Nora's TV Diary. Chapter 1: My Super Sweet Sixteen

I didn’t have a 16th Birthday. I don’t particularly remember not having one, but my mom mentioned it was because I was being a stanky bitch, which does not surprise me. Ages 13-17 I pretty much blacked out with rage and hormones, and I cannot be held accountable for anything that may or may not have happened.

Like the trend of obnoxiously overblown weddings, the new trend for teenagers is to have an obnoxiously overblown 16th birthday party. I consider this show, like much of MTV’s reality programming, as a form of birth control. Why would I want to bring forth a chid that would demand at $30,000 birthday party simply for surviving 16 years?

For those who thought that Mean Girls was just a movie, I have news for you: it was actually an MTV documentary. With better voice-overs.

Each episode of pretty formulaic. The girl (or sometimes guy) goes through all of the ways she (or he) is incredibly spoiled. It starts with the girl going over all the ways her parents have spoiled her. Then it moves to the party planning, where the girl requests (and gets) circus performers, rappers, ice sculptures, elephants or any manner of tacky (or awesome) things for her party.

Then there is the inviting: usually a really uncomfortable scene involving a public handing out of invitations. As if that’s not enough to make a girl drunk with power, they then go through the painstaking task of deciding who, exactly, is a VIP.

The girls seem somewhat aware, even proud of, the fact that they are spoiled and generally worthless human beings. The parents, and whatever they do to make such gross amounts of money, are briefly featured, if at all. I'm guessing this is because they don't need to advertise the fact that they are the ones responsible for her existence.

To the party girl, everyone wants to be her. Everyone wants to come to this party. Everyone who attends will stand in awe (and, more importantly, jealousy) of her. What the party girls don’t realize is that to everyone watching at home, they’re a 16-year-old girl in a party dress crying because there are other people dancing on HER stage.

It’s hard to decide which girl I’d like to punch in the face more. Is it the short girl who was recently adopted into a wealthy family who decided at the last minute that her best friend was NOT a VIP, and would not be riding in the limo or allowed to enter the VIP lounge?

Is it the Indian sisters who referred to themselves as the Indian Hilton Sisters of Texas and revoked an invitation after an overzealous guest hugged them in thanks for the invitation?

If you can’t tell, I f*cking love this show, and not just for the terrible humans who star in it, but for the way it can pull people together by reminding them of a time when they, too, were subpar people, only with less money.

For every hundred girls onscreen screaming “THIS IS SO AWESOME!” into the camera while they down yet another Red Bull and grind on the dancefloor, there are thousands of girls like me, sitting at home next to our roommates and thinking, damn, I’m glad my mother ruined my Sweet Sixteen.