i want my reality tv

You will tell me that television, particularly reality television, will rot my brain. It is the opiate of the masses and will leave me devoid of the ability to think critically. Reality show contestants are self-absorbed fame whores and by watching their shows, I perpetuate the vicious reality show cycle in which said contestants will get spin-offs and contribute to further brain-deadening. Blah, blah, blah.

Guess what. I freaking love reality TV. I first got absorbed in reality shows when I was in grad school; I spent much of my time reading and writing and thinking critically, I needed to be able to turn my brain off now and again. Reality TV was the perfect outlet for that. My husband and I have a reality show line-up for nearly every night of the week and, as educated people, we feel entitled to enjoy mindless entertainment. We're not particularly discriminate about what reality shows we'll watch; it ranges from crappy dating shows to the ones where you actually have to have talent to compete, like Project Runway and Top Chef. We like to pick different favorites and trash talk the way people do with sports teams. I'm admittedly more into the reality scene that Nicholas, seeing as how I'll even watch the super junk that causes him to roll his eyes.

Ultimately, I think Vh1 has it right. Most of your garden variety network reality shows take themselves too seriously, which I think is the underlying problem with them. Your Bachelor, your Survivor, your talent based reality shows (e.g., American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, etc.). They're all so damn serious. Not Vh1 reality. Oh no. In fact, last night on Real Chance of Love 2: Back in the Saddle, the contestants' challenge was to go on a hunt for the Yetti. The contestants are so completely asinine that they're ripe for spin-off shows, all of which premiere in immediate succession of each other, thus drawing me in for the duration. And I do exactly what the production company wants me to do; I chat with Elizabeth about challenge winners and call Rachel to rant when Becky Buckwild gets knocked off of I Love Money 2. It becomes ingrained in the very fabric of our friendships and I am okay with that. And damn you, Ryan Jenkins, for taking that away from me.

It's okay if you don't like reality TV. Turn it off and go try to save the world. Or something.

why all those babies, nadya?

It's no secret that I'm not a kid person. Despite our friend Crystal's repeated attempts to persuade Nicholas and me to have a baby before we leave WKU so she can be his or her aunt TeTe, I do not see any little Nicholas and/or Hollys in our immediate future. In fact, I can't fathom having a baby before the age of 35. I guess you can check back in with me in my early 30s when my biological clock starts ticking.

But I do get why other people have children. I totally do. I can imagine that it would be very rewarding when you see a miniature version of yourself take his or her first steps, say those first words, or bring home all As on a report card. Lots of women are innately much more maternal than I am; they coo and coddle babies with such ease where I struggle not to drop them or talk to them in GRE words. I once told Nicholas' 4-year-old cousin that Barbie's convertible should have seatbelts because Barbie is a reckless driver. I just don't have it in me.

What I do not understand, however, are people who have 76 babies that they have to care for on their own. I watched part of a TV special on Nadya Suleman (also known as the ocotomom, or as I call her, the poor man's Angelina Jolie) last night and I'm at a loss. All six of her single birth babies were conceived via invitro fertilization in, almost literally, six successive years. Then she decides it would be a great idea to implant all those leftover fertilized eggs at one time. There were eight of them, and she got some dolt of a doctor to oblige. And guess what? They all took. So now, a single mom with six children under the age of 7 is pregnant with octuplets. Genuis.

Nadya doesn't have a job but does have impeccably manicured nails. Before she finally moved into a house of her own, she lived with her parents who all but called her a selfish moron on national TV. She doesn't know how she'll care for her kids yet, she said, but she has faith that she'll be taken care of (hence the TV special, I guess). Not only is it a zoo in that house of hers, at one point she called one of the octobabies by the wrong name. If you can't remember who is who in your litter of kids, I'd say that's too many babies.

The compassionate part of me wants to root for her. I want her to get it all figured out so that her kids will be loved and cared for and won't get lost on a grocery trip to the Wal-Mart (although she doesn't have a great track record). But the rational, logical part of me thinks I've got it right; there should be a test you have to take before you can become a parent.

quarter-life crisis

I never thought I would have issues with aging. Thus far, I haven't. But I'm turning 25 next week (that's a quarter of a century!), and coupled with how this time of year thoroughly depresses me because I'm not a fresh-faced, 18-year-old embarking on the start of the most amazing time of my life, I'm having a mild panic attack. But I've recently decided that I need to get over it. Let it go. I'm never going to be a college freshman again, and I waste an inordinate amount of my life waxing nostalgic over sorority bid days and RA training and living fifty feet from my best friends, things that will never happen again. Ever.

I'm learning to embrace the things that getting older means, the things that are infinitely better about being 25 than being 18. I hear there are lots of them. Allow me to delineate a few for you.

An exponential increase in entertainment options. When you're a college freshman, you spend Friday nights at frat parties. Or, if you're me, Cinema International films in the Curris Center. Don't judge. The point is, there are lots of things you can't do when you're 18 because you're not of age. But now, I can go to piano bars (which I love). I can gamble at casinos (which I really love). And I'm not relegated to the 7:00 Thursday shows at comedy clubs; I can enjoy their two-drink minimum of overpriced cocktails while being heckled by a Vh1 clip show pseudo-celebrity for being a hillbilly in New York City. I didn't have that story to tell when I was 18.

I can be Grandma Holly. I went to college in a town with fake bars, which brought about my life's philosophy for going out: start at 8:00, in bed by midnight. This wasn't a problem until I went to grad school in a town with bars that stayed open till 3:00. What to do? Adopt the moniker Grandma Holly, refuse to go out on nights when I had to teach the next day, and fall asleep with my head on the table at sundry bars throughout Muncie. These things, they happen. But the older I get the more acceptable I think this will be. In fact, I'm often not the one to call it quits with our friends in Bowling Green because they're all older than me. Can you believe it?

