"iThink iLike iCarly" by Troy H. Cheek on Jan 12, 2009
Well into the third week of my sinus infection, I broke down and went to the doctor just to end the misery. Not the misery of being sick, mind you. I wanted to end the misery of my cow-orkers refusing to work with me, the misery of being constantly told how bad I looked or sounded, the misery of patients telling me that I could have their beds, etc.
I was afraid to go to the doctor at first, lacking insurance like I did. Well, it's not so much that I lack insurance. I have "excellent" insurance through work. The problem is that the insurance plan which looks excellent on paper has been somewhat less so in practice. I'm still appealing the payoff on my eye exams last year. The insurance company's stance is that although I went to the health care providers they specified, I saw the one particular doctor in the group who wasn't an "in-network provider" so it's my own damned fault that they paid as little as they did. I should also be thankful they paid as much as they did, as other insurance companies wouldn't have paid anything. Like I said, I'm appealing. Or, rather, the nice girl at work is appealing for me.
With all that in mind, before going back to my regular doctor (who has been treating me the last few months after my last one decided to seek other job opportunities elsewhere) at the regular office of the regular practice, I called up the insurance company. Actually, I had one of the nephews call, as I didn't feel like arguing at the moment. According to said nephew, I could go to the regular doctor at the regular office of the regular practice, but I could not go to the different doctor at the nearer office of the regular practice. The different doctor was not in my network.
This caused me to put of visiting the doctor for a while, as the regular office was closed that week and only the other, closer office was open. The week was over about the time the misery got to be too much. I decided to double check and, lo and behold, now the other doctor at the other office was in my network, while the regular doctor at the regular office was out. Perhaps he hadn't renewed his contract, or the database hadn't been updated yet when I last called, or I had been simply mistaken.
After about three calls to the insurance company and the doctor's office, I got a tentative agreement that I could go to my regular doctor at the regular office as long as his staff filed the insurance claim using the Federal Tax ID Number of the practice itself, the name of the other doctor, and the billing address of the other office. In other words, in order to get the insurance to pay according to our agreement, I have to commit insurance fraud.
I went anyway. The doctor examined me and told me I had influmonia gluteus. This roughly translates to "sick enough to knock you on your ass." I'm joking. He confirmed I had a simple sinus infection and that all my other problems stemmed from it. He prescribed some antibiotics, cough medicine, lots of fluids, and bed rest. The last one was my favorite because I meant I had a medical reason to take a couple days off from work. These were the first two days off in a row that I've been able to take in recent memory. That these days were the last two of my work week, meaning they would be followed by my regular two days off, was even better.
Better still, I was halfway through day three before my family realized that I wasn't at work and started asking me for stuff.
Since my main computer, aka my television and video recorder, was in view of my bed, I was able to rest and catch up on my viewing at the same time. SageTV had recorded any number of shows for me. I took advantage of my forced rest to catch up. In addition to a gazillion episodes of shows I'd already been watching, SageTV had picked some episodes of some new shows.
One was iCarly on Nickelodeon. Much like a couple of my other favorite Nick shows, Danny Phantom and Fairly Oddparents, iCarly is targetted for an audience a few decades younger than me. Still, I find it quite enjoyable, though on a level which the intended audience and possibly the producers will never understand. On the surface, it's a silly tween comedy about a girl and her friends. Dig deeper, though...
Carly is a young girl, about highschool freshman or so. She's sweet
and fun and pretty and thin and has a million online fans but somehow
isn't the most popular girl in school. She looks like she weighs
about 40 pounds soaking wet. She wears skirts so short and jeans so
tight that they'd be banned in any school I went to at that age.
Since there are no parents in her home, she's apparently raising
herself and her younger older brother, taking care of
two friends, and starring in a webcast, all while managing not to
flunk out of school. My nephews, roughly the same age, are lucky if
they remember that they have homework. Maybe it's true that girls
mature faster than boys, but Carly's script reads like it was written
for college graduates by college graduates.
Carly is living with her younger
older adult brother Spencer in a fabulous loft
apartment that they can't possibly afford on Spencer's starving artist
college dropout income. There is occasional reference to a father in
the military, so maybe he sends money home. While Spencer is,
according to online sources, 26 years old, he acts like he's 17. A 17
year old dope dealer. I figure that Mom must be dead because, were
she simply divorced from Dad, his leaving Carly in Spencer's care
would be instant grounds for her regaining custody. (Single parents
abound in this universe, by the way. I've yet to see a traditional
family anywhere near the show. Everybody is single, widowed,
divorced, etc.)
Carly's friends are Sam (who lives somewhere in the neighborhood with her mother) and Freddie (who lives right across the hallway with his mother). Sam might have a living father, but if so, he's in jail or on the run from the law like 98% of her family. Her mother regularly dumps her on her friends' families and "even smiles sometimes." Sam's comments indicate that her family is neglectful at best. I can't decide if her constant (dare I say, compulsive) eating is necessary because she never gets fed at home and is always hungry, if she's substituting food for the affection she never receives from her family, or if meals are so infrequent that she binges even when already full because she doesn't know where her next meal is coming from. She's already Hollywood Fat (which in Tennessee, means she's almost up to a normal weight for a girl her age) compared to stick figure Carly, but a halfway realistic portrayal would have her weight 300 pounds by the time she turns 18.
Freddie's Mom probably sanitized his Dad to death. She's that much of a neat freak. She wants to control every aspect of Freddie's life, which makes her the exact opposite of Sam's Mom while at the same time just as abusive. Freddie's Mom had a GPS chip implanted in Freddie's brain when he was a baby. She "adopts" younger men in her building who are sick, injured, or just untidy. She doesn't appear to have a job, so how she affords the appartment is anybody's guess. All I can think of is that the younger men are grateful.
The kicker is the iCarly webcast. Yes, two teenage girls have their own webshow filmed by a teenage boy with 300,000+ weekly viewers. All their fans are teens or parents who watch with their teen children. No pedophiles in the in-show universe, apparently. In this universe, adults talking about iCarly online insert "no pedo" into their conversations regularly. In spite of the bandwidth alone probably costing thousands a month, the webcast doesn't seem to have any advertisers. In spite of the content (which is about what you'd expect in a real life webcast by teens for teens, except for a complete and utter lack of anything blatantly sexual, no pedo), the webhost hasn't shut them down to stem the flow of complaints. And the hardware used to product the show, which include at least one computer, at least one 40" LCD or plasma display, and at least two professional video cameras, must have been bought with more of Spencer's drug money.
Oh, and about those notebooks and other computers seen on the show? They're all apparently built by a company called Pear. They all feature neon pear-shaped logos. Portable musics players are called PearPods. These are transparent spoofs of Apple and the iPod. I don't know why they have to spoof, seeing as the producers simply must have some agreement with Apple to use the "i" in iCarly to refer to a webcast, seeing as they haven't gotten sued yet. Or maybe the online rumors of the Apple legal team suing everyone using a lowercase I in a product name are exaggerated.
Anyway, put all this together and you get something that is funny and surreal to this old fogey. To my nephews who are roughly the age of the target audience, it's boring and childish. While I think Carly and Sam are cute (no pedo), my nephews think they are rather plain.
Then again, after meeting some of their classmates, I can see where they're coming from.
No pedo.
