In which I actually have five minutes to write something, so I expound on massive douchebags.

Somewhere between catching up on Top Chef and watching this season of Project Runway, and rewatching the first season of Veronica Mars, I've been reflecting lately on what I like and dislike about douchebags in reality television and in fictional programming.

The most obvious difference between douchebags on reality TV shows and fictional programming, quite obviously, is that one is real (under a loose definition of "real," of course) and one is not. It makes it a lot more difficult to let asshatted behavior fly out of a person who, at the end of the day, has to go through life with their own recorded douchey behavior saved on neatly produced forty-minute stretches for people to reflect back on.

Look at Jason on this season of Project Runway. Guy's a dick. We don't even have to argue that. He's a jerk, and he can't make a friend to save his life, and he gives off the impression of being mildly homophobic (at the very least) in an industry that's chock full of gay guys, and he's bad at his damn job to boot. AND he's a sore loser. While he was being Not There To Make Friends, he's basically violently screwing his entire CV. And no matter what the quality of the most recent seasons may have been or not been, it's just fucking repugnant to watch someone get a chance to present their talent in a viable and popular open forum like Project Runway and throw it away by being a massive toolbox.

Angelo from Top Chef is sort of the opposite of that, as far as I can see. He's kind of a mellow douchebag, in that he never gets mean or violent, but at the same time he's smug and self-centered and more than a little condescending. That said, he's nice about it, which is both unsettling and sorta intriguing, and he's got the talent to back up his attitude. Angelo has gone onto the show with the intention to display his talent (and win, of course) and he's done so admirably, no matter how sore the rest of the contestants may be over his wins. Would I want to eat at his restaurant? God, yes. Angelo, Tiffany, Kenny, and Kelly are the four contestants this season whose food I'd most like to try. Do I want to hang out with him? Uh, no.

There's a lot I'll let slide in fiction, though, that I won't let slide on reality television. Logan Echolls is a perfect example of that, God knows, because I hate teenagers anyway and he's an entitled popular dicksmack who organizes bumfights. If he were on a reality TV show I'd want to drown him in napalm by the end of the first episode. The same goes for Dexter Morgan (he's a serial killer; if he were real, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have named my chinchilla after him) or Castiel, who can be a great big annoyingly taciturn ass-apron when he wants to be. If Castiel were on Candid Winchesters or whatever, and he never apologized for opening the door to Bobby's panic room, it would probably be the one thing that annoyed me about him. You're surrounded by cameras, you did something wrong, SAY YOU'RE SORRY. As a fictional character, I get a bit irritated with the attitude in fandom that states that Castiel opening the door is The Worst Thing To Ever Happen On SPN And Also He Killed A Nun And Kicked A Puppy Afterward. It wasn't out of character considering where he was at that point, and I don't expect him to spill an apology somewhere in the middle of preparing for the apocalypse during Season Five, AKA Watch Castiel Go Through The Five Stages Of Grief While Slowly Becoming A Big Old Flawed Human Who Fucks Up Bunches.

I don't know ... God knows it's perfectly fine to dislike a character because they're a fuckjuggling thundercock of massive proportions, but I get a bit testy when people are like, "How can you like him? He's a crap-pitching dickhead." Sometimes that's WHY we like the crap-pitching dickhead. Dick Casablancas, Jayne Cobb, Damon Salvatore ... all characters I adore even though they're clearly terrible horrid awful people.

The same goes for pairings which are clearly destructive. Rewatching VM has reminded me how much I loved Logan/Veronica as a pairing. I loved Buffy and Spike together, too, at least up until ... oh, "Seeing Red", I imagine. That said, those are two relationships that I love in part because they were destined to crash and burn due to one or more party in the relationship being at times a slime-dispensing bastard. I craved the future fallout of a Logan/Veronica marriage like you wouldn't BELIEVE. That would be the most interesting, vindictive, passionate divorce filled with tears and recriminations ever, and I wanted it like burning.

So ... yeah. Unapologetic douchebags in fiction, when written well, are sort of my kink. Aw, yeah. Heh.

