i'd like a piece of gum

i saw this little gem while i was reading the tribune today. apparently this writer, trine tsouderos, recently rented the "sex and the city" movie and reacted with "horror"... and not just because it was a stupid cash-cow movie based on a god-awful series.

given our current troubled economic time, trine tsouderos was aghast at the insanely excessive lives the four characters lead... lives of which she was once so enamored. observe!

"What was so fabulous then—all those shoes, those clothes, those closets, those apartments!—seems so foolish now."

...

"This was the era of $300 jeans, weekly pedicures and "bottle service," in which you paid hundreds of dollars for a cheap bottle of booze just to secure a table at a posh bar."

are you fucking for real, lady? it took a nationwide economic meltdown for you to realize $1,200 purses, $600 shoes and $20 martini glasses of pink alcoholic sludge are foolish and excessive?

i can't wait for this person's next earth-shattering revelation. i imagine it'll be something like:

"trine tsouderos, after reading "marmaduke" for more than a decade, comes to the sudden and shocking realization that the titular character is a giant dog!"

news flash: the crap the characters spent their money on was always foolish. it never stopped being foolish. the entire series and its accompanying movie have a bone-deep commitment to glorifying foolish, absurd, unrealistic excesses that only the most shallow and self-absorbed percentage of the population can ever achieve. part of the "appeal" of the show is people like watching stuff like that. that's why there are all those shows about rich people doing really mundane things, but in ways far richer than we do them.

and before you start harping on me for not having seen the show and blah blah blah, i have seen it. i've seen a lot of it and it was never of my own volition and it was a fucking nightmare.

the worst time was when i was in my late-teens and i was sleeping over at cory's house because i thought we were going to drink and play video games. he and phil pulled a bait-and-switch and wanted watch a whole season of that fucking show because there's a lot of nudity in it.

i was stuck there with no ride, so i wound up staring at the ceiling on his couch for like six hours and drinking an entire bottle of vodka in an attempt to obliterate all traces of the evening from my memory or, failing that, die. i don't remember what happened after that, so i consider it a partial success.

if even a teenage guy filled with boiling, tempestuous hormones can't enjoy looking at naked chicks because he's too distracted by their brazen, cartoonish materialism, how the fuck did it take this long for a grown woman to realize it?!

boo-urns to you, trine tsouderos! although i am looking forward to that marmaduke column.