Real Housewives of Orange County Recap – 10/17/16

It was just the other day when I found myself in the middle of a totally peculiar conversation with a kid who recently transferred from another district. Having to change schools at any point can be an anxiety-ridden exercise in pure misery, but I think it’s probably the most difficult when you’re about to begin your very last year of high school. I want this student to feel welcome here – comfortable – so part of my morning routine now involves chatting with him during those flurried few minutes before the bell rings. I often attempt to bring other kids into our conversation and then I gently walk away once I’m certain this newbie is happily interacting with some guy or girl he didn’t know before last week.

As the first month of the academic year flew by, I was able to witness things falling into place socially for this student. He was starting to feel at home in a brand new place. He was beginning to make friends. I’d see him walking down the hallway as part of a small group. He wasn’t always alone anymore – that made me really happy – but other things I started to notice after interacting with him every single day began to cause some concerns:

1. Every single time we read from any form of any text, he always begins and ends up on the wrong page. And it’s not the next page he accidentally ends up on – it’s always some random distant chapter of the book.
2. He has to be prodded repeatedly to take notes because he often falls into a brief bouts of what I’m really hoping are simple narcoleptic episodes because otherwise I seriously fear for the kid’s health since he appears to lapse into a fully comatose state every few minutes.
3. He left a notebook and a textbook from another class in my room for over a week. When I asked him if they were his, he shook his head. No, he insisted. He’d never even seen those books before. Then I opened both books and pointed to the place where he’d printed his own name on the inner covers and he just shrugged and shoved them into his bag, still having not the slightest memory of ever owning those books in the first place.
4. Right before the entire class was scheduled to meet with Guidance to discuss post-high school plans, I found myself in the hallway with him (this is the discussion I was talking about) and I asked what he hoped to do after graduation. “I’m going to play basketball for Duke,” he told me with a smile. “That’s amazing!” I responded. “Have you been in contact with the coach?” He had not. “Has the coach come to see you play? Has he watched footage you sent him of yourself?” Actually, he’d never spoken to the coach in any form. “Are you on the basketball team here?” I asked then – and when he told me no and then also shook his head when I asked him if he’d taken the SATs, I could feel my eyebrows shoot all the way up my forehead as tends to be the case whenever I find myself thrown into a scenario in which I am contractually unable to utter a sentence like, “Do you understand that what you’re saying makes zero f*cking sense?”

After that bizarre conversation that had no beginning and no end and nothing that could be even be constituted as half of a middle, I had an inkling something wasn’t right when it came to this young man and the way he processes information. I did some research and found out his IQ falls somewhere between DOLTISH and TROGLODYTIC on the official scale that measures empirical intelligence. He’s a very sweet person; it’s an absolute shame that he’s so mentally vacant, but at least the school district is now aware of his limitations and we can get him the services he needs to hopefully graduate on time and eventually carve out a future plan that both makes sense and somewhat inspires him. My rather cynical guess is that his future will probably not involve being a star athlete at a competitive university, but then again, stranger things have happened.

And speaking of very strange things and the limitations involving human behavior, Kelly Dodd is having the kind of inaugural season that makes me wish I could check out her IQ numbers because perhaps there’s some form of mental deficiency that causes her to behave like a f*cking lunatic while cameras record every slurring sentiment she spits out in a huff of tequila-scented fire. In case anyone is looking for some stats (forgive me – I’ve got Duke basketball on the brain), so far Kelly has managed to call Shannon “ugly,” “a c*nt,” and “Mrs. Roper.” She chose to elect Vicki Gunvalson to be her Life Coach, an election Vicki won by a f*cking landslide since her opponents – Adolf Hitler and Ann Coulter – were both too busy helping Donald Trump to campaign against The Whoo Hoo Goddess. Then Kelly sat back and listened intently as her brand new guru encouraged her to stay with her verbally-abusive husband until the very end of time so she would never have to feel even a pang of loneliness because everyone knows loneliness is way worse than having your soul and your heart roasted from the inside out. As for her illustrious husband, Kelly has fought with him on camera and announced frequently to the masses that he’s a narcissist who takes sadistic pleasure in threatening to strip her of her custody. She has been drunk almost constantly since we’ve met her. (During one of the few times she was sober, however, she made sure to inform her husband that his own brazen intoxication humiliated her.) Then, after jetting off to Ireland with a bunch of women she’s already belittled and insulted, she quickly downed some shots and instantly morphed from Happy Drunk to Assh*le Drunk in two shakes of a fluffy lamb’s tail whereupon she made sure to bellow that Tamra is a complete f*cking liar and that’s probably the very reason Tamra’s daughter refuses to have even a single thing to do with her own mother.