Puppies (and other pets if you're so inclined). It's generally frowned upon to have furry, four-legged friends when you live in a dorm, although I do know of a girl who smuggled a cat in and out in her backpack for a couple of months. But now I get to look at and squeeze that sweet little Bolin face guilt free. And anyway, I don't think Bolin would have gone quietly into a backpack and might have aroused some suspicion with her yelps and corn chip smell.

Places to crash everywhere. In Kentucky, we get a great incentive for staying in state to go to college, so that's what most people I graduated with did. But when you go to college, then grad school, then set up shop where your husband is going to grad school, you meet people from all over. Elizabeth and I once created a fantasy road trip in which we listed all of the states where we could legitimately crash for free. Between the two of us, we were only lacking about four states. Most of these people we didn't meet until after the age of 18, leading us to believe if we'd planned our road trip then, we'd be out a lot more money on hotels.

Not being 30. Perhaps the greatest thing about turning 25 is that I'm not turning 30. And I don't mean that in the sense of thank God I'm not thirty because thirty is so old! which, I think, is a mindset so endemic to our culture. In the grand scheme of things, I'm such a young pup. Twenty-five is not old. Thirty is not old. And when my mom's best friend turned sixty this summer and they did a girl's trip vacation, I realized that even sixty is not old. I need to slow my roll and enjoy life and realize that I've got lots of time to do all of those cool things I didn't have the time or money or legal status for when I was 18. And even though that cultural divide between me and the 18-year-olds that I will be teaching the rest of my life will just keep getting larger, I'm choosing to think that I come out with the upper hand.

mistreating

When we lived in the tower, the windows in our kitchen, bedroom and living room stretched all the way from ceiling to floor. You'd be right if you guessed these monstrosities were a bitch where window treatments were concerned; we made do with the university-issued vertical blinds in the kitchen and living room, but broke down and bought panels for the bedroom -- it took six in all to do the job -- so the construction workers and college freshmen wouldn't see me in my freshly-showered glory when the blinds caught breeze and swung open as they had a tendency to do.

Nicholas nor I could take full advantage of windows that reached the floor in quite the same way as Bolin; I guess you appreciate different things when you're only 17 inches high. When we misplaced our dog, as we had a propensity to do, we could usually guarantee she was in one of two places: a) under the couch basking in the dry heat from the air vent underneath, usually just a wet nose or tri-colored paw or tail-tip peeking out, or b) nosing through the blinds in the kitchen or the bedroom soaking in the goings-on on a college campus, most assuredly making passersby say, "Is that a dog in the dorm?"

The real treat came when we we still letting her on furniture, when she'd perch on the back of the sofa for the alternate view from the living room. And even when that became forbidden fruit, I'd come in the living room from washing dishes or showering or what have you and catch her on the back of the couch. She'd skulk down with her tail between her legs when she knew she'd been caught, but I firmly believe it was worth it to her, mostly because I'd catch her again the next day.

Since we've moved to our new apartment and have windows of normal size and placement, I feel like Bolin is going a bit stir crazy. I fell asleep on the couch earlier while the sky turned green outside, and I'd open one eye now and again to catch Bolin looking longing over her shoulder at where she knows where the window is supposed to be. I thought I even saw a tear. And suddenly, I have become the parent that mistreats her young.

she get it from her mama

I know that it's Father's Day, but today I need to talk about my mom.

I love my mama. She's one of my best friends and she's contributed lots of great things to my person, whether genetically or through her raising. I get my big ol' booty and my tree trunk legs, both of which I've learned to live with and embrace, from my mama. I get my socially liberal leanings from my mama. I get my desire to schedule one vacation per season from my mama. But there's one thing I get from my mom that I'd rather she had just kept to herself.

I saw my first one at the tender age of 17, a glint in the mirror as I was finishing up in the bathroom and heading out on my way. It was your classic from-a-movie sort of double take. I bent over the sink to lean in and get a closer look, grappling at my roots to pinpoint the perpetrator. And there it was, unabashed in its mocking. And like a Vietnam flashback, in a fuzzy haze I envisioned my mom and me sitting around the kitchen table, her smoking her Eve 120s and spinning a tale about finding her first gray hair at 17.

17...17...17...

And so had I.

Finding my first gray hair was decidedly no good given my obsessive personality. After my initial discovery, I survived sans gray hair for a pretty good length of time, maybe close to a year. But then they started popping up in multiples; my friend Ashley once pulled three grays for me during one 50-minute interpersonal class during the fall semester of junior year. So now it's become a part of my beauty routine, which does not include putting on make-up or really fixing my hair ever, but by Lordy, I will spend hours plucking my eyebrows to perfection and scoping out my gray hair situation.

I started dying my hair dark after my wedding last summer, so I've been able to avoid the arduous task of gray hair hunting. But now that I'm over the dark and I'm trying to go back to my peanut butter colored hair, the grays are back. And they. are. pissed. It's as if they're saying to me, "You think you can cover us up? Do you? Do you? Watch this, bitch," and then they throw up their collective middle finger (if hair follicles had middle fingers) and let their gray flags fly. Only now, they grays I skillfully extract from the root are not only more numerous, but are dull out-of-the-bottle mahogany from about 2 inches on down, reminding me of a time when the glints in the mirror were not grays, but the blond streaks I get now and again.

My dad's sporting a full head of gray, too, but I've seen pictures of my dad when my brother and me were babies. Let the record reflect that my brother and I are responsible for my dad's gray hair. This is all your fault, mom.