Katy McDermott

It happens every year. I swear I’m not going to be seduced by the hyperbolic come-ons (“our most controversial audition ever!”) of American Idol, but every year I am anyway.

Currently, I’m watching American Idol, The Biggest Loser, Project Runway, and Survivor. Over the summer, I never missed an episode of So You Think You Can Dance, and I took occasional detours to the Jersey Shore (oh, the shame!) and spent a few hours with some Real Housewives. (Side note: Real Housewives apparently have no jobs and multimillionaire husbands. All of them. Somewhere, Gloria Steinem is crying.)

I’m not proud of this.

Part of the problem is all the associated written content (thanks for the recaps, EW.com and Project Rungay guys) – I’m a big fan of the written word, obviously, so half the reason I watch these shows now is to see what assorted brilliant and funny writers will say about them. Then, of course, there are several hilarious video blogs devoted to the most popular programs. Can’t miss those.

The scheduling conflicts with the scripted shows I watch are a bit of a challenge. I also have a problem with the near-constant sleep deprivation as I wake at 5:30 each morning and drive, bleary-eyed, to work. The worst thing, though, is my lack of eye contact when one of my family tries to talk to me during “my” shows. Sometimes, it seems like our most profound interaction is over the unjust ouster of a hapless reality show contestant…

Good God, what is happening to me?

Six hours of inane reality TV in a good week. If I’m going to watch TV, at least it could be something intellectual like a documentary on PBS or a nature show on BBC America. But no – it’s Top Chef for me (how on earth do they chop an onion so fast? And without crying too?) The best I can figure is that it’s my insecurities coming out. I can’t sing, dance, or design clothes. I can’t even chop an onion properly. I would certainly never eat bugs (I’m in awe of anyone who goes without proper bathrooms for 40 days) or work out for 9 hours at a time. My theory: I’m fascinated by reality TV because I like watching people do stuff I can’t do.

Proof positive: I’m bored by the Bachelor and all its “Love” iterations (Rock of/Shot of/Flavor of/etc.), probably because I’m content in my own relationship. Being happy with my guy? That’s something I can do.

Nowadays, in addition to the old standbys, it seems like there’s a reality show for every taste…

My favorite of the up-and-coming “stuff you’ll never ever do but are secretly fascinated by” reality TV genre is Deadliest Catch (RIP, Captain Phil!) Those guys are NUTS, and it’s so much fun to watch. More than once, I’ve cheered their discovery of a full-to-bursting crab pot from my anything-but-icy living room in the placid suburbs of Philadelphia. I had a company holiday recently, and was as pleased as a 4-year-old girl who got a pony for Christmas to spend the entire afternoon watching a Deadliest Catch marathon. 

Then there’s the “you could totally do this – why don’t you try it?” type of reality show. Ace of Cakes, Trading Spaces, and the like. I may not be able to make a multi-layered Deathstar-shaped confection for my husband’s next birthday, but by God, I can do better than a store-bought sheet cake with a few glutinous icing roses and his name spelled wrong. As for Trading Spaces, that looks ridiculously easy. Find a pair of fantastic matching bookcases at a yard sale, repaint them (it only takes a minute and a half on the show, after all), add a few colorful throw rugs, and impress the heck out of my friends. (Although I suspect some of those shows are rigged. The only yard sales I seem to find are the ones with broken-down Big Wheels and some mismatched crockery displayed on a wobbly card table.) 

I also enjoy reality shows in the “don’t you feel smug and superior?” genre. Shows like Half-Ton Teen and Ruby – no matter how dissatisfied I may be with my weight, I always feel better after an hour of watching someone who’s 700 pounds. That makes me a bad person, doesn’t it?

The one I admit to not getting is the “watch these spoiled rich kids!” genre. MTV is the head-scratcher network for me, as far as reality TV is concerned. I’m hardly their demographic, but still – My Super Sweet Sixteen makes me want to throw things at the screen every time I see it. And I can’t help wondering what those parents DO for a living – are they all drug kingpins or something? My husband and I work hard at professional jobs for solid companies – but we could no more have given our 16-year-old a convertible Porsche than flown to the moon. We rented a tent for her party, and considered that a big deal!

Of course, I can’t forget the “morbid curiosity” shows like Trauma: Life in the ER and Mystery Diagnosis. Will so-and-so survive his blunt-force trauma head wound? Can this infant come through 18 surgeries to correct her potentially crippling birth defect? Of course, the patients are always fine in the end, which makes me feel better about occasionally wallowing in this “slow-down-for-the-accident-scene” reality TV genre.

