You're welcome.

You really need to read this article. Oh, you're a movie director? YOU REALLY NEED TO READ THIS ARTICLE.

At 19 years old Jerzy Bielecki was sent to a concentration camp. Three years later he fell in love with an inmate, and the year after that they escaped together. This doesn't need to be filmed to win a Best Picture Oscar: the Holocaust, love, action, an escape, a tragic miscommunication and the kind of beautifully bittersweet ending that wouldn't leave even Mel Gibson's eyes dry. Print it, laminate it and read it when you need to be humbled.

Reality Bites

I am not a television snob. I am likely the only person alive that has watched every episode of More to Love - the fat man's answer to The Bachelor. That said, I am not here to wax pretentiously about how shitty reality television is. It has been a decade since Survivor premiered on CBS and changed my primetime schedule and PVR's Thursday nights forever. Ten years is high time to get rid of these reality tv cliches. I am encouraging every future reality tv show contestant to expand their vocabularies and please let these cliches die:

On the block
Meaning: In danger of leaving the competition
Origin: Street-wise adaptation of the phrase "on the chopping block"
Guilty of excessive use: Big Brother
Fun fact: Also the name of a failed reality show, On The Chopping Block.

Strategic
Meaning: Used as an adjective for any decision not based on personal motivations
Origin: The word "strategy"
Guilty of excessive use: Every single reality show that has aired to date
Fun fact: Less than 1% of reality show contestants have ever been able to work its root word into a grammatically sound English sentence.

Thrown under the bus
Meaning: To be sold out (often by a co-contestant by calling attention to another's faults in front of "the judges" or "the panel")
Origin: Common idiom
Guilty of excessive use: Top Chef, Project Runway, The Apprentice
Fun fact: Use this phrase whenever you are judged by judges whose job it is to judge you on the thing it is you are supposed to be competing to be judged on and it doesn't go well.

Going home
Meaning: Losing the competition
Origin: the English language
Guilty of excessive use: everyone
Fun fact: Contestants call anywhere without cameras "home." Big Brother contestants equate going to the "sequestered house" with going home, Survivor's jury members who stay on the island also refer to their departures as "going home."

I'm not here to make friends
Meaning: I am here to compete for the grand prize, I do not want to waste my time on pleasantries or civil conversation
Origin: Kelly of Survivor Borneo said poetically: "This is a game. Don't take it personally. You know, if people came here to make, you know, bosom buddies and, you know, lifelong friends, they should have gone to summer camp."
Guilty of excessive use: America's Next Top Model or any obnoxious reality tv show contestant that realizes that everyone hates them: see here
Fun fact: Everyone who wasn't there to make friends mentions the friends they made as something they gained from "the experience" in their exit videos. Alternatively, Top Model girls leave letters to the friends they weren't there to make.

The right reasons
Meaning: Earnest motivations to compete on said reality show
Origin: The outcasting of the first reality tv contestant to admit that they were on a television show with the motivation of being on television
Guilty of excessive use: The Bachelor, The Bachelorette
Fun fact: The Bachelor and Bachelorette contestants initially have no idea who they are competing to date, meaning the only "right reason" one can have for a dating show is desperation/loneliness.

Don't we all use pre-fabricated hearts?

The following is a blog I wrote in 2007 for a a class on "The Body and Modernity" that I found while I was poking around my old emails. The assignment was to blog after every class on any part of the lecture that struck us as interesting enough and raise questions on it. I can't help but be a little embarassed every time I read something I wrote more than 3 minutes ago.

In reviewing the clip of Dreams Money Can Buy during Friday's class, one lyric off the soundtrack made an incredible impression on me: "No man alive could ever survive a girl with a pre-fabricated heart." But what is a "pre-fabricated heart"? If a pre-fabricated heart is a way of classifying a heart that is insincere, who among us does not have one? Personally, in intimate social situations I run my gut reaction through a split second inspection line to ensure that my response is not socially awkward. I've been conditioned to monitor and censor my feelings from others as well as myself, and ask myself questions: Would my friends react like that if someone were to ask such a personal question? Should I be offended right now? Would someone attractively aloof be offended right now?

I am incapable of having a reaction without looking for the reassurance that it is a normal response; this is obviously a sign of some major insecurity. I can deal with that. I have friends that come to me looking for answers to similar questions; I know I can't be the only person who does this. If this is the case and we constantly test our feelings against social norms before openly expressing them, how do we determine which of our thoughts and reactions are really genuine? How can we know ourselves anymore? I'm a young female and these days that allows a certain amount of expected insecurities, but there is still something unsettling about this: What about those of us who react openly without adherence to the social norms and outlines? Assuming we are aware of these boundaries, do we purposely ignore tham for novelty's sake? Are those reactions just as "pre-fabricated" as mine? Do we all use pre-fabricated responses? If all of my relationships and friendships are based on these pre-fabricated responses, is any of my social contact genuine?