The Birthday Bubble

Life in the LA Bubble is now officially one year old.  That’s a whole year’s worth of psycho-therapy I’ve managed to avoid and a considerable fortune I’ve saved my husband in his co-pay contribution towards  our medical bills.  Personally I think he should be very grateful that I’ve found something to keep me occupied but his main comment whenever I attempt to discuss my blogging hobby is “who are you taking a knock at this week?”

However, those witty sarcasms no longer spring so readily from my keyboard. I worry I am developing immunity to the very things that first compelled me to write; I’m concerned my blog will just degenerate into another boring travelogue.

I have become more than acclimatized, I’m a pseudo American.  I no longer take daily treks to the supermarket, I now go to the store.  I don’t re-fill my car with petrol, I stock up with gas. It’s not a dollar note, it’s now a dollar bill. There is even a string of pumpkin fairy lights adorning my balcony and it’s several weeks off Halloween.

After a week in Canada and Alaska where we had access to that way too serious heavyweight BBC World News, it was such a relief to return to LA and watch the local evening news leading with a story about a Beverly Hills beauty salon which is revolutionizing hair removal with a new sugaring technique. It’s vitally important we get to know about these things – forget bankruptcy in Greece and unrest in the Middle East, if I can save five seconds every morning by not having to shave my armpits, I need to know about it. Definitely.

I’m not alarmed that the American media treats me like a complete bimbo.  I’ve got used to it – I’ve dumbed myself down.  I can no longer handle a crossword puzzle or a Suduko.  A word search is quite taxing enough for me. 

This week we were glued to the TV to the start of Fox’s new mega-series Terra Nova.  My husband was very excited and said we couldn’t miss it. Fox had been advertising it for weeks and apparently it cost millions of dollars to make.  The teenager who had been sat supposedly  homeworking but  probably facebooking in her room emerged half way through the evening and asked what we an earth we were watching. “It’s a new series”, my husband explained, “a sort of cross between Jurassic Park and……..” he faltered to find the right words.   “Absolute rubbish” I suggested helpfully.

But did we turn it off? No, of course not; we sat there positively embracing the drivel and watched it to the very end, commercial breaks and all. And talking of commercial breaks, such a welcome respite – you really don’t want to be bombarded with too much of the story in one go.  Five minutes snippets are perfectly adequate.

The fact that the teenager preferred to sit with her older sister watching a recording of the British drama series Inspector Lewis says it all. Inspector Lewis – where’s the fun in that? That’s way too intelligent and requires a high level of concentration skill that quite frankly I've learned to live without. Where’s the excitement? Where’s the action? Does the paying public really want those complicated plots and poker faced (albeit rather sexy) Sergeant Hathaway when they could be watching futuristic colonists with rippling muscles blasting off a dinosaur's head with a mega gun?

Speaking of dinosaurs, Ashton Kutcher has now replaced Charlie Sheen in Two and a Half Men.  When I first started Life in the LA Bubble I asked myself would I ever find this show funny; would that to be the ultimate test of my conversion to Americanism?

Well I may well have succumbed to an awful lot of America’s charms, but thankfully, there are still some parts of its culture I can resist.   I may have dumbed down, but I'm not totally stupid. There’s life in my bubble yet.