So wait – that’s actually more than American Idol, The Biggest Loser, Project Runway, and Survivor, isn’t it?

Jersey Shore, Real Housewives, Deadliest Catch, Top Chef, Ace of Cakes, Trading Spaces, Half-Ton Teen, Ruby, My Super Sweet Sixteen, Trauma: Life in the ER, Mystery Diagnosis… and that’s not even counting my new faves in the growing “bet you wish you had a dog” genre of reality TV: Dog Whisperer, Dogtown, and the ever-compelling Underdog to Wonderdog.  

As I mentioned, I’m not proud of it.

But thank God for Tivo!

Over six months ago, I quit smoking. It sounds so casual when it’s written like that – but honestly, that wasn’t the case. The first time I tried was 17 years before I finally succeeded. In the meantime, I tested every method of quitting short of getting my jaws surgically wired shut…

Nicotine gum? Tried it. Nicotine lozenges? They tasted disgusting, but I tried them nonetheless. Nicotine inhaler? Tried that too. The patch? Yep. That led to my most successful previous attempt, as a matter of fact – close to 2 months back in 1997. (Of course, I was entirely miserable and driven into therapy by the end of it, but that’s another story…) Naturally, I tried the pharmaceutical methods as well – first Zyban and then, years later, Chantix. Ever read the fine print on those? (And I do that for my job, so I know what it means.) Sca-ry! I stopped taking them pronto.

I didn’t ignore alternate medicine on my quest. Acupuncture didn’t work (perhaps because my abiding fear of needles left me so stressed out that I smoked with shaking hands on the way home from every session.) Neither did hypnosis. I bought a pack of cigarettes on my way home from my first appointment. However, I was determined to find my “magic bullet” – some way to quit without it being hard. I even drove 6 hours last year to a hypnotist called the Mad Russian who was celebrated for “curing” almost 100,000 smokers. All that hype – and I was smoking again within hours….

Of course, I can’t forget to mention my many, many attempts to “taper down.” Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

(They didn’t work.)

However, in the past several years, I grew increasingly desperate (hence my pilgrimage to the Mad Russian). A former coworker was diagnosed with lung cancer, and I had several health scares of my own. Together, they made me realize that it had to happen. I had to quit. I first tried the cold turkey method (with neither education nor support) last February, and lasted 5 days before I broke, drove to the nearest convenience store, and bought a pack of True Menthols with the mingled shame and relief of a true addict. Oh, the “security,” the familiar feel of the pack in my hand, a cigarette between my lips, my lighter at the ready! Within about 48 hours, I was back to my old level – a pack a day.

In July, though, I decided to give stopping cold turkey one last shot… Enter the website whyquit.com, the result of an internet search. (God bless technology!)

At the site, I found TONS of education, and that education made the difference. I can’t claim that quitting cold turkey was easy – it wasn’t – but it wasn’t impossible either, as I’d always believed.

And the key? I wasn’t alone! There was a support section on the website, a message board frequented by people from all over the world in different stages of their quit-smoking journeys. (Those white-knuckle first few days seem to be the same no matter what the time zone.)

A fellow in China had to figure out how to avoid the many cigarettes offered to him on a 30-hour train trip to Mongolia… several residents of the UK and Australia needed to re-learn how to enjoy their games of soccer without the demon weed… a Danish woman faced her first vacation (in the Alpine forest) without cigarettes… a Bulgarian girl cheered everyone on, no matter what… an American ex-pat living in Austria tried to deal with life in one of the last European countries to allow smoking in bars… an Italian doctor wrote of sneaking his smokes in between visits to the bedsides of emphysema patients… closer to home, a wonderfully supportive dog groomer in Florida shared her dismay at being virtually surrounded by smokers, both at home and at work, and a former healthcare professional in Texas remembered smoking in the nurse’s lounge at her hospital…

Everyone had an individual story, but the common thread was that we’d all decided to quit.

The knowledge that despite our cultural, linguistic, and political differences, we were all facing (and beating!) the exact same challenge, was exhilarating in the extreme. That’s global cooperation in action! Even though many of us have months of not smoking behind us now, we still turn to each other. We celebrate each other’s milestones, lean on each other when we have a difficult time with staying quit, commiserate when life throws us curveballs, and even share strategies for losing the few pounds some of us gained while quitting. (And as a fun aside, I now know some interesting British slang! Which I’ll take care never to use in a London pub!)

