Blogging to Durban: Obsessions

When my fad of watching Canadian adolescent cartoons ended, I found myself sitting in front of Netflix wondering what I was supposed to do with my life now. Just then, How I Met Your Mother popped up in the 'Recommended For You' section. I think I had watched about two and a half episodes of this show in my entire life, and there were eight seasons, almost two hundred episodes and counting. This, I knew, would be a taking on a big commitment, especially with the end of the college year approaching.

So, I told myself I'd just have to watch them really quickly. So three weeks and sixty hours of HIMYM later, I was once again left empty-handed, abandoned, and show-less. I didn't even have the courage to take up another obsession, with exams approaching so fast. So instead I cleaned my room. I started doing yoga again. I organised my iTunes library. I even made a study playlist - heck I even studied to test it out.

And so I found myself sitting in front of the tv last Sunday, scavenging a few old episodes of Friends and Scrubs to make myself believe there was still something there to cling on to.

That's when I flicked on to MTV, and found Catfish.

Now, I'll just say that I have never in my life watched any of those MTV shows like 16 and Pregnant, or Made, or Punk'd. I never watched reality tv of any kind. But my friend Lauren was into all of that, so I already knew the general gist of this Catfish thing. It's all about people in online relationships who have never met in real life. The problem is, if these people were honest or half-normal, they wouldn't need a camera crew to bring them together. The point of Catfish is that one or other of the people in this relationship has something to hide, and the extent of their lies varies dramatically.

In the first episode, Sunny has no doubt that the male model she is taking to online is exactly who he says it is - as it turns out, it's a girl who may or may not be a lesbian, using fake profiles online because she's been bullied her whole life. A sweet all-American lad found out that the girl he had sent dirty messages and pictures to was actually a gay guy. And one girl was surprised to find that her internet boyfriend was really a transgender girl who was currently undergoing hormone replacement treatment to become male. The beautiful thing about that one was that it actually worked out despite the ... complications. If I've never believed in true love, then that's it right there.

So I watched all the episodes and the movie within a couple of days, and what really fuels my obsession with this is the presenters, Nev and Max. Nev was just a regular New York photographer, until he fell in love with a girl online - who turned out to be someone else, leaving him broken hearted, while his brother and friend made a documentary of the entire thing. So when people in online relationships started getting in contact with him and asking for his help, he and his film-maker buddy Max turned it into a tv show. Here are Nev and Max's video biographies:

Nev:

Max:

Now, as you can see, these are two very beautiful men. And I don't care if Max has a girlfriend, or if Nev is definitely at least a little bit straight. They are my OTP. I just know that Nev looks up to Max, and that Max secretly finds Nev's optimism and gullible romantic nature quite admirable.

Lauren and I originally planned to catfish them. Our idea was for one of us to pretend to catfish the other, and have loads of fake conversations to make it seem legit. Then, when we do our J1 in New York, we get on the show and seduce them one night while pretending to be at a particularly vulnerable stage in the 'I've been lied to by my online love' act. And of course, they would fall in love with us and we'd all live happily ever after.

When we realised this was never going to happen (we're terrible liars), we decided to settle with setting up the Catfish fandom, which seems strangely non-existent other than a couple blogs and, oh, so many gifs. We call it, CATSHIPFISH, and the pairing is Nax. Or Mev. Or Yanax/Yamax or even Maniv. Establishing a fandom is hard work, but I think we can do it.

I'll leave you with some pictures of the beauts, and some stuff courtesy of the other fans that make me think, well, thank God I'm not alone in my obsessive personality disorder.