Austin, Baby

There something amiss about Real World. How every season, unfailingly, the two best looking people (in the conventional sense) become a couple (one of whom inevitably is in a (often shaky) relationship already). And the show proceeds to portray their romance as something miraculous, fateful, and as inevitable as R&J. There is the necessary banter about "feeling each other from day one", or "feeling a connection." Maturity and class nonwithstanding (the girl did moon 2 of guys AND made out with another girl in the hottub on the first day, and the guy, not to be outdone, nabbed a zygomatic fracture worthy of surgery during a drunken brawl on the first outing), they are a match made in heaven. Ahh, destiny. Who is to mention the obvious, that they are pretty boys and girls, and this is what pretty boys and girls do -- mess around, cheat, and fling it out in front of the cameras, pretending as if there were more substance than the mutual discovery of pretty-ness -- as if more meaning were to be derived from the most primal kind of lust that brews when you put several fuckable persons of similar age in one house.

Here is to making meaning out of frivolity, as only MTV can. I am officially addicted to Austin.