This is the Evening of Our Discontent.

I just got back from watching LOST at a friend's house. Now, I'm honored to have been invited into the time-honored ritual of gathering around the tv to watch a show. I think the last time I "made plans" to watch tv with people was with my family, watching the Miss America pageant in 1988. For years I've heard of people gathering -- to watch Friends, to watch Sex in the City, to watch the first two seasons of LOST. Finally I like a show enough that I wanted to be part of the action (and the people I was watching with are very funny, so I figured it was well worth the 5 minute drive).

The evening began with the end of American Idol. Perhaps nothing makes me happier than the end credits of American Idol. Someone got voted off the island, someone else will get a record contract they only maybe kinda deserve. Before I know it they will be playing Viejas casino and the cycle will begin again.

Then we watched America's Top Model. Or, as my sister likes to call it, America's Next Tyra. Tonight's episode was Punk'd meets ATM because there is NO WAY it was serious. They took the girls into the woods and had them hang out with Aborigines. They put these 5'11 90 lb American girls next to these 4'8 200 lb confused and dirty looking Aborigine girls (Susie: "they're the winners of Australia's Next Top Model") and then asked them to dance around like butterflies. I shit you not. This was *before* the models were asked to each perform an interpretive dance about their lives. Which is good, because, I mean, I like my models to have skills, don't you?

Curtain time (or tree time, as the case may be). Three of them danced about modeling (a dance which I expected to mime opening the fridge, sighing, and closing it again) while rambling incoherently and one 'danced' about childhood abuse. And the sad thing is that the show is so competitive that while I loved her for not doing the predictable thing, a dark dark (and very wise to reality tv) part of me wondered if she'd fabricated the abuse story to win (for the record, everyone in the room agreed with me).

Only one girl refused to genuinely participate (ie. she did her face paint, but not with gusto), but it wasn't even abstention on the basis of cultural humiliation. It was the black girl and you *know* she could have brought home the crown if she'd just shaken the booty! That's like if they had an eating contest. I'm the Persian girl, we would just WIN that shit. She stood there just talking. No dancing. At all. And in front of the Seventeen editor, no less! Her life fell apart in front of my eyes, slow motion. I mean, NO one messes with the Seventeen editor. And if you don't know it already, guess who didn't get a rose at the end of the night?

Finally LOST came on. The show we've all been waiting for. A show that I've never actually seen broadcast at its normal hour. It is official, I have arrived! I have caught up with popular culture! All I'm going to say here, lest there be someone who is reading my blog instead of watching tv like a good kid, is that the episode harkened to the dead-mother-in-the-chair scene from Psycho. Only it wasn't as good. Yikes. Fortunately I was in a room full of people who agreed. My enjoyment of the show might also be correlated to the weak Sawyer ratio, but that's ok, absence makes the heart grow fonder.

And my disappointment about tonight's LOST only tells me that I am WAY too invested in this show. I'm like an alkie who has woken up with bottles all around me. What-the-huh? I can't believe I care that the episode was sucky. A year ago I had to stop myself from canceling my cable bill and now I"m paying extra for digital recording. Go figure. I'd like to say that I went tonight for the company, but let's be honest, Dorito buffet aside -- if they had been watching West Wing or whatever else gathers the folks around the boob tube, I would have stayed home! And I am not just a LOST junkie. I am apparently also just a leeeeetle bit of a hypocrite because even though I laughed at the 'scary' scene... I did kinda ask Susie and Michael to walk me to my car.