Riding in Cars with Boys

In just a moment, I will be adding the proverbial Sun-In to the hair of Malibu Barbie. Which is to say that I will not only be confessing to having watched "The Hills," but I will also be quoting it. Vapid say whuh?

I know this show is based on reality, based loosely on a reality that exists in the minds' eyes of the producers of MTV who can position the real-life characters as their pawns, because some stay at home mother like I will be putting away dishes and get sucked in to the unreality of it all. And then get online and blog about how there was a chard of reality in a recent episode, a small chip of real glass that fell from the Malibu Barbie's hair into my hand and I've been carrying it around ever since.

*** The narrator of the show, LC, meets this boy Stephen - with whom she'd had "a thing with" in high school - for dinner. After dinner, he drives her home and she says, Remember in high school? How I'd always tell you I'd need to leave the party to make curfew and I'd say, Okay, we've got 7 minutes, and you always got me home on time?

To which Stephen says, Yeah, but I never drove too crazy, though...I had precious cargo.

BAH!

*** Can you b'lieve? Yeah, I was touched by this, even if it was masterfully scripted, because in all of high school, never EVER was I driven home by a boy who treated me as precious cargo. I think most of the time I was driving my own toochis home in my mom's white marshmallow mini-van to make curfew. The rest of the time, if I was being carted by some stooge, we would spend the ride listening to "Gettin' Jiggy" and pointing out Mustangs, or there would be some asenine conversation about their high school which they worshiped and I would be plagued with the perennial fear that I would be raped in the backseat and left for dead NOT KIDDING.

There was one person who was very special to me just after high school-ish, though, that always made me feel like precious cargo, always listened amusedly to everything I had to say and would always notice when I was starting to nod off narcoleptically and would quickly charge into some story about the novelty of mudflaps with superheroes on them - something like that. We had the beginnings of a thing, the tickle in your nose before you actually sneeze sort of a thing, but I'll always remember how that felt.

*** Someday, some guy will want to drive Baby Girl home and he will have to leave a copy of his driver's license and fingerprints with me before doing so, but, my stars, do I hope he knows how to make her feel like precious cargo. And I hope he knows he's a dead man if he brings her back a second past curfew.