[Updated on Jan. 17th, 2006]
All these questions posted all over the place… it’s tough to provide answers when you can’t find them anymore. Consequently, here’s the place to do it: ask whatever you want in the comments section and I’ll either extend the post to incorporate the answer or I’ll tell you to bugger off because I don’t want to scare the children. Assuming I haven’t scared them already on my own.
All right, where to start…
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I’m single, but not looking very hard—I’ve got the bar exam to look forward to in February. And it doesn’t help that I’m living at my parents’ place these days. Sure, I can get together with someone for dinner or coffee or something along those lines, but if she ever wants to come over to my place for a game of Strip Scrabble or something, “I’d like to introduce you to my parents.”
On a related note, I spend most of my free time by myself or with friends, so I’m not sure whether my new-found confidence may have carried over from the show. If I start hooking up with a bunch of random chicks, then you’ll know it worked. But I probably won’t tell you if I start hooking up with a bunch of random chicks, so I guess you’ll be in the dark either way…
I still keep in touch with people from the show. There’s an occasional group e-mail that someone will send out to everyone, let them know what’s going on. I’ve chatted with Cheryl and talked to Bill, Chuck and Scarlet on the phone recently, so it’s all good. If you want to know what they’re doing with their lives… no one’s sent a group e-mail recently, so I couldn’t tell you for sure. If you want me to make up an answer, you’ll find out all sorts of interesting things about them…
I’ve still got the highlights.
No Myspace or Livejournal page—just the blog, baby. Just the blog.
Hiking during Episode 5: Most of the running happened right at the beginning—gotta make it look exciting. Our packs had canteens, sleeping bags, thin sleeping pads and whatever else we added, which in my case was extra clothing made of light materials, a thin rain jacket, etc. (It may have looked full, but mine wasn’t that heavy.) As for breaks, we had one in the middle that gave them time to move cameras and that was it. Unless you count stopping to reel in the fish. But there was only one assigned resting spot and that’s where I emptied the contents of my tummy. If they’d given us a map so we could have seen the length of the trek and how high the hillside reached… I would have treated it more like a hike than a race.
Love: I couldn’t tell you about the girls’ past relationships. It’s not something that comes up in regular, friendly conversation, but I imagine that they’ve had their share of deep emotional relationships, regardless of how they were portrayed on the screen. Likewise, I’m not sure how many of the guys have, either (myself excluded, of course… and yes, I’ve been in love before, so you don’t need to ask).
Between Chuck and Richard, it was pretty much Richard pushing his buttons and the viewers seeing what Chuck would do afterwards. When Richard started calling me “Shawnee of the Pawnee,” I wanted to smack him, but since I didn’t follow through and since Chuck had a stronger reaction to what Richard was saying and doing on a constant basis, theirs was the “feud” that was one of the highlights of the series.
The reality of reality TV: It was us. The challenges were set up for us, the host sometimes had cue cards and we sometimes had written questions that we were supposed to answer, but everything that came out of our mouths were our own words. The interviewers would prompt us sometimes (”Did you think the swimsuit was sexy?”), but what we said was all us. And that’s not to say that the prompting always worked: a few days into the show, I did an impression of Richard for some of the guys—during my next interview, they asked if I could do any impressions of any of the cast members… I said no. They asked if I could do an impression of Richard… I said no. They could ask all the questions they wanted, but any answers they got were what we chose to say.
I imagine most everyone was as nice and kind as they appeared to be. I don’t want people to assume that Scarlet’s getting pissed off at me was an exposure of her “real character.” That was just her getting pissed off. I can get pissed off, too, but I never reached that point on the show and it wouldn’t mean that I’m a bad person because of it. People might make it sound like those monstrous changes in someone’s attitude was who we “really were,” but given the small amount of footage they took while we were living in the mansion 24/7, the common viewer saw only an inkling of what people were doing. If Scarlet was only pissed off for half an hour the entire 2+ weeks we were there and they focus a lot of attention on that single 30 minutes… you get the idea.
The only example of religion I saw was Richard telling Mindi he wanted to pray. There were no Bibles, no one made a big show of saying grace before a meal together… if anyone was extremely religious, that person kept it under wraps very well.
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Whew! I think I’ve covered all of the comments listed below now. Anything else?
