Certain as the Sun Rising in the… Eek!

Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme,
Beauty and the geek.

There’s not a whole lot of TV that I’m ashamed to say I watch. 24 can be over the top, House can be predictable in structure, Lost leaves you ‘cliff-hung’ every darn week and Grey’s is a total soap opera. But, despite all this, they’re solid shows. I’ll admit it, there’s one more I watch: Beauty and the Geek. It started up this Wednesday with a two hour premiere, which I watched. Last season, my favourite team won to my second favourite team.

I only wondered for a short time about why I liked the show. Eventually I decided that it makes me feel ‘normal’. The whole premise of the show is that they have two extremes — the gorgeous, ditzy girls who know a lot about fashion and little else; the awkward, bespeckled geeks who chat in their own language of physics formulas and Klingon. Beauties are challenged to help the geeks get their self-confidence up and geeks are meant to teach the beauties how to not rely on their looks to get everything in life. In certain respects, I’m somewhere in the middle. I mean, I’m quite a bit further over on the Geek side overall, but I also have no uncommon knowledge of economics or politics. I’m not socially inept. Generally. And I love ‘What Not To Wear’.

I try not to be deluded about shows like this. I know reality TV is hardly real. I know they’ve been told to play up their images, especially in the premiere. I can’t bring myself to believe that a guy would actually greet an extremely hot girl for the first time with the ‘live long and prosper’ hand signal (saying nothing else, not even ‘Hi!’) when he has to know that she’ll have no idea what that means. And also, I can’t bring myself to believe that anyone living in America over the age of twenty-five would not have at least an educated guess to the answer of, “On Wall Street, what do the letters NYSE stand for?” She seriously said, ‘Uh… something… system?’ That can’t be real, can it? Can it? For one, what else could NY possibly stand for? It’s just boggling.

As the contestants go, I think I liked last season’s a bit better (or at least, I sympathized with them faster). They switched it up for this season, but in the last one in the beginning they had all the girls in bathing suits and the guys had to go in one by one and introduce himself, then wait for one of the girls to pair up with him. Later on when they were having lunch, one of the guys (Josh, my favourite one) commented it was a scary experience that made him very self-conscious. But then one of the girls (Brittany, my second favourite one) said, “I get that, but don’t you think it was at least a little hard for us to be sitting there in bathing suits just thinking all the other girls looked better than we did?” I thought that was a really cool and interesting thing for her to say. Even girls who most people would deem ‘extremely beautiful’ have issues with their looks.

This season’s geeks are pretty par: a spreadsheet-obsessed business student, a Master of Theology, a comic collector/gamer, a Trekkie, one sings in a Star Wars band (Hah!), Harvard grad, etc. The gamer has been a bit disappointing so far (except for the tattoo of an NES controller on his forearm — respect!), because he seems to just be into Super Mario. By now, that’s mainstream enough, let’s admit it. I really think they should have one of those uber-WoW geeks on there. That’d be hilarious, especially how the geeks now are relating their experiences to the viewers using physics and Star Wars analogies. A WoW geek could do that easily, and you know, if you throw in enough of the lingo it does truly sound like the paramount in dork-language. For example:

“Holy crap guysss, going into that room of hot babes and introducing myself reminded me of the time when I went to the Un’Goro Crater with my 49 troll Mage who was speced for fire (even though Ignite got nerfed in the last patch). On my way to Fire Plume Ridge I saw this 57 pally ganking a lowbie UD Loc so I ran the other way but got mobbed by silithids. Next I know I was jumped by the Alli. He got a 640 crit on me with a rank 3 Holy Shock and stunned me with Hammer of Justice… totally pwned me. When I asked my guild for help they were all farming honour in AV except this one shammy who was “soo busy” selling his epic drop in the Org AH. I was all alone, dudes.”

Even the other geeks would be like… blink blink…

The one thing that makes me mad about the show is one of the captions. As in all reality shows, when someone is talking interview-style about a certain event, they have their name and a quick title for them, like: “Matt — M.I.T. Graduate” on the bottom of the screen. One of them (he was eliminated this week, but still) was “Sanjay — Virgin”. You know, I really wish our present media would stop portraying people who are virgins as substandard. I know waiting for marriage is an uncommon and unpopular choice these days, but it’s out there. I wish people could respect it. It’s not for everyone, I understand that. But a lot of people who wait are doing so based on wisdom a lot, lot more founded on truth than MTV. I am reminded of this constantly. You find out one of your friends is pregnant? Your reaction is based on what you think theirs must be. If they’re married and stable, you’re probably really happy for them. If they’re 19 and alone, this is a pretty bad thing. The news is the same. The reaction is very different. People do the things they do for a reason and I think part of life is figuring out how to weigh and balance patience, sacrifice, desire, risk, consequence. I hope we all learn well.