fbpx

Month: August 2020

dianahooley Books, Film, Art

Reality TV Has the Answers

I am not a voyeur.  Yet, when Covid struck and channel surfing seemed more likely than ocean surfing, I clicked the remote until I came upon a couple of reality TV shows that hooked me.  My 600-Pound Life and Naked and Afraid are both full of lurid, ooh-ah moments designed to keep the TV viewers tuned in.

What can I say?  Last summer at this time I was reading a prize-winning book about brain chemistry, and this summer I’m into fat and naked people.

(Please note I didn’t combine those adjectives:  Six Hundred Pounds, Naked, and Afraid is a TV show still searching for an audience.)

These TV shows may offend more discerning tastes, but I have to say, I’ve learned a few things about human behavior watching them.  For example, people will eat anything, ANYTHING, when they are hungry.  A dieting, obese person will claw through the garbage, past coffee grounds and slimy peach pits, to get to the bag of potato chips they nobly threw away the day before.  Naked people may be afraid of the panther in the jungle, but they’re fearless about eating stinky skunk meat.  I’ve also learned will power is not necessarily won’t power, as in I won’t abandon this challenge.  People will “tap out” of the jungle and put on a pair of underwear if the chiggers get bad enough.  Obese people will go back to fried mayonnaise sandwiches if their only other option is lettuce (I don’t blame them).

A fascinating lesson from these shows has to do with resilience, the very trait needed to get through tough times.  I’ve thought about this lesson a lot lately with our pandemic, job losses, and social unrest.  How can we still be okay when life gets difficult?  How do some people on Naked and Afraid survive 21 days without food, water, or shelter being provided?  How is the 600-pound woman able to withstand a year of only 1200 calories-a-day, or less?  They somehow find the resilience they need to meet their challenge.

From the comfort of my couch I cheer them on, thankful I’m not in their situation—but wait, I AM in their situation.

We all live with some kind of struggle.  It may not be worthy of a reality TV program, but we all have some kind of problem we have to deal with, often on a daily basis.

One thing I try to keep in mind about reality TV is how orchestrated these shows are. There’s a certain amount of character and plot manipulation going on (remember that 1998 movie, The Truman Show?)  Yet, there’s also obvious instances of genuine human suffering on reality TV.  I’ve noticed successful show participants think and act more flexibly.  They demonstrate their resilience by making things better, even in the worst of circumstances. The couple abandoned in the wilds of Indonesia built a cozy hut and figured out how to turn a piece of bamboo into a water filter. The 600-pound man found a way to make his meals more appetizing without the extra calories.  He added colorful chopped vegetables and began experimenting with fresh fruit. They made their hardship less hard.

I thought about reality TV when I visited an old friend of mine who’s suffering from a re-occurrence of her cancer.  I’d been meaning to visit her, to see how she was doing, but couldn’t find a good time.  Finally, one day when I was running errands I stopped by her house.  I felt bad about not calling ahead and hoped, considering her recent bad news, she’d feel like talking with me.  I rang the doorbell and when no one answered, peeked into her back yard.  I’m not sure what I expected to find, but I didn’t anticipate my friend smiling and sitting with her husband in lawn chairs.  They were drinking a glass of wine and looking at the lovely white phlox blooming in her flower bed.  In the background I heard the sweet strains of violin music coming from speakers mounted above the patio.

My friend may only weigh 120 pounds, and she would never think of leaving her home without her clothes on, but she does have something in common with the people on reality TV:  she’s knows how to be resilient in a challenging time.

 

 

Image Credit:  Naked and Afraid    Image Credit:  photo by Diana Hooley

Image Credit:  Resilience

dianahooley Current Events, Out West

A Wind that Blows Nobody Good

On a trip to the coast recently I enjoyed watching the wind send ocean spray flying down the beach.  Not all winds though, are so friendly.  Just today the news reported that an inland hurricane, a derecho, packing 100 mph winds, had flattened crops and destroyed buildings and property in Iowa.  Last week, Hurricane Isaias unleashed wind and rain across the Eastern Seaboard.  And a couple of days ago, multiple tornadoes ripped through greater Chicago causing extensive damage.  As the old Jimmy Reeves song says, these were ill winds that “blew nobody good.”

Ill winds have been part of my history—and as a matter of fact, greater Chicago too.

I grew up not too far from the “windy city” in northern Indiana. When I was eleven-years-old on Palm Sunday1965, two tornadoes struck my little town. Twin funnels cut a swath of destruction killing 1200 people and flattening a trailer park just south of where I lived.  There were a total of 47 tornadoes sighted in the Midwest that Palm Sunday.  To this day it’s still considered to be one of the deadliest and most violent tornado outbreaks ever recorded.  Some people in our town were not even aware of the severe weather forecast. They were sitting in church pews celebrating Easter week when they heard the roar of the twisters.

Unfortunately, the tornado season that year did not end with the Palm Sunday tornadoes.  A month later, again on a Sunday, a tornado was sighted in my town June 6.

I remember this tornado even more than the Palm Sunday twins, because it was the day after my brother Sam died.

Sam and I were taking swimming lessons at the YMCA pool when he lost his life.  Though it happened a long time ago, I still remember how devastated my family was.  We gathered together in the little living room of our ranch-style house, crying and hugging each other. Then suddenly, we heard an eerie wail rise up from the street outside, a sound that had nothing to do with our grief.  Firetrucks were roaming the neighborhood and blaring their sirens.  They were warning people to take shelter because a tornado had been sighted.

I walked out the front screen door to see the firetrucks passing by, and then noticed my grandfather standing in our yard watching the sky.  I stood by him for a while, when another man strolled over and asked Grandpa what he thought about the weather situation.  Grandpa just shook his head as if he couldn’t take one more piece of bad news that day.

Eventually, he responded to the man, telling him he thought the weather didn’t look good, the sky was too green and the air too still.

This was the first time I’d heard about one of the more significant warning signs of an impending tornado: the wind stops blowing.  Apparently, tornadoes create a low pressure vacuum, something commonly known as the calm before the storm.  We were all thankful when we heard on the radio that our area was given the “all clear” by the National Weather Service.

After I married an Idaho farmer and moved out west, I had to get used to the never-ceasing winds that scour these high desert plains.  I’d get nervous when the skies darkened and the wind turned into a full gale.  One year a storm came roaring through the canyon near us.  The wind shook our trailer so much, a favored print by the French artist Jean-Francois Millet, fell from the paneled wall, and cracked the frame.

That wind storm almost sent me to the corner of the room cowering in fear.

I’m still afraid of extreme wind events, though today for an entirely different reason.  I know derecho’s, tornado clusters, and increasing numbers of hurricanes are all signs of the climate changing.  Just because we’re dealing with a viral pandemic does not mean this particular problem has gone away.  But unlike a sudden tragic death, we can do something about climate change—and that gives me hope.

 

Image Credit:  Palm Sunday twin tornadoes 1965       Image Credit:  Derecho

 

 

dianahooley Out West

Stuck and Stranded