Flipped out
Last night after the gym, I got sucked into Bravo’s Flipping Out. If you haven’t seen it: it’s a reality show that follows Jeff, a real estate investor who buys houses, fixes them up and sales them - i.e. flips them. Jeff is, to put it mildly, a lunatic. He insists, for instance, that all the bottles in his fridge line up and face the same way, that his employees dust the tops of the kitchen cabinets daily and take his dogs for a walk once per hour all day long. Jeff has four employees - an assistant who helps with the business, a housekeeper, a house manager (whose job is ill-defined) and a house manager’s assistant whose job is to sweep the leaves off the sidewalks and other tasks as assigned. He is constantly yelling at, berating, screaming at, and flipping out at his employees. Jeff’s former boyfriend Ryan is his business partner (Ryan has a husband, child, nanny and sane life). Jeff, by contrast, is a seething mass of financially brilliant nuttiness.
Okay, so Jeff is convinced one of his staffers is hurting his dogs. So he secretly installs nanny-cams to spy on them. At one point in the episode, he’s talking with Ryan who says, “We have to sell this house, we’ve been sitting on it a year,” and Jeff replies, “I can’t do this now. This sting operation is the most important thing in my life right now.” He has a million dollar house sitting around doing nothing and he’s been talking about being short of ready cash and the big issue in his life is installing nannycams to spy on his employees. It occurred to me as I was watching that the issue for Jeff is all about perspective - he has none, all he can see is his issues, his needs, his feelings, his world - he has no balance, no life, no relationships, no larger issue so he “flips out” about everything. I’m sure there’s a lesson there.
July 2nd, 2008 at 12:15 pm
I don’t watch the show, but, I like where he’s coming from.
If someone was, or I thought was, hurting my dogs?
HULK SMASH
At least he was looking for proof.
July 2nd, 2008 at 12:44 pm
I wonder, has anybody ever checked to see if there are extremely self-centered people who are also broke? Most of the ones I know do pretty well for themselves…
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Yes, I usually spot them begging for change in front of the local drugstore. Same folks, day in and day out. They are there from 8-10am, 11am-1pm and 4-6pm. And it’s never their fault that they are homeless. Nope.
July 2nd, 2008 at 11:21 pm
I once came across a guy on the internet somewhere that had submitted a pilot for a reality show about a veteran who goes around helping other veterans and people with needs. He had a website about it and it looked like a really good idea.
I haven’t seen it anywhere and don’t expect to because television is designed to ignore poor people unless a cop is breaking down their door after things have gotten out of control.
What a country!