Lampoon or remain civil? For once, I chose the latter.
I stopped by a yard sale yesterday where 4 or 5 women in their mid-20s were disposing of nothing particularly exceptional, but one thing caught my eye. On the ground, next to the 3 year old all-in-one printer was a copy of “LA Candy” by one Lauren Conrad and what I can only assume to be the saddest, most down-on-his/her-luck ghostwriter. I thought how to approach this for probably close to 45 seconds. Do I make a joke? Do I ask who is selling it and then make a joke? Do I just buy it and leave them all wondering why a seemingly straight male of their same age would want such a waste of paper?
I mean, they are seemingly nice women, and hey, I live in the South now, so I should be sharpening my gentlemanly qualities. And so I did.
But this also got me thinking and I realized that these young women who had no inhibitions of putting out their dirty laundry, or rather their dirty affinity for the repulsive, reprehensbile Lauren Conrad are one of the reasons I moved to Atlanta. Coming from an elitist college-town and previous to that from a very large, very pretentious nabe of an equally pretentious city where any remarks about such cultural hogwash as the Hills (if one would even admit to having seen an episode) must come with an air of irony and/or snark (which is not to say that I don’t love snark), these women laid out their mistakes for any willing passerbys on a Sunday afternoon. I like this town and all the people I have met here, but I still walked away regretting the missed opportunity to gently rib an unassuming stranger for possessing that fucking book. And I’m pretty proud of that.
On top of it all, I’m pretty sure my roommate teared up during the Guiding Light retrospective on 60 Minutes. If that’s not dedication, I don’t know what is.
