The Inner Bean

I’ve been absent for a couple of weeks due to starting a new remote position with Mahalo , who I have worked for remotely for since last August. Currently I am working on pages for Halloween, all kinds of fantastic costume information and ideas, party tips and retailers, origins and customs. It’s been a lot of fun and really gotten me into the spooky spirit.

Some of my favorite pages from the last couple of weeks include

Halloween Crossword Puzzles,

Halloween Poems

Halloween Customs

Halloween Pranks

Also, being pagan I have had the opportunity to add a lot of Pagan resource pages to the database, and was excited to build the Mahalo page for Samhain .

I have done everything on Mahalo from greenhouse working and mentoring to building How To pages, and I’m excited now to be  a part of the RFTG team, building great pages for the Halloween season.

So having a teenager in the house means finding myself often exposed to things I wouldn’t normally expose myself to. For example, that stupid Parent/Child dating show on MTV and the increasing number of “celebrity smash shows.”  That is what I will call them.  You may call them something else. They are shows in which a group of F-list nobodies, ranging from celebrity hair-stylists to “Nicole Kidman look-alike” experts, sit around watching clips of things like the Oscars and Grammy’s and the celebrities who appear at them. Then they sit and poking fun at them with dripping sarcasm. Rehab and drugs are serious things, not to be shone amusingly in the spotlight while the guys from washed up glam bands stroke their beards and talk about bubble butts and Brittany’s overdose.

Now most of these people like to pretend they are smarter than Brittany Spears or Paris Hilton, but in the end they sound equally repulsive, petty and stupid.  They watch celebrities do stupid things, and to try and make a name for themselves they make stupid, self-absorbed commentaries about celebrities, and still wind up being no one.

Does anyone over thirteen in the world really watch Talk Soup on E?  Entertainment Tonight?  Any of the numerous nutty shows that now consume VH1 (didn’t VH1 used to be a video music channel for pete’s sake?) like Cutest Celebrity Baby and Top Fashion Faux Pas of the Red Carpet Week 9876.

I mean don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with having a sense of humor, and being sarcastic is one of my fortes, but  you couldn’t pay me enough to sit on a VH1 stage and poke fun at Adrian Zmed’s hair in Grease 2.   They also can’t pay me to watch the crap either.

It’s just another chapter in the reality TV hype that is burning me out on TV completely.   I wish more people would tune out so they’d get the hint and stop promoting that kind of garbage.

Coming soon: When did we start turning every sentence into a question?  Are we really that unsure of what we’re saying?

So, it’s that time of year when the 80’s movie film craze sneaks in on me and I start to catch myself planning out how I can hook up with Judd Nelson in the Breakfast Club. While I was listening to an amalgamation of 80’s movie soundtrack songs, the Ferris Bueller song came on and I started to think about Ferris. Not Matthew Broderick, but Ferris and Cameron, and how awkward that whole movie was. It was honestly never one of my favorites, and I could never quite put my finger on why.

The thing that bothered me even as a teen was why on EARTH was the principal so worried about Ferris Bueller? He wasn’t even that badass. Okay, so he did sing in the street, and he manged to convince everyone he was practically dead on ONE day from school, but haven’t we all done that?

I just can’t wrap my head around it. He was a total nerd. Cameron was way more pathetic and even a little cooler than Ferris. I got the impression that Cameron missed way more school. So why was everyone so obsessed with Ferris?

I guess the movie is a classic, but it’s almost like John Hughes just wanted squeeze out as many hits as he could before he got to 1990 and his movies started to smell bad, but seriously. Ferris Beuller? If you thought he was all the rage, I want to know why. Honestly, I thought Farmer Ted from Sixteen Candles was way cooler, or even Ducky from Pretty in Pink… but Bueller… I don’t know. Maybe there was always the potential for Anthony Michael Hall to become a hot psychic.. but whatever happened to Matthew Broderick and who cares?

I don’t know when it started, the Wednesday night tradition of watching ABC television’s reality show “Wife Swap.” If I knew, I would go back in time and look away before the train wreck, or even better position myself as far from the TV as possible. How the show has manged to maintain itself these last few years is beyond me, but season after season foolish families agree to swap wives with another family for two weeks to experience another lifestyle (and hopefully TEACH the other family how wrong their style of life is).

I have managed to learn two things from the show:

1. If you’re going to swap lives with another woman from another family, you better believe that they are going to find a family who is completely opposite of yours in beliefs, practices, customs and values.

2. I hate reality TV more and more each time I watch it.

The unfortunate thing is that it really is like a train wreck. Gruesome, hideous and powerful enough to scar your mind, but if you pass it by while scanning channels you will stop.

Beware this evil mind trap. Not only is it one of the most awful reflections of a closed-minded society, they seem to gather some of the most evil women on the face of the planet. You will hate them.