My Secret TV and Internet Habits

It’s no secret in my house that I am the one who watches the most annoying things on TV and looks up the worst stuff on the Internet. Are you like me? Do you like the things I like? (Ahem, Kardashians, CookieSwirlC, sharks, Pickle and Peanut, stuff about pyramids, and Bar Rescue.) Or, are you looking for new diversions from children, work, the atrocious state of the world, and household chores? Allow me to present to you the things I watch and look up online when I’m three Cabernets in and the kids are in bed, or it’s 10:00 A.M. (or noon and every hour after) and I’m procrastinating from working or am worrying endlessly about all the terrible things in the news.

Without further ado, my greatest delights and my deepest shame are waiting below.

Just kidding.

All of the below is amazing and highly recommended (by me), and I pray you’ll respond that you, too, enjoy many of these. (And if the internet explodes from all the links I embedded, my deepest apologies.)

TV SHOWS

The Real Housewives franchise: I am constantly appalled by every cast member and yet cannot tear myself away. I’ve watched this franchise for 10 years. I could be a doctor by now. Oh well. Anyone want to dress for Halloween with me in a Sky Top and go as circa 2008 Vickie and Tamra? We can drive all night in a limo, drinking white wine and using vocabulary words incorrectly. If New York is your thing, I am also happy to join you in dressing up like Bethenny, Luann, or Dorinda (because nobody wants to be the Ramona) and screaming at each other in a cafe. P.S. One of my greatest joys is my daughter’s name provides for her nickname to be “NeNe.”

House Hunters: I only watch this show to confirm that about 20 minutes into each episode someone will say, “I can really see myself drinking my morning coffee out here.”

House Hunters International: Someone always needs two roommates to afford to live abroad and I’m like, “THAT IS A TERRIBLE IDEA, LADY FROM IOWA WITH NO FRIENDS AND NO JOB WHO BOUGHT BUNGALOWS IN RURAL AUSTRALIA AND JUST RAISED HER POSSIBILITY OF MURDER-BY-FENCE-POST RATE BY 95%!”

American Pickers: I don’t know what I find so enthralling about two fairly embarrassing men who drive around in a van looking for farms to raid for oil cans and old bicycles, but it doesn’t stop me from watching. I spend several minutes of each episode trying to picture someone who would have sex with either of these men and have not yet been successful.

It’s Sew Easy: I’m pretty obsessed with this show, even though I can barely sew a button. I often use lunch breaks to catch up on my DVR, and sometimes this show edges out American Horror Story and The Walking Dead (I KNOW).

Lawrence Welk: From 2010 to 2014 our family had a tradition of watching this show before bed. This is how my kids know all the words to the “Hawaiian Wedding Song.” We have nicknames for cast members, make up background stories about their lives and marriages, and enjoy spying cast members who screw up the lip syncing in ensemble scenes. (This is way more fun than I’ve made it sound.)

TWITTER

Richard Marx: I think he likes to drink and Tweet fairly often (a man after my own heart).

George Wallace: Hands down, George is the funniest person on Twitter.

Seinfeld Current Day: One of the staples of Weird Twitter. If you’ve never checked this out, you need to rethink all your life decisions. Scroll down this article to read some its best tweets.

INSTAGRAM

Advanced Style: Ari Seth Cohen has a blog, books, and an upcoming documentary film featuring really stylish old people. I dare you to follow this IG account and not go down the rabbit hole of following 15 individual accounts of amazing individuals like Iris Apfel. It is a life goal of mine to dress as eccentric and perfect as these folks.

Amber Rose: MUVA 4-EVA. She is totally fierce, gorgeous, honest, super raw, and a great mom.

Gracious Opulence: Imagine an entire feed of the most amazing interiors you can’t believe are real.

Interiors with History: Similar to Gracious Opulence but with a history lesson included. Because we can all use more chateaus and castles in our lives.

Jenny and Teets2: Jenny Mollen is married to Jason Biggs of pie-sex fame, has one child and a severe attachment to Jason’s ex-girlfriend’s caftan, and was a writer for Chelsea Handler. She’s my brand of no-holds-barred humor, and I find her hilarious. She also has two books I recommend: I Like You Just The Way I Am and Live Fast Die Hot.

Rickonia: Ricky Smith is a brilliant, hilarious friend-of-a-friend who is doing amazing things through the movement and nonprofit he started: R.A.K.E. (Random Acts of Kindness Everywhere). Maybe you’ve seen his recent McDonald’s commercial or one of his ubiquitous t-shirts. His posts will remind you there is always good in the world, and you can be the catalyst who creates it. Find him on FB and Twitter too.

The Jungalo: I can’t be the only one who, if given 25  seconds of personal time, will slip into a sweet reverie where I am living alone in my dream house full of books and cans of sour cream and onion Pringles. My imaginary house is always decorated like the Jungalo feed. It is an unfortunate coincidence it also looks a lot like the Target seasonal aisle right now.

