My brains have melted. Completely. I blame ABC. My roommate and his girlfriend were watching The Bachelor, so I stupidly sat down and watched the damn episode with them.

Call me a cynic, but I have doubts about the whole scenario. I have serious misgivings about people who can claim they are falling in love with someone after only a few weeks together -- and not even spending 24 hours a day with each other, but only bits and pieces of time together every now and then. Hell, the guy was running around with a dozen women at one point! Could he honestly begin to have such deep feelings for any of them individually in such a short amount of time? Could they honestly feel love for him after that short amount of time, especially knowing that he was also spending time with and hooking up with all those other women they were competing with?

I hesitate to think that any marriage he might enter into with any of these women would be built on an incredibly stable foundation. The abbreviated courtship was broadcast across the country, and he was under pressure not only to weed out the women he didn't want, but to also make himself look good and make sure he didn't come across as a consummate dick in front of millions of viewers. I could tell that he'd lied and hid his true reactions to things just over the course of the 45-ish minutes of actual programming, and I'd never seen the show before. Interesting what people will do to save face.

During the show, KABC ran a couple of teasers for its 11PM news, the top story being the Winona Ryder verdict. My roommate commented that he couldn't believe that an item like that would be the lead story on a news program. I replied that I wasn't surprised, given that we live in a society where the program we were watching was one of the most-watched TV shows at the moment.