In time, some of us formed our own support group on Facebook (it’s called “Nicotine Freedom For All,” if anyone’s interested), but the education at whyquit.com is what helped many of us to quit in the first place.

The support? The support is what’s helped us to stay quit.

The members of this international group have a special acronym – NTAP (it stands for “Never Take Another Puff”) – but it’s pretty loosely organized for a secret society, I’ll admit. There are no bylaws, no rules (other than continuing to not smoke), no executive committee, and no dues. The only law is the “law of addiction” (“administration of a drug to an addict will cause re-establishment of chemical dependence upon the addictive substance”), and the only dress code is “any article of clothing without cigarettes in the pockets.”

It’s helpful and wonderful and all the rest – but we really need to get to work on a members-only handshake and some funny hats…

Before he died many years ago, my father told me, “Count your blessings, young lady!” I can’t claim he meant it as any sort of deep and lasting legacy-ish statement. I was about 6, and he was probably trying to get me to eat my vegetables by reminding me how many unlucky children had no Brussels sprouts at all. (I don’t think that line of reasoning swayed me much…)

Now that I’m an adult, though, I find that phrase comes in handy a lot, despite my firmly agnostic worldview.

“Count your blessings, young lady.”

To me, it means simply, “if you change how you look at things, you’ll appreciate them more.”

Take grocery shopping. We do it every week, and it’s about as mundane a chore as you can find. Milk? Check. Cereal? Check. Cat litter? Check. Stuff for dinners? Snacks for work? Check and check.

However – and this is the important part – pretend you’re a newly arrived immigrant from a country with a restrictive, totalitarian regime. Years ago, I saw stories on the news about citizens in what was then the Soviet Union waiting in line for hours for a stick of butter and some bootlaces. And while I’m sure the butter-and-bootlace situation has greatly improved, I still use the image.

The average American grocery store contains thousands of colorful choices from apricot jam to Ziploc bags and everything in between. Butter? Try five different brands. And then of course there’s light butter, heart-healthy butter, unsalted butter, and whipped butter (and let’s not even talk about all the other dairy products – there must be 50 different kinds of yogurt alone!) As for bootlaces, just check out the “shoe care” section of the laundry aisle – what color would you like?

See? Imagine that’s your perspective, and what used to be a chore will seem like a miracle.

“Count your blessings, young lady.”

Think about purging and reorganizing the dreaded junk drawer. Could anything be more boring? Is it any wonder we put it off?

My junk drawer at the moment contains (among other things) a pair of scissors that frequently takes itself out on excursions, several half-used rolls of tape, a couple of train schedules, a bunch of take-out menus, a random candy cane, a battered package of airsickness pills purchased at the Dublin airport four years ago, and a spare house key.

Or, as I can choose to think of it, a memory book.

How many presents have I used those scissors and tape to wrap? We brought each one to a party, a time we got together with friends and family for laughter, food, embarrassing stories… Those train schedules call to mind all the homecoming hugs I’ve received from my out-of-state brother and nephew. I only see them once or twice a year, so those visits are extra-special… The take-out menus make me think of all the lovely Friday nights my family and I have enjoyed – the work week over, no desire to cook, how about some Chinese food and what DVD should we watch tonight?… That rogue candy cane must have made a stealthy escape – its compatriots decorated our Christmas tree, our stockings, and half our presents last year. That rogue candy cane, all by itself, makes me remember a truly magical day just this past December: we trimmed our tree, watched heartwarming holiday specials (is there anyone who doesn’t tear up at the Grinch’s ice-cold feet in the snow, incongruously sweet dog, and singing-inspired change of heart?), baked cookies, and listened to Christmas carols like “Chipmunks Roasting on an Open Fire” (okay, okay – I can only do so much of the Norman Rockwell stuff)… The airsickness pills remind me of a glorious vacation in Ireland, complete with unimaginably gorgeous countryside, lots of Guinness, and an unexpected upgrade to a penthouse suite… And the house key? Simply another reminder of how lucky we are to be homeowners, especially in these precarious economic times.

A reminder, in fact, to “Count your blessings, young lady.”

