Draw Your Knives

I am a big fan of the ceremony of reality competition shows. Never before have the sort of things they take just the most seriously ever elicited such solemn reverence. We just accept that there’s something called a “rose ceremony” with no question. Of course there is. You’re given a rose and then you pick out a boy. The women are all wearing evening gowns, I can only guess because they know their connections are so tenuous that they feel looking like a particularly sex-positive prom queen one last time could be what really locks it in for them. They make the women struggle with pinning the rose on the guy’s shirt. Oftentimes, the giving of said rose was strategic in some way (this is, after all, a game) so there are a lot of awkward close ups of a woman stabbing a man she’s potentially repulsed with a tiny sword for the world’s longest 10 seconds.

I love it.

I love Top Chef when they have a high stakes challenge on deck and they tell them to draw knives from a knife block to pick teams, or decide the protein you get to work with, or the order in which they get to kiss Tom Collichichcioo’s ass (dummies, everyone knows Padma Lakshmi was always in charge of all of everything.) When they say “draw knives” there’s this wonderful little bit of sound design they drop into the shot which is the sound of knives, ostensibly being pulled out of the block, but in reality sounds like they are slicing against each other, like two chefs halted dinner service for a quick dual. It is both menacing and incredibly satisfying. Then one by one, the chefs step up to the Knife Block of Truth and take turns pulling out enormous knives with words printed on them that determine their fate.

Roses. Knives. Every show has their little ceremonial moment, and it’s been this way since the dawn of Survivor.

Tribal councils. A backstreet boy clone with a soul patch that can only be described as infuriating filling a modest New Jersey neighborhood with strangers yelling “Move that bus!” (Makes me cry every time btw.) Girls not just saying the word “yes”, but instead reciting the phrase “I’m saying yes to this dress!” like a hungry robot because that’s the deal and they want nothing more than to spend the entirety of their 15 minutes of fame fighting with their mother while buying an criminally overpriced white dress on basic cable.

Anything like this, anything with a slight structure and a fun enough premise, and I am in, substance be damned.

I would like to try to work some of that ceremony into my life. I could just hold on to all my mail for a month and once a month take two xanaxes and open it all at once. Or at night when I’m flossing, when I get to each tooth space I think of something I’m grateful for. There have to be ways to have more ceremony in one’s life without summoning the dead, or drinking something that tastes like dirt and drugs and potentially coming to in the middle of an Erewhon. Crystal-free ways to make the day feel weighty. Significant. Becoming a tea drinker could probably do the trick. But I just far prefer the taste of bean water to leaves water, and if I do both my brain might explode.

I do think it’s a good idea to lean more towards being grateful. If you can, you know? Only if it feels right. But if you can’t be grateful right now, or ever, I think that is completely valid too. This world is a mess. People can treat each other really poorly, not me of course because I’ve never hurt a single person, but other people. It can get dark, and being told to scrape around at the bottom of the barrel for feelings of gratitude has to be so exhausting. Stop scraping, girl. Just come sit down over here and we’ll have an undercooked chocolate chip cookie and watch some Top Chef.