I have an unhealthy obsession with seeing average people win needless crap. The more average the person and the more needless the crap, the higher my brain’s serotonin spikes.
Well, that’s not always true. Should a hopeless black sheep be placed directly next to the ole average Joe, I’d prefer the sheep win instead. The tragically disfigured single girl who lost her high school sweetheart in an appalling free-water diving accident and who has now been encompassed by a pool of 24 Greek goddesses on the new season of The Bachelor, that’s the poor girl I root for every single time. Growing up underweight and overly interested in football, I’ve always seen myself in the underdog.
Show me an episode of Cash Cab where a mom and an infant win two hundred dollars in cash, and I’ll show you my eyes tearing up.
Give me an episode of Undercover Boss where an undervalued employee gets a promotion and a pay raise, and I’ll give you funeral-level sniffles.
But let me watch an episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, where a minority family of four gets a castle, complete with a moat, Dodge Ram, twelve college tuitions, and a new houseboat that could harbor twenty-two Guatemalan families inside of it, and I will make you watch my incessant sobbing into my pillow that night. Extreme Makeover warrants the best kind of cry, like everything I’ve ever hated is being released inside those tears of goodwill.
Mostly I blame my late grandmother for the blubbery mess that I have become every time watch a new reality game show. My granny was the first one to ever give me free reign to a remote control, and together we'd watch coma-inducing levels of The Price is Right throughout the ‘90s. There, laid out on her hide-a-bed covered in protective wrap, is where I learned what empathy was for the first time.
We’d take turn bidding on cooking pots, hot tubs and Jeep Wranglers, imagining what it’d be like to enjoy each. The closest we’d ever come to such treasures was during early Saturday morning yard sales and trips to Big Lots, but even then we couldn’t swing such purchases. Instead we’d sit by an empty Jacuzzi in a stranger’s front yard talking about what we’d buy if we won the jackpot lottery our state didn’t have.
We’d dream and hope, and just when our wishes turned into envy, she’d hush us in only the way a good tabacca-chewin’ granny can.
“Be ‘quat,” she’d say. “We ain’t studyin’ that.”
And so we’d go back to wishing it for other people.