Satellite TV and farmlife... (PG 10-13)

After 12 years of not paying for cable, I have found a couple shows I enjoy watching on a regular basis. I’ll say that in another way; after 12 years of going without TV in the home, I have found very few shows that truly entertain me. American Idol is one of them. I know I might be writing my death sentence here with some of you by saying that, but it’s true. I even had a dream about Simon Cowell the other day. It went like this:

I was standing in front of him waiting for his verbal response to the posting of my most recent blog. He looked at me with disdain, and commented, "Frankly, I found it incredibly disappointing. The descriptions were tedious, the humor was appalling, and the attempt to inspire a commitment to some higher form of belief or action was, well, to be honest, absolutely horrifying. The truth is, Christie, I liked what you wrote in your intro, but after this most recent performance, I’m questioning whether or not you can pull this off. We need raw, we need relevant, we do not need some bizarre concoction of Anne Frank meets Seinfeld."

As Simon said all this I just stood there studying him quizzically. I seemed puzzled by some part of his response, which to my audience-dream-brain seemed strange, considering who was talking. I knew all along that Simon would hate every word of what I’d written, and yet something in his statement was confusing me. It became clear what this was in the moment I responded to his complaints with the question,

“You liked my intro?”

I suffer from a disease-like condition called extreme under-confidence. It feeds on my perfectionistic tendencies. Tell me something I have done is good, and I will explain to you how I could have done it better. Let me know that I have hurt you in some way, and I’ll sympathize with you before apologizing. (Unless of course you are my spouse or children… but we won’t go into that whole pile of worms just now…). Right now I have a funny story to tell you about the acronym used around here to refer to the popular TV program American Idol, and the way that it converges with my history of rural living.

In Santa Barbara we are coastal people, which implies that we wear flip-flops to weddings, speak ocean slang, and abbreviate tiresome titles. Thus, it is common to hear folks using A.I. in the place of “American Idol”. This might make perfect sense to your mind. I see my friend, they remind me it’s Wednesday, and invite me to their A.I. party. I can’t help but giggle when I hear that, because of all the vivid images that come to mind, none of them remotely corresponding with microphones, stage lights, or celebrity opinions.

You see, I grew up a farm girl of sorts, in Northern Idaho. My dad has higher education in Veterinary Science and Animal Husbandry, and spent much of his working hours teaching grad students “in the field” how to raise and manage a beef cattle herd. In the summers, I would often come across these graduate practicum’s, as I was running about in the fields behind our house. A. I. was one of the most important ones, and stood for this: “artificial insemination”.

Maybe you are having trouble with that visualization. Imagine it this way. A strapping young man with cowboy boots and a Stetson hat pulls a two foot long latex glove over his hand. He inserts it, with effort, into the back of a cow—through the path leading up to her uterus, to be more exact. The cow does not like this, but she is trapped on both sides by strong metal fencing. Oh—I forgot one important part. Before the man with the Levis and farmer tan puts his arm into the cow’s backside, he grasps the gift he wants to leave inside: the semen of a bull who has won some prizes for his brawny size and overall good genetic makeup.

Are you city folk utterly confused by this turn of events, or is this making sense to you? I’ll try to explain in a way that keeps us in PG-13... There are advantages to A.I. in the agricultural community. Rather than owning or renting the bull who would then spend his own sweet time getting to home plate with the females he liked, the sperm can be kept on dry ice (indeed, until the age of 18, I thought dry ice was made to store bull semen) until such a time as it’s needed for egg fertilization. It’s a surer bet that calves will come at convenient and closely corresponding times when human hands are in charge of the penetration. Enough said. Back to A.I. then. You said you were having a party at your house at 7 p.m. on Wednesday night?