Two other random things

-- I've come to realize that the reason they call that particular channel Discovery Health is because it's how you discover just how many people apparently slept through the classes on reproduction in their high school Health classes.

-- Every night at Wegmans they play this recording over the loudspeakers at regular intervals for shoppers and employees to take a "micro-stretch break" which I've yet to see anyone actually take. The recording in question starts with a sound that resembles a doorbell chiming, and I completely blame MST3K that every time I hear it, I say under my breath, "Ding, dong! Trick-or-treat for pantsuits!"

No more nervous breakdowns. God knows the first one wasn't any fun.

Ugh, somebody else come fill out financial aid forms and college loan applications and whatnot. *headdesk*

You know what it is? It's that doing all this makes me see myself in debt up to my ears all over again. Not that I'm not already in debt up to my ears, but ... well, you know. I think part of it is that the last two times I tried the college thing -- the first time when I cracked and flunked out and had what was probably a bit of a nervous breakdown over the whole thing, and the second time when I discovered just what a mess my college loan history really was -- I was trying to be very, very sensible about my majors and I picked stuff I figured would be of use. The first time I picked journalism, the second time I was going to try for something in IT.

This time ... fuck it, if I'm going back I'm going for a communications major with a concentration on writing. Creative writing, at that.

Is it sensible? Fuck, no. Will it make me happier having a degree in something I dearly love, regardless of the fact that getting published is so damn hard and I've been having miniature bouts of paranoia the past few months that I'm never, ever, EVER going to be published and I might as well give up and devote myself fully to the inbound call center industry? Hell, yes, it'll make me happier. Broke, but happier.

That said, the financial aid industry can go fuck itself sideways with a rusty chainsaw, honestly. There should be more people who will just fill out this stuff for students who see numbers attached to dollar signs and run away screaming.

With that in mind, I found a college tag. So I've got that accomplished, I suppose.

Adventures in momsitting: The college years

What with all of the college talk, I don't think I told this story.

My mom went to the same weekender program I'll be starting in, except she was majoring in human resources. She'd never been to college before so she ended up taking a lot of basic courses. She had to do a few presentations before the class over the years, and one of them involved constructing an argument against a commonly-held misconception. Mom went with "Siamese cats are mean," unsurprisingly.

Cue Rudy. Rudy was our dog. Or at least he thought he was a dog. My mom has never raised a mean cat -- a few shy ones, but nobody who'd bite or claw anyone on purpose -- and Rudy was sort of the epitome of that. He was always downstairs when they had parties, always sat on laps no matter who called him or put him there, and loved riding in the car and going out of the house for anything at all, even vet trips. He was my dad's favorite out of all of the cats we've ever had. When my dad would go on trips, Rudy used to sit at our sliding glass doors for days with only food, water and litter breaks and wait for him.*

Mom took Rudy as a "prop" during her speech. She let him out of the carrier she had him in, and he proceeded to walk around the class helping her case by rubbing up against people's legs, letting everyone pet him, and generally being the social butterfly he always was.

About halfway through her speech, Rudy walked away from the students and over to the garbage can. Without bothering to make so much as a peep, he stood up and pulled it until it tipped over. My mom kept going with her speech, until one of the students pointed out, "Uh, I think your cat just used the garbage can for a litter box."**

Rudy trotted out of the garbage can, hopped up on the teacher's desk, and sat down as matter-of-fact as you please.

Without flinching, my mom tipped the garbage can back up, took the plastic bag in which Rudy had done his business out of the can, tied it in a knot to shut it, put it outside the classroom door, and went back to finishing her speech.

Which ... pretty much says as much about my mom as about the cat, I suppose.

* We have another one now, Owen, who does the same thing. My dad didn't even like cats when he married my mom. Now he endears at least one cat in any given group of them to abject obsession with him.

** He also once spotted one of us dumping the contents of a wet bag of cat litter into a bucket - the bag was wet, the contents were still dry - in our mud room and waited until we turned our heads to get in and use it. You can't really yell at a cat for something like that.