This past week, we had two snowstorms here in Philadelphia. Our development has no garages, and we watched through frost-encased windows as our cars gradually became individual, indistinguishable igloos. Finally, this past Wednesday night, the snow slackened for an hour or two, and a lot of us residents began the long process of digging out…

Normally, we’d just nod grimly and try not to dump snow on our neighbors’ slowly-emerging vehicles. The conditions on Wednesday, however, were extreme even by blizzard standards. People carried their dogs instead of walking them, shoveling small spaces for the animals to “go.” Neighbors lent each other shovels, passed around snow-melt and salt, exchanged tales of unplowed roads, and a few hardy college kids even brought out snowboards to try on the local hills. Perhaps it was the late hour, perhaps the unexpected camaraderie, but somehow it turned into a party. People chilled beers in snowbanks that are gardens in the spring, and by the end of it, we wound up with a group of folks at the bar in our basement. We made tentative plans to hold a poker game – plans that something tells me will become definite.

New friends.

Another blessing for me to count.

I know you were just trying to get me to eat Brussels sprouts… but thanks, Dad.

The Winter Olympics are fast approaching, and that made me think of this essay. I wrote it a few years back for the Summer Olympics – but I think the sentiments are the same…

For my money, the greatest moments of any Olympics happen before the first shot has been put, the first dive drilled, or the first dismount stuck. I’m talking, of course, about the Opening Ceremonies – and specifically, the Parade of Nations. For about two hours (although it seems a lot longer to those who carp about it every four years), colorfully clad representatives of every nation on earth march together into one stadium, and are greeted by the roar of untold thousand voices simply because they exist, and they are together.

It’s a fantasy – we all know it. There are athletes standing next to each other in that stadium from countries sworn to destroy each other. As soon as the Games begin, nationalism, ignorance, and prejudice will shoulder themselves to the front of the line as they always do. When the Games begin, accusations will be hurled and festering hatreds will boil unchecked. 

But not tonight. Not this night.

As an American, I find the Parade of Nations both poignant and curiously humbling.  Watching it from my comfortable, gadget-saturated house in the most advanced country on earth is almost embarrassing. Burundi, for example, gets to me. It’s great to see Americans win medals – joy is joy, and infectious in any language. But all the same, I know our athletes are well-fed, well-funded, and often bolstered by legions of everything from nutritionists to sports psychologists to massage therapists. Do the Burundian (Burundese?) athletes have massage therapists? I’m guessing not, which makes their one Olympic medal (in Atlanta, 1996) all the more impressive.

Every four years, I realize anew how ignorant I am of global expansion. When I was in college 20-odd years ago, I took a class in World Geography from a notoriously crusty and much-loved professor. By the end of that course, by God, I could name every country on earth and its capital (including my all-time favorite, Ouagadougou – look it up).  Today, I realize, I wouldn’t make it past the mid-term.

What is Barbuda, and when did Antigua adopt it? Comoros? Never heard of it. Kiribati? Not ringing a bell. São Tomé and Principe? I think someone just made that one up. And when did Guinea start procreating? Now we’ve got plain old Guinea, Papua New Guinea, Equatorial Guinea and Guinea-Brissau. We make so much of the birth of our nation here in America, yet there is a veritable nursery full of nations that have been born in recent decades, and somehow I never heard a word. 

Of all the young and unsung nations I encountered during this year’s Parade of Nations, however, none affected me as much as Nauru. Here was the proud Nauruan (Nauruese?) delegation – all three of them, I think – striding into the Olympic stadium behind their beloved Nauru flag, their one athlete surely as excited and overwhelmed as our own poster boy Michael Phelps, and I didn’t even know what continent the country was in.  When I looked it up, I found myself wishing with all my heart that Nauru had a ringer – a come-from-behind, who-is-this-guy upstart who would win the 100-meter dash and show our coddled American darlings what was what. 

Nauru is the smallest independent republic in the world. You could fit its total population into your average football stadium in the States and probably have room left over for São Tomé and Principe. Nauru’s main source of revenue is bird guano – and they’re running out of that. It’s the only nation on earth that doesn’t even have a capital city. God, I want them to win something.

When we talk about the Olympic spirit, we usually mean it in an individual context – Kerri Strug vaulting on an injured ankle, Jesse Owens and Ludwig “Luz” Long forging an unlikely friendship in Berlin, Al Oerter winning gold in 4 consecutive Olympics and continuing to compete far beyond that. But to me, the Olympic spirit is best embodied by the Parade of Nations – that one magic night when the biggest cheers are reserved for the smallest nations, the understudies on the world stage, the ones who work hard, show up, and hope for a miracle. Will they win medals, these under-funded, unknown underdogs?  For most of them, the answer is probably not (although in the case of Nauru, I have high hopes – any nation that can found itself on guano is a force to be reckoned with.)

So okay, most of the lesser-known players will go home without hardware. But on Parade of Nations night, they’re there. 

They’re there together, and I’m glad.