And on the sixth day

by tess

My family room alarms people who fear color. Visitors with a conservative aesthetic run screaming into the streets never to darken our door again. Feigning illness, my parents wear sunglasses in the room until twilight falls.

An intense array of yellows and golds with blazing orange, shocking blue, and fire engine red accents, there is admittedly much saturated color that is certainly not for the faint of heart. Hoping to make the area coalesce into a finished space, we removed the red Oriental rug. Shunning the ancient and filthy beige carpeting, The Hubs asked what we could use instead. With a chuckle of derision, I replied, “Anything but that bright yellow rug. That’s one too many yellows even for us!” His eyebrows shot up and quick as a flash he returned … carrying the yellow rug that hasn’t moved since. The uber-experts of HGTV indicate that one’s flooring should ground the room both literally and figuratively. How better to ground a vibratingly bright room than with a boldly designed lemon yellow carpet?

Our wall-sized television and stereo components sit opposite the yellow rug from Command Central. The nerve center of the family room emulates the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise complete with twin Commanding Officer recliners outfitted in bright yellow leather. The soulless, ultra-modern, metal and glass tables house the parade of remote controls that operate the TV, cable, DVR, receiver, DVD, ROKU, iPod speakers, lights, and blinds.

Thus we encamp for our Saturday afternoon BBC America horror fest. For those of you who have lives, I’ll summarize below.
You Are What You Eat: A troll (aka nutritionist) evaluates the deplorable eating habits of fat and slovenly Brits. She begins the process by stacking every single item they’ve eaten in the past month on the dining room table creating a disgusting pile that would sicken even the most stalwart of gluttonous gourmands. After a thorough examination of their feces (which is called “pooh” and is inevitably found wanting in size, color, texture, odor, and vitamin content), she provides a diet rich in completely inedible ingredients. Finally she follows them around haranguing them publicly for snack-sneaking. The 30 minutes concludes with the poor sods thinner and happier (albeit starved and brow-beaten) swearing they’ll stick to the diet after the cameras are gone. Uh-huh.

How Clean Is Your House?: Two mega-cleaners invade and clean grotesquely filthy homes. I am thoroughly unimpressed by cleanliness and don’t believe it’s anywhere in the vicinity of Godliness, but these houses are so repulsively squalid that I am inevitably shocked. The “dust-busting divas” (according to the BBCAmerica.com site) scrape up bits of filth from different rooms and have it analyzed to identify the germs, diseases and insects present in the home. The goal is to encourage healthy homemaking while showing the slob how to clean and organize the house. Returning a month later, we see that the house is inevitably careening back toward its putrid starting point.

This might represent the best of what television offers. Not only can one learn nifty nutrition tips (pooh should be solid, but not hard, and completely odorless) but also some helpful cleaning tips (vodka lifts tough pet stains from carpeting and upholstery).

So if you need to reach us on a Saturday afternoon, you can find us in our blindingly colorful family room. We’ll be manning Command Central while noshing on mayo-laden sandwiches, swilling a bottle of wine or two, and pointedly NOT cleaning the house, but smug in the affirmation that at least we’re not having our excrement examined on national television.