After sloshing down a few too many cosmos, my friend Grant likes to make serious life-altering decisions on the Internet. In the middle of the night, he books last minute deals to cities in continental Europe, forgetting that he is supposed to graduate in May. He wakes up at noon to discover rare acoustic versions of Sarah McLachlan B-sides downloaded onto iTunes.
Grant decided to stop plunking around with Travelocity and Limewire, in favor of pouring his wasted little heart out to someone who actually cares, like job recruiters. Specifically, the recruiter for MTV, to whom Grant sent a desperately passive-aggressive email entitled "Give me a job. Now. Please?"
The next morning, in addition to a raging hangover, Grant woke up to an offer to host The Freshmen on MTVU, a show where four college students adopt Paula, Simon or Randy personas and comment on new music videos. Although I claim to be too cool and cultivated for anything in the Urban Outfitters/Acapulco/MTV family, in my jobless anguish, I had no choice but to capitalize on Grant's ambition and co-host the show with him.
We were all talk before the shooting began. For ammunition, we worked on our characters. I exploited my token Asian status and tried to invent a particularly inspiring tribal name like Sujin Park, while Grant donned a cashmere cardigan in an attempt to construe WASPiness as a viable ethnicity.
Our other co-hosts turned out to both be pretty Asian girls who were hotter and better than me. Although one of them introduced herself by saying, "Hi, I'm Kristen. I may be Asian, but I definitely have my blond moments," she studied fashion at Parsons, thereby assuming automatic superiority. The other one, Maikiko, was superior because her name made "Nickie" sound like some backwater corn-bred whitey name.
Grant, considered diverse for the first time in his life, was euphoric.
After my Asianness and supposed coolness were pulled out from under me, everything else unraveled. Ambitions of sounding like a highly intellectual and knowledgeable music guru were forgotten, and I instead insulted new bands for choosing meaningful names like "The Afters" and not being attractive enough for television. I also discussed whether a clever top-heavy camera angle was really disguising a band-wide obesity epidemic.
Luckily, MTVU is virtually non-existent, in that it is only broadcasted on select college campuses. I haven't even seen the show myself, but I am officially announcing my retirement from my television career. The only lasting damage comes from being a has-been before graduating college.
In other news, Grant woke up yesterday still drunk, and found the Afters mysteriously downloaded onto iTunes.
