Archive for February, 2009
{ February 26, 2009 @ 11:01 pm }
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{ Philosophy }
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The other day I was watching iCarly (shoot me) while running on the tredmill. It’s a rather mindless show to dull my mind while running in place (I’m rather like a hamster).
Anyway, while watching I noticed something rather disturbing.
To give a little background about the show, this girl Carly (played by Miranda Cosgrove) lives with her brother (played by Jerry Trainor) in a rather nice apartment. They have interesting things on the wall, a nice elevator, and Carly typically plays around with a video camera with her two friends and is “famous” on the internet. Her brother, who should have a real job, is only an artist.
What’s the disturbing part?
The lack of parental guidance in the show.
No parents are mentioned or even thought of. Carly’s best friends both have mothers, one of which is a freak of nature who loves to make everything sparkling clean. All of the kids find her a pain in the butt. Point is, there aren’t any parents really present in this Carly girl’s life.
Yet she lives in a nicely furnished apartment with wood floors and a doorman in the lobby. She lives in Boston (from what I gather) and has a generally carefree lifestyle. Without parents.
Nick… Nick… Nick… how could you do this to your viewers? It’s almost as if the network (and this show) is stating that parental guidance is no longer required to live a ridiculously easy lifestyle as Carly does in iCarly. While I’ve never been bothered by the fact that Timmy in Fairly Oddparents has idiotic parents who sometimes make no sense or that Jimmy in Jimmy Neutron has a father who adores ducks, I’m bothered by the LACK of parents in iCarly.
Personally, I think this says a lot about the character of the network.
Should they promote less parental guidance towards such impressionable viewers?
{ February 4, 2009 @ 12:06 pm }
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{ General Happenings }
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School was cancelled today with less than an inch of snow on the ground and warming temperatures in the air. All the crisp whiteness that sprinkled the ground overnight should be gone by midafternoon.
I’m sitting upstairs, copying down vocabulary for my psychology class; we have a test on Friday and I still haven’t read. Behind me, on my pale green comforter, my cat is laying down, resting on a few papers my mom gave me to me. The computer clock hits 11:00 AM and I’m rather hungry. Turning down my music, I leave my room to go downstairs to make a sandwich and get some water.
Gobi, my cat, remains upstairs. He’s fifteen and doesn’t like to move a lot. In the past four or five months, he’s turned into a skeleton. He has probably four teeth that he can chew with and the only reason he’s not dead now is the pain medicine we give him. His tongue lolls out of the side of his mouth between a few brown teeth and black gums. Pinkish drool escapes his lips to settle on his chin. His mouth doesn’t close anymore. He smells like he might be rotting. His jaw looks deformed, a tumor bulging out.
So he sleeps a lot. Asks for food. Drinks water to replenish his source of drool. In all sense, he’s disgusting. He’s so bony that he doesn’t even like to cuddle much anymore. But Gobi has always been a social cat. He wants to be where people are. So mostly he’s on the couch or in someone’s bed.
As he cat naps upstairs, I make a jalapeno pimiento sandwich and fill up my Nalgene bottle. It’s a pretty simple snack and I quickly hop up the stairs back to my room to plop back into my computer chair.
Like magic, Gobi perks up from his position on my bed. He’s always been a people-food lover and cheese is one of his favorites. He gargles a distorted meow and jumps off my bed and quickly onto my desk. Thick pink drool is already running into his fur. He meows demandingly, his brown canine and black gums sending a vile stench towards my face and my food. His dull eyes plead with me, he only wants a little.
I snatch him up and grab a tissue to wipe the drool off of his face. He struggles to get away and as I place him back onto my bed, he perks up once more to ask for food. I wriggle a little piece of cheese out of the sandwich and hold out my hand.
His slimy tongue felt around for the piece of cheese, covering my hand in the stench of his cancer. Once or twice, he almost ate it, to only have it fall back out of his mouth onto my hand again. Never a quitter, Gobi could not abandon his efforts, his swollen tongue delving down across my fingers, between them, and all over my hand until both cheese and sauce was imbibed. He licked his chops satisfyingly, missing the path of drool that had began to travel down his chin.
To be honest, I no longer felt very hungry. Gobi, eager to find a new spot to lay his stinking corpse, demanded to be let out of my room. After washing my hand, I opened the door, and he trotted out, his bony hips waving me goodbye.
I finished eating my sandwich anyway. I folded some towels and I looked at my bed where Gobi had previously been lying. Stains of red were all over the papers my mom had brought upstairs.
I threw them away and sighed.
