So You Are Home All Day...

... And this stupid show is on in the background because it comes on after Martha. And then some of it sort of soaks into your peripheral consciousness. And you laugh about how terrible it is but don't change the channel. Nobody changes the channel. Then you pick up on one moment, or get to sort of know one character. And you laugh about how stupid she is, but nobody changes the channel.

And then you are roped. You are watching "Starting Over" every day.

Day laborers may not know the power of "Starting Over." If, on the occasional sick day, you happen to pass the show on NBC, you quickly change it because upon first glance it is obvious that the show sucks. It's a reality show done by the creators of MTV's "The Real World," featuring middle-aged women in a new-agey Southern California house receiving 99-cent-store psychology while being forced to perform humiliating emotional and physical exercises. Like when one of them was put in a box and had to write on the walls of the box about her inner child. Or when the group had to decide which of the others should be thrown out of a lifeboat. The women are trying to relearn their authentic selves through argument or something. Each one has a descriptive tagline that comes up whenever they are on screen. Christina, for example, is "Learning to Drop the Hustle" (she was an escort); and Lisa is "Growing Up at 40." Sometimes, they have to wear costumes that exemplify their inner children and/or psychobabble.

Yes, it is inane. But stay-at-homers understand that the show's power is in its persistent mediocrity. It is background conversation for those of us home by ourselves. And there is something so California about the show's values, it reminds me of my mom's search for the answer in everything from "Who Moved My Cheese" to Ram Dass. And it's the realest reality show I've ever seen in terms of average looking people, which is at once refreshing and revolting.

Still, I'm so embarrassed. But I have to write about it here because misery yearns for company. I want to know that my compulsions are, if not the norm, at least not unheard of. I know there are others watching this crap. I feel like I need to go to a house for women like me, trying to overcome their addictions to boredom. And of course it must be filmed, so that our house may be watched by other stay-at-homers, who will then require their own house, and so on. Whenever I would come on screen, my descriptive tag line would be "Learning to Pick Up the Remote," or "Restoring Her Sense of Good Taste and judgment." And I would be made to wear sweatclothes stained with baby spit up and then left in a sensory deprivation tank to cry myself to sleep after destroying television characters made out of play-doh.

It's enough to make me miss the office.