Friday, August 17, 2012

Apparently I'm retro now

Sometimes very important and meaningful things in life remind you that days are turning into years which are passing and leaving you older.  And sometimes it's a reality television marathon.

When I'm at my desk in the office, podcasts are my audio tune out for the silence, which crazy as it sounds I find much more distracting.  Yesterday I was working from home, and so it's the television that provides the droning.  And I happened to stumble upon a marathon of Laguna Beach, which provided a background of guilty pleasure nostalgia to contrast my e-mailing, Excel spreadsheeting, and XML debugging.

This show completely falls under the 'against my better judgement' category.  I know it's not a good show.  I know that it's the audio visual equivalent of McDonald's, because not only does it provide nothing of nutritional value, but when it comes down to it, it isn't even that tasty.  But that doesn't mean that you don't sometimes just want that very particular taste.  You can't help it.

This was like plopping down and eating a Happy Meal.  And maybe playing in the pool of plastic balls.  I couldn't help but remember when I first saw this semi-scripted, totally stylized view of high school.  The first season aired during my own senior year, so as much as I didn't want to admit to following the lives of these people with whom I shared an age group and not much else, there was something undeniable about watching them graduate and seeing them deal with their eventual partings at the end of the summer.  I watched it as I lived it, and now I've seen it with my own graduation a memory.  Still gets to me.  But then, I'm easily gotten to, sentimentally speaking.

My short stay back in the land of MTV was...I won't say enlightening.  But there's always something interesting about looking back.  I enjoyed my Happy Meal.  But now I probably need some cultural veggies.  Some PBS, perhaps?

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