I Like to Watch

April 16, 2006 | When you're old enough not to care what other people think (and that's pretty damn old -- don't fool yourselves, kids), it's only a matter of time before you wake up and find yourself living a life that most young people would characterize as deeply uncool.

Not coincidentally, this means you're finally old enough to have children, since everyone knows that you can't raise a kid properly until your life is unstylish and dorky enough to make your kid's skin crawl. If your kids think you're cool, that's a sure sign that you're doing something very wrong. But if your kid seems to have an unflinching commitment to pointing out to you, at every turn, that every choice you've ever made in your entire life is highly questionable, stylistically repellent, and/or just plain unsavory (all of which you might notice if you weren't so pathetically self-deluded), then you know you're doing a good job as a parent.

When I was a teenager, I expressed these sentiments to my mother by singing "My mom's a refugee, baby!" (to the tune of "Our love's in jeopardy"), because she used to wear an oversize army surplus coat to work in the morning and refused to run a brush through her hair before she left the house. While other moms wore espadrilles and skirts with pink and green ducks on them, my mom dressed like a member of the trench coat mafia -- you know, before they wised up and traded their army fatigues in for trench coats.

These days I think my mom was actually pretty cool back then, which probably means I'm about as uncool as she once was. But come on, hot pink espadrilles? I'd sooner leave the house with a pair of tighty whities on my head.

Yuppies for sale

Still, there's a point in your life when you just can't justify your taste, your habits or the idiotic things that grab and hold your attention.

Personally, I can't justify my reality TV habit. There was a time when I could, because most shows were so new and so ridiculous that no mere mortal with a taste for the most freakish mutations of human behavior could resist them. Like a victory parade, or a trip to the World's Fair, or a nice long gossip session at the barber shop, reality TV was the dishy spectator sport of our time, a shared distraction we could delight in together without shame or fear.

But now the parade is over, the World's Fair has packed up and declared bankruptcy, and the old-timey barber shop has been replaced by a Supercuts. And sadly, I'm the freak who's still hanging out at the Supercuts, trying to dish gossip to a sullen teenager in a bright blue T-shirt who's trying desperately to cut my hair without just grabbing the nearest mixing bowl.

Next page: Control freaks and crappy products, saved by The Donald!