I know, I know, i'm totally wimping out on the bloggage this week. Basically here's what I've been doing: work, work, work, run while watching episodes of The Biggest Loser on my iPad, then work some more. We can talk later about how I must cry my face off during pretty much the entire last half of every season of that show.
Would I be redeemed as a blogger if I showed you this totally absurd cat food commercial?
Oh, where to begin? I started seeing this short film-esque commercial a couple of months ago, and it caught my eye because I had just seen this Saturday night live commercial parody, and I think the two go well together. Because, let us never forget that behind the million dollar production budget and the narrative heavy commercial and the sentimental music that plucks our heartstrings, at the end of the day, they are TRYING TO SELL US CAT FOOD.
Of course I have to say I am biased becuase I am terribly, awfully allergic to cats, to the point where the inside of my eyelids will swell up and actually cover my eyes if I touch cat fur, and even seeing them hold a cat that fluffy up to their faces made my eyes water and my nose start to run, so I was unable to watch it in the sort of romanticized way that they intended. Like, literally, I have to take Benadryl when even going to the home of someone who has cats. That's how allergic. So– a fluffy white Persian cat like that? Can you hear me sneezing and clearing my throat? What is the correct word to express that sound you make when you sound like YOU'RE going to cough up a hairball? COOOOOOUUUUUUGGGGGGHHHHHHHH. That should about do it.
What's so very funny, to me at least, about the Fancy Feast film, is the part where the guy goes home, then does some sort of construction, then gets the girl a kitten and proposes to her. What's going on with the construction? To me this is what pushes it over the top. Is he building a room for the cat? Didn't he SEE his fiance's parents' house? Doesn't he know that he's marrying a super high maintenance girl who loves super high maintenance cats and is going to make him get a new job and move out of his apartment right after they get married? I repeat: did this guy not see the girl's parents and THER fancy fluffy white cat? If this guy thinks he is getting off with a few renovations to his apartment, he is sorely mistaken, my friend. This guy is on the short plank to "kept woman-ville," where he will assuredly be required to get a soul crushing job at an investment bank, will gain 100 pounds, and will never have sex again.
I'm just saying, the narrative is inaccurate, and I will like to see this same commercial in ten years, when the house is filled with cats and the wife is picking on that poor guy all the time, and he's like "Um…I just wanted to buy you a kitten." Another thing that's funny is that there is a whole extended version of this short film– a Fancy Feast director's cut, if you will, which includes footage of the guy actually drafting plans for the "cat room" on an architect's table, and could only have been funnier if you saw him go to Petco to get the kitten's nametag engraved in that machine they have at the front that makes a loud noise (or maybe he got it at Tiffany, that's what we're probably supposed to think), but which makes me wonder– are they going to name the cat "Will You Marry Us?" and if not, you're probably going to need to get a new nametag ASAP in case that little sucker gets out. If you want to watch that, please go right ahead, and feel free to leave your comments here.
Oh, and speaking of comments, one of the reasons I didn't write much this week was because I got a totally nasty comment from a guy that just didn't like my writing and wanted to tell me about how stupid he thought I was at length (which I didn't publish because I don't like to encourage people who are mean and critical). This discouraged me and made me kind of not want to write, because in the age of Twitter and Facebook and everything going a million miles an hour, it actually takes time to sit down and put your thoughts down, and when you get back feedback, it just makes you feel like that time was wasted. Few things bother me more than feeling like I wasted my time, so I just took a couple of days off to put that behind me.
So listen, guy who called my Saturday Night Live writeup a "pile of shit": this is my blog, those were my thoughts, it is a free country and a free Internet last time I checked, and also, please go away.