FACEBOOK

Katherine Chloe Cahoon: This girl is an enigma. Is she for real or just really good at the bizarro character she portrays? Decide for yourself with her videos How to meet Eurpean Men at a Dance Club, Oktoberfest…A Manfest for Single Girlsand But I Do (trust me, there are tons more where these came from, and each one is golden). She’s kind of like Elle Woods crossed with a character from a Christopher Guest film but if that person also wrote The Single Girl’s Guide to Dating European Men.

IFL Science: I love that this is curated by a woman. It’s kind of all over the place with physics, astronomy, genetics, psychology, paleontology, archeology, chemistry…you get it. If you’re looking for weird facts and amazing cocktail party conversation starters, look no further.

Darren Knight/Southern Momma: This man wins Facebook for me. His natural accent and colloquialisms are something Hollywood wishes it could harness, and his videos never disappoint. “Southern Momma’s At the Ballfield,” “Southern Momma Gets Her Tax Return,” “Southern Momma’s At the Trade Day/Flea Market,” and “Southern Momma’s Power Goes Out” are my personal faves. (You gotta like his FB page to view the videos.)

YOUTUBE

Karina Garcia: Hey girl, hey! My favorite YouTube crafter and personality is super bubbly and funny. I’ve never actually created anything she’s made like countless Orbeez projects, EOS hacks, squishies, slime, or gelatinous milk cartons, but I can’t stop watching her videos.

Red Bull: These videos are INSANE. I can watch them with my kids, but I prefer to watch them alone with the volume turned way up and when my kids ask, “Mom, what are you watching? Can we see?” I just yell, “Stay downstairs and finish your Cheetos!”

Prancercise by Joanna Rohrback: It is what it is, man.

INTERNET

Gibbons Twins: When I was eight or nine, I was convinced I was going to solve a murder mystery from Camden, Arkansas from old newspaper articles my grandma had saved. Of course that didn’t happen, but it sparked a real passion in me for researching creepy, old news stories. June and Jennifer Gibbons are beyond fascinating, and their story is bizarre and tragic.

Moberly-Jourdain Incident: I don’t even know how to explain this. I stumbled across it after Googling “time slips” one evening, which sounds worse. It’s one of the many things my husband peers over my shoulder to see me reading about on the internet and then backs away slowly questioning his choice in a life mate.

Mike Schank and Mark Borchardt, stars of American Movie: One of my top five favorite documentary films. I like to check in to see what they’re up to more often than I’d like to admit.

North Korea: This country, the cult of personality it creates around its leaders, and its human rights violations scare the ever-living crap out of me. It’s almost like it cannot be real, and yet it is. Its state-approved hairstyle posters don’t help matters.

Dead Malls: I need a coffee table book about this site. I was looking up old photos of Windsor Park Mall in San Antonio and ended up getting stuck on this site for days. There is something both eerie and comforting in seeing familiar old spaces. The creepiest ones are those that are abandoned but still standing. You can search by state, and there are links to sites about casinos, grocery, and retail stores past and present. I cannot be the only person who loves looking at abandoned spaces (I dare you to click this link and not get sucked in).

Obviously, this is just the tip of the iceberg of my random web searches. I’m sure some part of me knows I deserve an intervention for a few of these. Like, I probably need to come home from Super Target one evening and find six of you sitting solemnly in my living room where one of you says, “Ashley, we’re here for you because we love you, and we are concerned you viewed that video of the stingray giving birth inside a boat 17 times.” Unless you’ve viewed it 18 times…in which case, can we be friends?

Ashley
Ashley is a back-up dancer for circa 1989 Janet Jackson in her dreams and a mother of two preschoolers in her waking life. An Alamo City native, she spent her college and post-college years in TN, CA and AZ (all lovely states completely incompetent in the fine art of breakfast tacos). After crying everyday in radio sales, working next to a sheep pen at a rural telecom, being totally confused in agriculture, and completely giving up and drawing cartoons of co-workers at an online university, she finally found her calling in grant writing for a non profit arts organization. And then her husband (who, no joke, watches college football for a living) was like, “Hey! We can move to San Antonio to be closer to your family if you want to!” And then Ashley was like, “Hey! That’s good timing because remember all that drinking I was doing last week because I thought I had really bad PMS and wanted to power through it? Well, that PMS is a baby!” So they moved to S.A. and Ashley found a job with a rural non profit, but when she tried to go back to work after the baby, living on no sleep with a newborn and a traveling husband unable to share in the workload, she quickly learned she was about five seconds away from a mental breakdown. Cut to today where she is a full time mom, loving the freedom to run all over the city each day with her kids, despite a 98% decrease in her ability to pee alone/do less than 19 loads of laundry each week. She chronicles her most embarrassing childhood moments and photos at This is Me at 13-ish (http://meat13.tumblr.com), in hopes that she never forgets that as difficult as it is to be a parent, it is just as much of a struggle to be a kid.