why I want to be a desperate housewife when I grow up..

I regularly spend my Sunday nights watching Desperate Housewives at 8 pm on ABC. I'm pretty sure that it is the most ridiculous show ever, yet I'm slightly addicted. Not as addicted to it as I am to Grey's Anatomy, but addicted enough. I don't know quite what it is that draws me into the show, but whatever it is, it definately works. I'm not sure that desperate is the most appropriate title for the show, moreso "anything-goes (no matter what)" housewives. I know it is meant to exagerrate the lives of housewives, but having women die by falling off a roof or getting shot in a grocery store by another deranged housewife is pretty absurd. I know that some of these women are meant to portray stereotypes of housewives, like Gabby who had sex with the teenaged gardener, and Brie who is an obsessive perfectionist with nothing to do in her time besides clean. But at some point, I think the show crosses a line into complete unreality (if that's a word). Like if your mother was having a stroke, no way would you leave her on the lawn of someone else. It almost starts to bother me when things get that unrealistic. Kindof like Grey's Anatomy, of course there is some unrealistic aspects like all the sex and prettiness in the staff. But sometimes there are situations which totally disassociate themselves from the watchers. I know some of this is appealing but is it too much? Is Merediths mother waking up from her Alzheimers or whatever it is solely to yell at Meredith in Grey's Anatomy just too much? And does this all just contribute to the numbing we've talked about before?

The Numbing of the American Mind

I really liked this article, it kind of called us out on how we're losing sight of what's real and what matters. As I said in class, I really like the part where he talks about wolves and how we "see them" but don't actually see them. The only way we "really" see things are through accidents. And even when that happens, we get bored. All of this really echoes everything in the book White Noise. In White Noise there is a part about the "most photographed barn in America", which everyone can see, but again no one can actually see. We have these scripts encoded into us by our culture that tell us what to see and how to react. Like in the article, we are pretty much told we need to keep moving on and staying busy. That way at least, even if things hit us hard, we just keep moving. We become accustomed to disaster and no one can really experience it anymore. And the worst is if the disaster isn't disasterous enough, because then we feel disappointment as well. All this just goes to show that we have really become numb to everything that used to hold meaning. It's a little sad.