The Best Reality Show You'll Never See

I'm still posting some older posts her to beef up the content. If you've seen this before, carry on. If not, hey, what's up?

I always chuckle a bit when I tell people I work with orphaned kids and they say, “Oh, I would love to work with kids. It must be sooo fun!”  Ha! Here’s the deal. Children of all backgrounds are not nearly as sweet as people make them out to be. They’re inherently selfish, greedy, inconsiderate of others and generally evil. Stamping out these problems and making children less inherently evil is what’s referred to in society as ‘parenting.’

Orphans don’t get this luxury.

Jesus tells us all to take care of the orphans, but I think most people are wrong in assuming he’s saying this as a nice, calm sentiment. It was probably more like “Please! If you have any love in your heart for your fellow man, take care of the orphans. Good Lord, take care of the orphans. Because if you don’t, they will rip you apart limb from limb and then use your spleen to flavor a bag of flaming hot cheetos.”

I was totally listening, Jesus.

I work with 6 teenagers getting ready to emancipate, which basically means they leave residential treatment and head out into that big world on their own, as prepared as we can make them. I humbly submit that watching this all go down would be the best reality tv show in all the land.

It would be a bit like Jon and Kate plus 8, except replace 8 relatively normal toddlers with 6 sexually charged teenage orphans with poor social skills and remove Jon and Kate and install a perpetually calm and patient team of workers that never gets rattled despite the constant barrage of temper tantrums, sentences laced with ‘fuck’ used as every part of speech, and suicide threats.

It would be like the Real World sans perpetual douchebags and replaced with potential douchebags who we're trying to help not become perpetual douchebags.

Now, the thing is, for all the bad times we have at work, there are also equally poignant times were you really see a light flicker on in someone’s head and they begin to get it. These moments make it all worth it.

Which would make watching on tv worth it as well, because you always want your characters to grow in a story, whether those characters are real or not. And boy howdy, are they characters. Take a gander at a few of these gems:

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While talking about a school project:

kid 1: I need to do a report on saints. Is Don Quijote a saint?
me: no.
kid 1: I know who I'm going to pick. Obi-wan Kenobi.
me: you can't do that.
kid 1: Why not?
me: Two reasons. One the Catholic Church has not recognized Obi-Wan Kenobi as a saint, and two, he's not real.
kid 1: So? Neither was Don Quijote.
me: He wasn't a saint either, dude.
kid 1: Whatever. Shows how much you know.
kid 2: (eavesdropping, sweeping the floor) Wait. Don Quijote was in Star Wars?

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At the Getty, all of us in a room full of Greek statues. Kid stops in front of a statue:

Kid: Wait. Wait. I know who this is. Don’t tell me.
Me: Okay.
Kid: (scratching his head.) It’s um…um…HERPES. There it is. HERPES.

(everyone in the room turns to give a curious stare. Kid knows he said something wrong.)

Me: (walking away laughing) It’s Hermes, man. Hermes.

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While driving a kid to school:

Kid: It’s really windy today. Think we might get a hurricane.
Me: We don’t get hurricanes in Los Angeles. Just the east coast.
Kid: Really?
Me: Yeah. They come in from Africa and hit the Gulf of Mexico.
Kid: Like the one that hit New Orleans.
Me: Yup. Sometimes they hit Florida too.
Kid: I thought Florida was in New Orleans. Isn’t it?

(me shaking my head, silently criticizing curriculum taught in California geography classes.)

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While having a conversation about acronyms:

Me: Okay. What does NBA stand for?
Kid 1: National Basketball Association.
Me: LAX.
Kid 2: Los Angeles International Airport.
Me: FBI
(long pauses)
Kid 1: Um….Federal….Bupartment……
Me: Bupartment isn’t a word. Try this one. Nascar.
Kid 2: National Ass Car

(me and coworker snorting up enchiladas for the next five minutes until kid finally gets what he said.)

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See. How can you go wrong with National Ass Car?

Or, for that matter, how can you go wrong with incredibly articulate kids who are trying their best to succeed with the bum hand they’ve been given?

Answer: You can’t.

Unfortunately, you really can’t find out because this would never happen. There are way too many legal hoops to jump through to get kids in the system in front of a camera, and sadly, the State of California would never allow it to happen. Too many privacy laws and potential lawsuits from gold digging parents.

Maybe in a perfect world….but then, in a perfect world, this would never exist.