Passions, Product Placement, and Paternity

Hi. My name is Rachel, and I watch Passions. I started watching Passions in college when I somehow managed to schedule my classes on only Tuesdays and Thursdays, and it's only been a matter of hours since I last saw an episode.

To be honest, I Tivo Passions and watch episodes mostly in fast forward because there's a part of me that believes that I'm not losing quite as many brain cells if I only watch certain segments of the one hour show.

Rationalization, I know.

My recent beef with Passions is that they've started pretty serious product placement advertising, and while I realize that product placement is going to become more and more of a reality because of Tivo owners like me who don't watch commercials if we can help it, I hate it. Hate it in the way some people dislike musicals because of the unrealistic nature of someone bursting out into song and dancing down the street with a hundred strangers who happen to know the same dance steps and appropriate harmonies to their song.

Today on the show Jessica was holding a pregnancy test box in her hand for an entire segment, brand name facing the camera, saying lines like, "This EPT pregnancy test is supposed to be the easiest and most accurate of all pregnancy tests. Soon it will tell me in this small indicator box if I'm pregnant or not! It's so easy to read!"

Ugh. Come on. It's not like I'm expecting Aaron Sorkin here, but seriously. Come on.

While I'm confessing pop culture sins, I'd like to mention my unusual interest in the Anna Nicole Smith saga. I wasn't at all interested in her when she was alive, but it's absurd how much ET I've watched to learn more about that situation since her death. I was, of course, watching video on MSN today about the paternity results released today.

Also, there was incident tonight with an insect in my salad at dinner.

(Writing this post feels a lot like how I used to feel in seventh grade when we were forced to go to confession. I was always worried I wouldn't have anything to say, would open my mouth, and realized I couldn't stop confessing embarrassing things about myself. I'll try to keep these to a minimum in the future.)