The Chronicles Of Jessica

This guy will probably be a guest on Good Morning America before you know it.

For some reason, August seems to have brought out the conspiracy theorists. Maybe it's the heat. I've never really bought into any conspiracy theories, except one: I believe that the people at the Norton Anti-Virus company and McAffee and those places are really the ones writing computer viruses and sending them around to infect people's computers. How else would they know how to write the cure for the virus?!?!? THINK ABOUT IT!

But since I have a mac I don't really spend a lot of time thinking about it. Live and let live. Now there's this whole subset of the American population who have decided to drink the koolaid of this conspiracy theory about the President not really being the President because he wasn't actually born in the United States. (Except he was.) This is like the fringiest of the lunatic fringe, and they won't shut up, and for some reason people aren't just ignoring them. This just proves that most of America has never lived in a big city. In a big city you learn to just ignore the crazies; the worst thing you can do is give them attention! That's what they want! When a guy gets on the subway wearing a 3 piece paper bag suit and ranting about how women are special agents sent by the government to destroy men (which we are, and that guy can most often be found on the F and V line on or around 53rd street in Manhattan), you keep your eyes on your magazine and turn up your iPod. You don't say to him, "Your views are interesting and warrant further consideration." When a lady wanders past you in the park with a tinfoil hat slapping herself in the face and denying the Holocaust, you don't smile and say, "Fascinating! Why don't you have a seat next to me and tell me all about it - and don't leave out the part about how they're trying to control the banks. Tic tac?"

No, no, no. The goal is to distance yourself from these people as much as you possibly can and that is the mistake the american media is making right now - they're inviting the lunatics to have a place at the table and join in the discussion. President Obama could produce a home video of himself coming out of his mother on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and it wouldn't be enough to satisfy these crazies. As a nation the best thing for us to do is to turn up the music and wait for them to amble on to the next thing, and not take any deep breaths lest we inhale the smell of cat food wafting off their hair.

It's a slow month all around. Paul and I are buying a gently used exercise bike, even though we have no place to put it. When we moved into this place, we got a little pie-eyed about having so much extra space, which in comparison to our last place we do, but it's still not a big place. I am of the opinion that exercise equipment should remain hidden from view, like pornography and comic book collections, but we don't really have that luxury if we want to actually exercise. Which we don't. Why did we spend this money again?

Paulie hates exercise more than seems natural. I do believe he would prefer to have a fro-yo with Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck rather than hit the gym, but he does actually realize that he has to exercise and eventually he'll do it with a modicum of nagging. I don't know what motivated him before I came along. Maybe he saw one too many cholesterol public service announcements, or maybe he was just too cheap to go out and buy bigger pants. Myself, I like to exercise, especially in a class situation but what I really really like is having exercised. In any given day I am likely to accomplish very little but if I've been to the gym I have done something. I've worked out! What have you done with yourself today, jiggles? Yeah, that's what I thought. (For extra piety, try getting up and working out before the sun comes up. Nothing can beat it for that holier-than-thou feeling.)

Now that I'm with child, I'm not supposed to let my heart rate get up above 140. Please. My heart rate goes up above 140 sorting the mail. So I'm pretty much sticking to prenatal yoga and walking, which is not exactly going to qualify me for the Iron Man triathlon. My goal is just to not turn into a complete mass of fat and old-lady-tricep-chalkboard-flappy-arms before the 9 months are up. Here's hoping.

I started watching this show, "So You Think You Can Dance" partly due to the influence of some friends of mine who were really, really into it. I think it's been on for a few years now but I'd never really seen it before this season, and I had nothing more pressing to put into the Tivo so I gave it a try. Tivo is pretty much worthless from about April to October, except maybe for people who have HBO or some of the better channels. All the regular shows are on hiatus, and most of them are crap anyway, except for 30 Rock, House and mayyyyybe LOST. LOST is on thin ice with me. They redeemed themselves somewhat by hiring a wonderful and talented actor who I went to college with for the last seven episodes of the last season, but. I can only take so much messing with my mind from network television; my tolerance for high end cable channels is a little higher but only because there are no commercials. They need to start revealing some big pieces of the plot, stop introducing new characters, and start having Sawyer take his shirt off more if they want to keep me as a viewer. I have spoken.

Anyway, SYTYCD is a good show and I was keeping up with it for a while. It's similar to American Idol but in my opinion, far far less nauseating. For one thing, the judges actually seem to know what they're talking about and they don't seem to delight in utterly humiliating the contestants at each and every opportunity. For another, the ability to win the show seems predicated on the ability to actually dance. American Idol doesn't always seem to care if you can sing or not, which is evidenced by the fact that a lot of people keep staying on it who can't really sing. Naturally if they can't, they have to have a nice rack or butt or be reallllly charming. To me, dancing and singing are both highly technical things (that I can't really do) - but they're technical in that you can either do them or you can't. You can hit the note or follow the choreography - or not. There are certain subjective things like personal style but for the most part it's pretty cut and dried. And the dancers they get on the show are really good and they all have to try these different genres such as ballroom and hiphop so you see them really working outside their normal comfort zone.

Of course, it has to have the usual reality tv-slash-artistic competition gameshow issues which hold it back. Like the woo-ing. There is a disproportionate amount of woo-ing (that is, teenagers screaming "WOOOOOO!") on these shows and it's very obnoxious and they need to get Judge Judy or somebody with a gavel to sit up there and mitigate that because it bugs. One of their judges is also disproportionately fond of woo-ing, which she does at increasingly high decibels and with mounting obnoxion, and that bugs, but it's also sort of cute because at least she reserves it for the times when they really do something awesome.

The other issue is the frequency of the program. They have the show on Wednesday, I think, and then again on Thursday. So the contestants dance their pieces and then America(tm) calls in to vote (I don't do this and I consider calling in on your cell phone to vote on the merit of someone's artistic expression to be horrifying and tacky, not to mention that it's undoubtedly cooked up by the cell phone companies as a way to boost revenue - ew), and then on Thursday you're supposed to tune back in and watch people get eliminated. Now that's FOUR hours of the show in a given week, not including commercial time. Four hours a week! I don't devote four hours a week to personal hygiene! Four hours a week is too much. So for the most part, I don't really watch the episodes that air on Thursdays. If I really really really have nothing else at all going on, I might fast-foward to the end of the Thursday episode to see who gets kicked off, but more often than not I'll just wait till the following week and see who dropped off the opening of the show. And since I don't really devote a lot of hard-core energy to thinking about these things, half the time I can't really figure it out from that but then when the show's over I'll realize I never saw, say, the little Japanese girl so she must have gotten kicked off. Simple. Except now there are like six episodes sitting on the Tivo that I haven't gotten around to, and thanks to the internet, I already know who won. So do I invest the time and effort to actually plod through those six episides so I can see how it all shakes out? It's supposed to be about watching the dancers, of course, but in the course of viewing TWELVE HOURS of the show there's bound to be a great deal of fast-forwarding, which isn't really in keeping with the spirit of, you know, the arts. Am I supposed to watch the judges' discussion so I can see whether or not I agree with the outcome now that I know who won?

It's too much pressure for me. This is what happens when you combine the power of technology with a sensitive artistic sensibility like mine. I'm just going to watch Roseanne reruns and local news from now on.