Reality TV Addicts Unite!

My Fair Lazy – One Realty Television Addict’s Attempt to Discover If Not Being a Dumb Ass Is the New Black. Or a Culture-Up Manifesto.  Jen Lancaster

I think Jen Lancaster and I were separated at birth. She is snarky and sarcastic and goofy and insecure and addicted to pop culture and trashy tv – all things I happen to be as well. Reading about Jen’s (yeah, after reading her words I feel like we are friends and I can call her by her first name)project  to  “culture-up” as she calls it, was as life reflecting for me as Jen’s conversation with Candace Bushnell  that sparks the whole project was for her.

There are books that you read and enjoy and move on from, and then there are books that you read and enjoy and that stay with you and change your world a little. This book was a little bit of that for me. I can sympathize with the feeling of being an intellectual outsider that Jen expresses at the beginning of her story. In graduate school, I always struggled a little with feeling like a fraud for not always being totally in love with the classic literature I had to plow through. I felt a little guilty about  wanting to chuck things like Moby Dick against a wall (seriously? A chapter about rope? You have got to be kidding me). I was always making connections with current events or “chick-lit” or thinking that Faulkner made no damn sense and these people can’t really be serious when they say they love it, can they? I know that I am a little too loud sometimes, that I tend to barge into conversations and that I end up having to explain my jokes and sticking my foot in my mouth more than the average person.  Sometimes, like Jen, I have to stop and check my behavior and realize that as much as I hate to admit it, I am the annoying girl people roll their eyes at.

The Jennaissance detailed in the book, her attempt to expand her cultural intake beyond The Real World, The Real Housewives, Survivor, and anything on VH1 is something we could all probably stand to do. It’s about stretching beyond your comfort zones, and learning for the sake of knowledge and understanding and opening your brain up to things that challenge you and make you a little uncomfortable.

Jen takes us with her as she explores stinky cheese, highbrow theatre and finds a love for classic literature. Reading about her journey feels like sitting over a cosmo and catching up with an old girlfriend. Her voice comes through so clearly that I feel like I would recognize her if I heard her in a restaurant. More than once I laughed out loud – not in the LOL IM speak that was amusing way but in the literally laughing out loud to the point where The Boyfriend looks at me across the room like I am a lunatic way.

Ultimately I am grateful for Jen for making it ok to have equal love for Shakespeare  and Jane Austin, and Glee and all the other junk cluttering my DVR (No lie, I am watching No Reservations as I type this; love me some Anthony Bourdain). Reading about her desire to not be such a “dumbass” – her words, not mine – made me want to try to not be so much of one myself. But, that does not mean I am giving up my Bravo reality tv.