The most disgraceful part of the entire scenario, of course, is not even that Kelly said such a thing about Tamra and her daughter. Sure, that was a cruel comment formed by the lips of a walking piece of dribbling horsesh*t, but c’mon – nobody actually cares about Kelly Dodd’s opinion on parenting. The real issue is not what Kelly said, but how desperate she is to prove that saying those words should have absolutely no consequence because she was the one who was made to feel sad first. And why did she feel sad? Because Tamra told her the poke-you-in-the-nose game was getting annoying so Kelly retaliated by lobbing The Custody Grenade. Yes, Tamra dirtied the waters a bit when she shot out that she has been such a good friend to Kelly that she hasn’t even divulged all those secrets Kelly told her, like the juicy one about Heather being poor. That was an assh*le move by Tamra for sure, but it did not deserve the vitriolic retribution it received. And even now, even in the aftermath of the battle when things should start to become a bit less fuzzy and begin to make a bit more sense, there still appears to be no awareness whatsoever on Kelly’s part that saying the most devastating thing you can articulate will absolutely lead to the ratcheting up of stakes in a manner that will not easily be resolved, especially not when you subsequently deny any complicity in the manner and your sociopath of a husband encourages you to do anything and everything besides apologize.

I do not care if Kelly ever achieves personal contentment or inner peace. At this point, I’m pretty sold on the idea that she’s a horrible person who causes problems everywhere she wanders. I do not care in the slightest about whether or not she stays married to a man who appears to be just as damaged as she is. And I certainly don’t care that Vicki hasn’t come to Kelly’s defense with the same idiotic force with which Kelly sought to defend Vicki’s tarnished honor earlier in the season. To even allow herself to believe that Vicki was invested in her life for any other reason than the fact that she’d been blackballed by every single woman in Orange County and she needed someone to drink with on a Tuesday was moronic. Vicki will not be coming to Kelly’s aid in Ireland – or at least she won’t until everyone remembers just how much Vicki sucks and turns against her again and Vicki immediately requires a new best friend who is too foolish to go running for the ruins in the distance. But for now? For now the only person Vicki really cares about is herself.

I’d love to spend the rest of this Bravo-sponsored tour through the hills of Ireland with only Shannon or Heather. It would f*cking thrill me to pieces to scream “Fare-Thee-Well!” at Meghan as she goes tromping off to discover her heritage and I suppose I wouldn’t mind watching a few more seconds of Tamra hyperventilating into a paper bag, but I’d be quite happy to pretend Kelly and Vicki do not exist. I would like instead to enjoy the zaniness of Shannon dressing up in emerald green sequined outfits while Heather drains yet another glass of champagne and does it without walking into even one wall or calling another woman a c*nt as someone who looks a great deal like Jamie Dornan sings Danny Boy in the foggy distance.

Unfortunately, Bravo editors are clearly conspiring against me. They did not heed my very specific requests for exactly what it is I want to see, so this week begins with Heather calling Vicki to get the rundown on how Vicki and Shannon bonded drunkenly the evening before. Their rickety friendship is starting to be pieced back together – at least while they’re in Ireland and everyone is currently hammered and filled with hatred for Kelly – and they shall celebrate the resurgence of this already-broken bond by spending a day on a farm! Not invited to frolic with animals in the vast countryside is Kelly. She is assh*le-non-grata at this point and maybe part of the reason for such a distinction can be traced back to the fact that she still cannot understand what it was that she did to make people so angry. The lady is a moron and she will be punished for being this much of an idiot by having to walk the streets alongside a pregnant woman and stop each passerby along the way to find out if anybody might be one of Meghan’s distant cousins who can provide both food and shelter should Meghan eventually come to her senses and leave her douchebag of a husband.

Now that the rest of the women are free from Kelly and her haze of horribleness, it’s time for them to meet in the lobby of the hotel so they can listen to Vicki discuss how she vomited all morning and how she might actually be pregnant. (Wait. Didn’t we all secretly get together and take a vote that Vicki’s uterus was to forevermore be used for nothing except the storage of tight shirts with cutouts near the cleavage area? Could that have simply been a dream?) In any event, nobody seems all that upset that Kelly is nowhere around, not even Vicki who cannot accomplish a task so simple as opening a trunk without making it into some stupid show, one I can’t believe hasn’t been canceled yet by either Andy Cohen or God.