We're a Nielsen family this week. I am in charge of keeping track of what we watch in our cheap little TV viewing diary because Jack doesn't give a rat's ass. But I feel like, Well, they sent us five bucks, how hard is it? Maybe we'll watch some poor show that is struggling but has really high quality writing and we'll save it from being cancelled! Or I could lie about what we watch just to fuck with those Powerful Nielsen People, to make them think we're a bunch of goddamn Nazis who stay up until 4 a.m. watching the History Channel. (Why, you ask, do you say that watching the History Channel makes you a Nazi? Because the H isn't for History, it's for HITLER, it's the HITLER CHANNEL, every time you turn it on it's showing an endless World War II documentary loop. That observation was stolen from my brother-in-law, thank you very much.)

But I don't really see any point in lying about what we're watching, because the truth is far more subversive than anything people make up. The only reason to lie is if you just want to destroy the system by providing a lot of useless information, but then you have to get everybody doing that with you because if you're doing it alone you are just pissing into the wind. Which is gross.

What they don't get to see, however, is what's in the VCR/DVD player. We've discovered that we can actually watch a grownup movie with Jackson as long as the movie contains lots of animals, motorcycles, airplanes, or trucks. You should have seen our little Rex Reed the other night at dinner, sitting in his high chair, glued to Out of Africa. Animals: check. Airplanes? Check. People kissing? Hey! Checkcheckcheck. (Jackson likes it when people kiss. He is 100% love.) He was also moderately interested in Lawrence of Arabia last night, mostly because of all the camels, I think, because otherwise (to a little kid, at least) it would just be a lot of smug accents, prosthetic noses, and Bedouin tents flapping in the wind. You can call it brainwashing a child into numb submissiveness, but I call it being able to sit and eat my entire dinner without getting heartburn.