Gay Bloggies

MOVE... THAT... BUS.

In Challenge 3: Guiltiest Pleasures By Ernie, Little. Yellow. Different.

First and foremost, I'm always just a little self-conscious when I write these entries. "Tell us about a secret you've never told on your blog! Tell us about your most guilty pleasure!" Between the eye candy and the porn stars and the erotica writers I kinda feel like the awkward math tutor that was invited to the sexy slumber party because our moms knew each other, but no matter. (It's also one of the reasons I'm kinda shocked that Pierre Fitch, the porn star was the first one eliminated. He might have lost, he think about it - he just wrote on his personal blog about how he went to McDonalds and watched Saw 4 at the theaters and his post got 49 COMMENTS. Forty-nine comments about eating at McDonalds. He might be the first one eliminated, but seriously, he wins.)

Anyway, I digress - most guilty pleasure. [sigh] Alright, fine. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. (If you're unaware of the premise of the show: a bus full of designers finds a family that is down on their luck, they re-do their house, said family crawls into a fetal position and sobs for the remaining of the episode due to overwhelming happiness. Lather, rinse, repeat.) Here's why:

First off, episodes of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (hereby called EM:HE for short) are usually shown on weekend nights. This is when your self-esteem is already completely trashed because instead of having that fabulous gay social life you see on gay.com banner ads, you're at home feeling sorry for yourself and watching television. And that show you're watching, of course, is EM:HE.
Ty Pennington is a fucking crackhead. Yes, because I'm gay I HAVE see him on Trading Spaces, thank you very much - but where he was once the beefcake comic relief, he's now been relegated to an incoherant man running around with a megaphone, screaming and fake-crying over some eight year old kid with leprosy and three fingers. if I were one of those volunteer crew members, I would steal a nail he was hammering and drive it into an eye socket rather than deal with his "wacky antics."
It's an unspoken rule that every family that EM:HE helps must be a child ages four to thirteen, presumably for one reason only: so some god-awful designer can make a tacky theme room in the new house. They interview the kid, where they kid says something off-hand like, "yeah, I'm struggling with school, but science is alright. I don't mind it that much." But then someone from the EM:HE will take the idea, run it to the ground and build a fucking LABORATORY in their bedroom, where there are beakers full of dry ice and they remodel their bed into a life-sized petri dish. "Little Jimmy loves science; we'll think he'll cherish this room for years to come." Do they not think these kids will ever go through puberty?
Here's the most important part - you would think that by making fun of said children and families and host I would be completely apathetic to the shows plight, right? Wrong. Every two-hour special episode has me an emotional basketcase, because if I see grateful people cry, I start tearing up. What, a family full of quadraplegics had a house that was lost to Hurricane Katrina? God bless you, ABC Network, for building that house full of ramps. A single Marine veteran father with five kids, all blind due to complications from diabetes? And the EM:HE crew built a fully tactile house so the kids would know what room they were in AND a "support the troops" flower garden? Pass the fucking kleenex, that's what the human spirit is all about. You start openly sobbing along with the families, getting caught up in their causes and EM:HE's over the top solutions, but by the time you think to yourself, "oh my god, that house is STUPID," the show has been over for three hours and you feel ashamed.