Michael watches this show Jon & Kate Plus 8 on The Learning Channel (check your local listings). For those of you who have not heard of it, it is a reality show about two thirty-somethings raising eight children, one set of twins and one set of sextuplets.

Michael: It’s a good show you watch it.

Me: Like you, I can’t stand children.

Michael: Well I don’t like serial killers but I watch movies about them and the critically-acclaimed television show Dexter.

Me: Huh.

Michael: I wouldn’t want to parent or kill…

Me: I have feeling you’re bound to do one of those things in your life.

Michael: …However, I appreciate the drama, pathos, and character development in art involving parenting and killing. When I watch Jon & Kate Plus 8, its like watching a horror movie especially from the standpoint of the husband…It’s something I would never want to experience.

Me: Use of “however” is one of the signs of an inferior writer.

Michael: We’re having a conversation.

Me: Who said we weren’t? I mean if we weren’t I would have to go back and take out all these contractions.

Michael: You’ve lost me. But anyway, I don’t like sports and I find sitting through a sporting event incredibly boring but I watch the critically-acclaimed NBC show Friday Night Lights. And I read Charles Dickens which is full of insufferable children…It’s about drama and pathos.

Me: There are a lot of contractions in this!

“If the better is the less vulgar and the less vulgar is always that which appeals to the better audience, then obviously the art which makes its appeal to everybody is eminently vulgar.”
-Aristotle, Poetics