Fumarama

I was in San Diego a couple of weeks ago, and sitting next to me at the restaurant was this (possible) couple. The woman was very tan and she was wearing a shirt that showed 40% of her breasts, which I am pretty sure were tan too. The guy was on his cell phone the entire meal. He was telling a story about a woman who tried to commit suicide and how she ruined an apartment in the process, and he was telling the story in this awful way, without emotion, but also like he was talking about some important business in the office or something, but you could just tell that he told all his stories this way, like everything out of his mouth, no matter how superficial, and I suspect that most of it is superficial, is just really important. And the woman kept picking up her cell phone (so that for much of their lunch they were both on their cell phones) and saying things like "talk to me" and "you are fired. Haha." And they were going to the races midday on a Thurs, obviously making me wonder what kind of jobs they have.

As we were walking out, I said to Christine: "this is a brand of awful I don't quite recognize."
She responded "California rich."

But here is the thing, my statement was not quite true, I just said it because I thought it was clever. (it is always a balancing act for me between being accurate and being pithy). I have seen such people before. At some point this spring I watched a marathon of the Real Housewives of Orange County. But seeing that couple in that restaurant was still really strange for me because in some wierd way I did not think that the people on the Real Housewives of Orange County were real.

The same scenerio replicated itself on the beach where there were all these teenage girls with perfect bodies in bikinis, and I was like "shit, I thought girls like this only existed on Laguana Beach" and Casey had to be like "well, Laguana Beach is not that far from here."

Here is the thing: reality tv is compelling precisely because it is real people. I mean if it was not for the fact that you could be like "WTF, who actually acts like this?" (I guess some people call it voyeurism), there would be no point in watching, because the stories themselves are not that interesting. But at the same time, there is this disconnect in the mind between the belief that I am watching real people, and the realization that they are actually flesh and blood people I could encounter. I tend to actually think of them just as characters. So in this weird way even as I watch reality tv, I am undermining the whole point of it. But the curiousity for it has not gone away.

This makes no sense. What am I doing?