I use so many hyphens when I'm sleepy

Writing from the perch of sleeplessness at 5:30 on a Sunday morning, I am appalled at my lack of interesting commentary. If I ever had this scenario outlined to me (as people are apt to outline blogging scenarios in casual conversation) I would have assumed that I had a juicy, nerve-wracking reason for being awake at such an hour and would be thus amply supplied with blogging materials. Unfortunately, I just cannot sleep.

This is shocking to peeps of my acquaintance, surely, because I have never been one to have trouble sleeping. Usually I am far too fond of sleeping. Not that I am one of those marathon sleepers (I’m usually up around 9 on the weekends), but rather one of those people who is irreparably bitchy when I don’t get the daily recommended dosage of snoozes. But getting that sleep was never a problem for me before approx. 1.5 years ago, after which the cycle of job searching and (ironically) the subsequent employment encouraged my natural anxiousness to encroach upon my scheduled sleep-time.

And so I am awake. And I am thinking about Gossip Girl. And that’s rather depressing.

Why is a rational person like me thinking about Gossip Girl? It so happens that just before going to sleep last night I watched an episode of the show. (It was my first, but maybe a season finale? I don’t know; I streamed it online.) I watched the show out of a morbid curiosity provoked by my mother discussing over dinner how scary (actual death-scary, not just this-is-our-culture-scary) teen vampire shows can be.

As she spoke it occurred to me that I had never seen any of these supposedly over-sexed teen dramas. In the three years since I’ve had a TV, I have rarely had occasion to regret my sparse and selective internet streaming habits…except when I realize that I am missing something excruciatingly bad.

I hate to miss bad things: I relish bad movies, bad TV programs, bad haircuts, bad tattoos, and especially bad personal anecdotes. In light of this, I decided that I needed to investigate this new generation of crap TV. And because I am about 2 years behind the cultural learning curve, I decided to watch Gossip Girl.

With the exception of the voice-over, the show didn’t differ from the teen dramas of my youth enough to scandalize me. The conflicts and goals were fairly similar (poetic break-down of social castes, overemphasis on graduation as an epic event, sexual fraternization between shockingly attractive teenagers who are hella, hella, hella in love). But there was one similarity that I was surprised to see made the cut: parental subplots.

If I may wax indignant on the subject of hour-long teen dramas, I must say that this is their most abhorrent feature. While I am trying to focus on the boyfriend stealing and substance abuse of these rich and attractive teens, the action keeps being interrupted by the romantic and financial intrigues of their rich and far-less attractive parents. Is this done to fill in the hour? Or do people actually enjoy these plodding subplots about the parents of adolescent lovers becoming lovers (substitute becoming an alcoholic, going bankrupt, or getting the capital ‘D,’ Divorce) themselves?

Come on, the CW, I don’t care about these people. They aren’t in high school and thus their lives aren’t relevant to mine.