Real Housewives? Real WHAT?!

Okay, I have an announcement to make. I LIKE TELEVISION! I do! I like TV. And movies and commercials and magazines and brain-killing, ignorance-building, mass-controlling popular culture. I'm fascinated by it. And from this day forward, I am going to own my fascination!

I met a girl the other day, and I asked her if she ever watched the Real Housewives shows on Bravo. Suddenly the conversation, which I thought was going pretty well, was cut short as she quickly and less-than-tactfully bowed out. She didn't really speak to me anymore after that. Was it because I had offended her? Perhaps. But how had I offended her? As I think back over the conversation, I remember that I laughed at her jokes (and it wasn't some stupid pity laugh. They were genuine laughs because she was genuinely funny), I showed interest in her life by asking questions, I didn't interrupt, and I, in turn, gave her cause to laugh. The only reason that I can think of for her sudden and violent disinterest in me is my Real Housewives confession.

Why is it that so many extraordinarily intelligent people of my generation seem to snub their noses at television, and reality television in particular? I've been working in the trenches for the past three years, so maybe my perspective - that if I come home from spending five hours at the hospital with the family of a 4-year-old rape victim and do something that might cause me to think too much about what I had just witnessed, I just might lose my mind - is a little different. Or maybe I'm just meeting the wrong people. But it seems like there exists only an either/or option for people of all intellects. I can either read, or I can watch TV. But if I do watch TV instead of read, it absolutely must only ever be a show on National Geographic, PBS, Discovery, or History. Why can't it be both? I do both. I am currently reading three books: Orlando by Virginia Woolf, The Collected Short Stories of Edgar Allen Poe, and Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell. I am also watching many shows. Well, I was before I came to Indonesia. I think it is crucial to maintain a balanced interest in both worlds, especially because I am going to be in a position for the next nine months to really give an in-depth and more accurate picture of America to my students than they might ever encounter again. Hopefully not, but just in case, I feel like I need to make every medium of popular culture available to them. If it turns out that, god forbid, my students watch Jersey Shore (which, for the record, even I cannot bring myself to watch), I need to know how to counteract that swiftly and effectively. When I went to Kenya, the most common questions I got were related to the idea that everyone in America lives like the people on MTV Cribs. Who can blame them for thinking that? That's all they've been exposed to. Likewise, many people I know in America think that a) Africa is a country, not a continent, and b) everyone runs around wearing loin cloths and killing lions. Because that's what we see in America.

As I think about some of these past experiences, I realize now more than ever how valuable this upcoming year will be. One of my favorite things is showing people my own experiences in another culture and watching their expressions as they realize that, in the end, we're all just people. We might dress differently or eat differently or speak differently, but we all smile. And we all laugh. And we all love.