Drama, Drama, Drama

Do you know what really bugs me? Television nature programs. They’re all exactly the same, have you ever noticed? They all depict a man or a woman in bad camouflage with war paint on their faces, holding a shaky camera pointed at themselves with various wild animals strolling around in the background. And they all say things like, “Aren’t they the most majestic creatures?” and “You wouldn’t believe it to look at them, but these pint-sized bunnies have been known to swallow daring explorers like me whole, in order to protect their young”. They then proceed to crawl around on their bellies amid these killer bunnies “so as not to pose a threat”.

TV is always much more dramatic than it has to be, though, isn’t it. Whatever type of show it might be, you can bet it’s at least four times as dramatic as anything in real life would ever be. Even by my families standards which, in my opinion, deserve its own soap-opera slot on daytime television.

You get shows like The OC, where everybody’s dated, married or related to everybody else. One Tree Hill, also, is a fantastic example: Haley and Nathan, the 17-year-old pregnant married couple. Nathan’s brother Lucas who flits constantly between Brooke and Peyton who have, by the way, both slept with Nathan too. Lucas has a heart disease; Brooke has her own clothing line; Peyton is, in my opinion, an undiagnosed chronically depressed mess. This is hardly surprising when you consider the facts: two dead moms, an absentee father, a psycho stalker and a secret half-brother. I’m not saying I don’t love the show, but it does prove my point fairly well.

Then you have shows like Oprah and their wildly outrageous stories. “I was born a boy, had a sex change, married this guy and now I’m falling in love with his sister!” Some of the things and people featured on that show leave me feeling fortunate to have a mother and a father who are only married to each other, as well as a dog that I’m not sexually attracted to.

Even the news these days leaves me reeling. Last night I watched as a man sitting in a deck chair was lifted into the air and carried off into the sunset, with the aid of I don’t know how many helium balloons. How much helium would it take, anyway, to lift a fully grown male and his lawn chair that high into the sky? You know what? It’s not even worth thinking about. The fact is, he managed it, and made it onto world news. And that’s what the worlds TV has come to.

Human Beings: The Most Complex Creatures on the Planet?

Isn’t it funny what we, as human beings, do to amuse ourselves and entertain ourselves as this thing we call Life happens? I mean, I know people say it all the time, but we must be really complex beings.

Just look at us – we’re not happy just to live and breathe and blink and swallow and do all the other remarkable things our bodies can do. We’re not happy just to be. No, we have to have education and careers, spouses and children, hobbies, interests, talents and skills, friends, enemies, pets, clubs, music, sport… I could go on forever. I could, but I won’t. And it’s got to the point now where it’s not enough for us to have different things to occupy us; now we’re training animals and hunting down human “freaks” to perform for us.

Granted, there are some people who can sit for hours and be entertained by absolutely nothing. I, among many others, watch Oprah Winfrey every day religiously, for example. Another fine example would a good friend of mine who, as multifaceted as he is, comes up with startlingly absurd games such as the one he plays with his friend involving two entirely unrelated words and Wikipedia.

“So...we'll both be sitting in front of our computers on www.wikipedia.org and one person says one really random word and the other says a completely unrelated one - take ‘salmon’ and ‘communism’ for example - and the aim of the game is to start off at ‘salmon’ on Wikipedia and click on the blue words on each page that link you to another page, and find your way to ‘communism’.”

You get my point.

I just think it’s fascinating how creatures as wondrously made as we are can be so simple-minded. Take it in likeness to a graphical calculator. These calculators have the ability to do outrageously difficult sums, plot charts and solve simultaneous equations faster and more accurately than Albert Einstein probably could, yet they can still be, and are, used to work out things like how many 5’s go into 15. Of course, this may be down to how remarkably uneducated humans can behave, but you get the idea.

I have a new flatmate (which makes him sound much like a new pet, only I would never call my rabbit Jamie and this one happens to be a male person), and it amazes me what mundane conversations and tasks can keep us both occupied for hours at times. Today, for example, we sat and talked about the price of ice cream for about ten minutes – it doesn’t sound a long time, but you give it a try, and you’ll see. About a week ago, I watched as Jamie sat and stared at a picture of, and talked about, the new iPod for at least twenty minutes. We sit and stare at a particular lightbulb for hours, arguing over who’s job it should be to buy a new one and who will install it (for safety’s sake, anything electrical should be Jamie’s responsibility, every time), or who’s turn it is to go grocery shopping, or Spaghetti Junction aka the corner of the room where all our wires coagulate.

Anyway, it’s time for me to go and do something productive. I can’t decide which one sounds more exciting, to be honest - hitting a tennis ball against a wall, or rearranging my sock drawer.