Your Unemployed Daughter

photo credit: Nitro101

I have a new guilty pleasure. I have been watching the new 90210 again, after swearing off it last season when it just seemed too stupid and the girls were too skinny and it didn’t compare at all to the classic.

(Brandon, Dylan, Brenda, Kelly … you really had an impact on me. That is, before you went to college and moved into the beach house and everything got a little silly, what with David on a mix of uppers and downers and Brandon dating the chancellor’s exhibitionist daughter, and Dylan’s dad blowing up but not and Kelly and Donna surviving endless fires/rapes/stalkers/cults…)

Back when I was in high school my brother and I would not miss an episode. And since there were no DVRs at that rather antiquated time period, Mom would allow us to eat dinner in front of the television—quite the luxury, indeed.

Anyway, I’ve taken to watching the new class again, in front of the TV, while I eat dinner. It’s less of a luxury as there’s nowhere else in my apartment to eat dinner, unless I sit on my bed, and that has the makings of a disaster. The show comes on Tuesday at 9 pm, and you should really check it out.

Not convinced? Let me catch you up:

There’s Adriana (last season she battled a drug problem and had a baby, which she gave up for adoption), who just broke up with her boyfriend (Navid) to be with her old camp boyfriend (Teddy) and now is really sad because she gave into the glitzy allure of a six-pack and lost the love of her life.

Navid, whose dad is a porn billionaire, didn’t even show in last night’s episode, probably because he’s totally devastated about Adriana, who he stuck with through her pregnancy (not his, btw) and didn’t even sleep with for, like, ages.

Then there’s Silver, the younger sister of Kelly (she was known as Erin back when Kelly and David Silver lost her that time on the playground when David was a druggie) who has just found out that her mom (remember coked-up Jackie at the charity fashion show?) is dying of cancer.

Oh, and Silver is bipolar and hates Teddy, the asshole famous actor’s son/breaker-upper of Navid and Adriana, but hit some tennis balls with him last night when he shared that his mom also died of cancer.

Kelly is Kelly, unforgiving of poor Jackie, bossy to Silver. She confesses all to the principal of the high school where she works, who she has a crush on. Unfortunately, the principal’s wife (played by Lori Loughlin from Full House) has picked up on the crush vibes, and the lunchtime heart-to-heart goes awry when wife (Deb) shows up with a sandwich for her hubby (Harry), who had canceled on her to break bread with Kells.

Harry and Debbers happens to also be the occasional pot-brownie-eating mom and dad of Annie and Dixon, who, respectively, urged on by her stalker/drug-peddling/Mother, may I sleep with danger? boyfriend just stole a car (and, end of last season, killed a homeless man, who was the uncle of the aforementioned boyfriend, in a hit and run); and is about to get kicked off the surfing team because he spends too much time with his elderly girlfriend who, apparently, is preggers with his baby.

My life, by comparison, is a snoozefest. I mean, yeah, I doused some dude with a glass of wine a couple weekends ago, and got kicked out of a bar. I have to go to Barnes and Noble to buy a book for some interviews I’ve got to do for a new project with an impending deadline. One time at a party I took another girl’s lipstick accidentally. My metrocard is about to run out.

Basically, the only thing I’ve experienced that these high school kids haven’t is being unemployed. And that’s largely because they are still in high school, I imagine.

But in comparison to druggings and muggings and teen pregnancies and older sisters who sleep with the high school boy you have a crush on and then defraud you for $100,000 claiming they need the money to divorce their ex-husband but then really buy a horse with it (that’s Naomi and big sis Jen, by the way), gosh, sounds like we jobless have it sorta easy.

PS: The show also includes such masterful dialogue as: “Annie, you’ve got my neurons firing on all cylinders,” and “He’s probably tormenting some hair-sprayed chick with french manicure toenails as we speak. Ugh, vomit!”

See what I mean?

What are you watching because it makes you feel better about your life?