Thursday, July 21, 2005

Reality

Morgan Spurlock, the guy who put himself through 30 days of eating only McDonalds and lived to tell about it, is producing a show called 30 Days where an average american goes through 30 days of being in someone else's shoes. There are some people who hate the show because they feel stereotyped and can't admit that people fear the unknown, and are brainwashed by the media. If someone shows you that what you have been blindly following is just totally wrong, I understand it would be hard to swallow for a lot of people. But it looks like most of the people watching the show are discovering that the show makes a hard stab at the bubble we're living in and opening our minds to a lot of the issues we've chosen leave ourselves in the dark about, like how hard it is to live on minimum wage which a lot of people do, and what it means to be a muslim. I say the show is really hard to watch at times, only because it makes me uncomfortable to think about issues that a lot of us purposely avoid, but if you can stick it out for 60 minutes, you might learn a lot more than you ever thought it would be possible through a semi-reality TV show. I've only seen episodes 1-3 so far (and the one about steroids just didn't have any point) but the other 2 were really good, and episodes 4-6 (which deals with living in a world without fossil fuels, a straight man in a gay world, and a binge drinking mom) have really good reviews.

In other reality tv news, it appears that someone has finally decided to start encoding the real world. Just late last night, I was flipping through my tivo and telling myself, "alright, I think I'll have to tell Eric to get cable since I don't want to miss a lot of these shows, especially the real world", but to my surprise and delight that it seems like they are encoding it and releasing torrents for it. I've been hoping this would happen for a good year or two. I hope they keep it up.

So the move to Eric's house in Mira Mesa went very smoothly. The planning and the timing for the move couldn't have been any better. Basically, I was able to clean at my own pace for 3-4 days when I had holes in my schedule and pretty much handed them the keys without having paid rent for any day I wasn't going to be there. Its amazing how different the weather is here for only being 10 miles inland. I'm sure its also from moving out of la jolla in the spring, and moving to mira mesa during the summer, but damn, its hot here. Can't wait for the fall, especially winter. I'd rather be freezing than uncomfortably hot, any day. Its different living here in a house with furniture. At my other place, I was pretty much living in a loft. Wei and I both had rooms big enough to make our rooms to be a bed room/personal living room so we never used our living room for anything. But definitely, having a living room with furniture is nice. My friends actually have a place to sit on when they come over.