough is enough! I’m left with no choice but to insist that my kids start watching SpongeBob, Finneas and Ferb, or Alien Surf Girls – anything that won’t warp their suggestible minds and distort their expectations of normalcy. In the meantime, I’m off to catch the new episode of Dog with a Blog. Pets are so brilliant these days!
