When I was a kid in Finland, our house didn't have cable, so we never had MTV. The first time I really saw any MTV was when we moved to Denmark in the very early nineties. Heck, I remember people like Ray Cokes, who's apparently since turned into a Belgian. The first and only time a cartoon really blew my mind was when I first saw Beavis and Butthead. So MTV has a certain place in my heart, even if it's become rather silly since. Watching "MTV Finland" is usually quite painful. But because I still sort of care about MTV on some silly level, I kind of keep up with what's going on. I've even seen a couple of episodes of The Hills; enough to know that I don't understand why anyone would actually watch that show, let alone marry Spencer.
Having seen the Hills, when the next big reality thing came along, I did my best Jeremy Clarkson voice and asked myself: "How bad could it be?" And so I was watching Jersey Shore.
My initial reaction was that someone at MTV found out that rampant stereotyping of American-Italians sort of ended in the 1920s, and decided that it's high time it came back. Not only has the show pissed off just about every American-Italian advocacy group in the world and the residents of the Jersey Shore, but it has that same sense of astonishing unreality as The Hills. Every episode leaves you wondering: do people really live like this? And even more scarily: do young people watch this, and then get the impression that one is supposed to live like this?
Given that my generation doesn't spend all its time sitting at home and watching music videos in AC/DC shirts, I'm not really too worried. Maybe the most worrying thing I've taken from MTV is that on some level, I really do feel that the best possible summation of the political and human rights situation of Finland is "in my country, we have no bunghole". I can live with that.
Now, all things being equal this would just have been another post with me going on about what's wrong with TV and today's youth and so on, making me look middle-aged. But all things are not equal. At all. In fact, they're so unequal and in such a way that only my deep conviction that no-one will actually read this blog post permits me to actually get to the point of all this.
Ordinarily, I would have watched one or two episodes of Jersey Shore and then dismissed it all from my mind. However, I can't, because I'm in love. Now, when I say love I really mean the kind of strange attraction that a person sometimes feels for someone they see on TV or out on the street or wherever. In teenage terms, a crush. As I watched Jersey Shore for the second time it dawned on me that I'm in love with Jwoww.
I can't explain it, but there it is. I think she's kind of cute, but other than that? She has giant fake tits, a voice like a man and she gets drunk and punches people. Apparently, that's what I like!
I'm being uncharitable, as I could post a far better picture of her:
According to MTV, she's a 23-year-old New Yorker, who's "a party girl with zero self control". That's actually being polite, based on the first season... For whatever crazy reason, I think she looks lovely, and there's something about her that just pushes my buttons.
They'll start showing the second season soon in the States, so that means I'll be watching MTV Finland again this fall... Here's a gratuitous bikini picture.
So there, I've admitted it. Not only do I watch Jersey Shore, but I've fallen in love with Jwoww. That's the kind of person whose blog you're reading. A Jersey Shore fan's!
Oh, brother!
Catharsis feels good, and so do those pictures. I'll go take a cold shower now. We'll be returning to our regular pseudo-intellectual programming soon, but I'll still be thinking about her.
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