Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: C | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT New Modes
By Jacob Clifton | Season 3 | Episode 1 | Aired on 09.25.2008
Okay, to be fair: the promised "sexy views" include Ugly Naked Midlife Neighbors ("That is not sexy! Or sanitary!"), the refrigerator contains something dreadful yet unknowable, and there's a bathtub in the exact middle of the room. That's iffy. But the rest ... It's the loveliest shade of Heywood-Wakefield green. Hilda finally twigs to how she got it sight unseen, wonders if the previous occupant was murdered, and gets Betty to admit she spent her money on the place. As in all of it. In the world.
Hilda goes off for some reason I don't get about how dare Betty spend the money that she earned her own damn self when Hilda is poor, Ignacio is poor, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are poor, etc. "We are struggling! And you throw it all away?"
That's where I would ask Hilda to leave my house, honestly. "All you did was fight harder than anyone ever has to educate yourself, leave Queens, create a new life for yourself, and save the lives of an entire family of rich-ass lunatics. How dare you spend those resources any way you see fit, when your father and sister -- who have in common the motivation and focus of a fucking Ramen-addicted twenty-year-old who can't afford his Ritalin -- working at a burger joint and unable to get it together and overcome paperwork to become an American citizen in the thirty years he's lived here and/or starting ill-advised entrepreneurial failures every five seconds while fucking married men! These things have nothing to do with each other! I am obnoxious and throwing stones in a glass house!"
Anyway, Hilda threatens to call Ignacio and they wrestle over the phone and Betty keeps promising she's going to fix it herself. And to be honest, I'm nearly on Hilda's side but still. Especially when we cut to her sitting in her new office space complaining to her new landlord about how "tricky" it was for the real estate agent to be like, "Hey, do this incredibly stupid thing that even a person with limited life skills would find fishy, okay?"
And I mean, I would do that too. I have done that. I'm sitting in that, as a matter of fact, talking to you now: a house I happily would have signed on without going inside. And I would have been right. I love my house more than any other house in this world. But part of the assumed risk when you buy into something sight-unseen is that it will absolutely, positively, never ever look like you imagine it looks, for the very scientific reason that your Imaginer is located in your brain, while reality is all around the outside of it.