As of April 2010, I've shied away from this blog for almost a year. Last time,I stayed away from my own blog for five whole months, because I feared lack of quality. In blogland I think that's called "Guilt and Guts Syndrome".
One can't write badly and feel guilty about it around here. In blogville roam countless readers who are experts at separating the good-bad from the bad-bad. They tend to gravitate toward writers with the guts to post both.
So I'm back, with something I truly should feel guilty about, according to most of my highly educated and wise-from-birth friends. I watch "Big Brother". I don't know when I started. I don't know how I do it. But at least now I know why.
I was one of those kids who didn't get picked much for teams, having worn glasses and undergone eye surgeries since age 3. No eye-hand coordination. I wasn't terribly interested in teams, anyway, being one of those artsy types. Art done by teams: that's where bad advertising is born.
Lately it's dawned on me that knowing how to function in teams makes up a critical part of the maturation process. It also helps you to survive retail jobs. So I'm fascinated with some of the reality television series semi-grounded in teams. "Big Brother" pits individuals against teams -- often the teams they're in. But the team lessons are there to be had, so I'm fascinated.
Tonight showcased a first-time surprise. A house resident deliberately got herself expelled from the game. Fired from her gig on the show itself. Or as I immediately thought of it, out of current need and greed: "she just killed her source of paychecks!"
It was one of the two Whiner Sisters, Chima. Like the other Whiner, Natalie, she's a "Big Brother" player who probably got hired for her lack of ability to discern between a game and real life. When one of the other players got her favorite human in the house "evicted" (BB term), Chima's brain shifted just enough on its axis. Yelling, moaning. Cursing. Weeping. Groaning. Public displays of anguish. And so on.
She became most notorious for ignoring various producers' voices over the house system, politely commanding the cast members to go here or there, do this or that -- directing the cast members, in other words, so that they could do their jobs.
Chima topped off her "Rebel Without A Clue" siege by tossing her body microphone into a pond in the set's back yard -- while the director of the moment urged her to put it on her body.
The next morning, she was ultra gone. Her Whiner Sister, Natalie, became uncorked.
I whine and get dramatic sometimes. Compared to the Whiner Sisters of Big Brother 11, I am the mistress of team cooperation and workplace self-control.
Television as therapy? Hey, I'd gladly pay Chima ten bucks for the therapy session she provided. Of course, CBS was paying her more, which would be part of my point.
I would have worn that microphone clipped to my upper lip if the bosses had asked.
