The other day, while Juliette and I were watching the season premiere of Jon and Kate Plus Eight¹, a commercial came on for a new TLC show called The Little Couple. Like most of what's on TLC these days, it's a reality show, this one centered on the life and relationship of Bill Klein and Jen Arnold, who are--as you might guess from the title--little people.

I've been somewhat conflicted about shows like this--TLC runs another reality show called Little People, Big World centered around a family of little people. On the one hand, shows like this give these people the opportunity to show the world how normal their lives are, but I still can't help feeling like these shows are exploitative. But, leaving that aside, what struck me about this new show was the reaction I had to learning about the woman's profession. She's a doctor. A neotatologist, to be more precise.

Now, my initial response was to think to myself, "Good for her, that's really great that she was able to accomplish that." Overcoming adversity and all that. But then I thought about it a little more and realized that that's actually a pretty patronizing attitude. I mean, why shouldn't this woman be a doctor? Just because she's small doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with her brain.

I think it's important to examine the latent prejudices we have. I like to think of myself as a pretty open-minded, accepting, equitable sort of guy, but obviously there are still areas where I could stand to improve, and the only way I can do that is if I'm aware of my shortcomings.

¹I actually hate that show, but that's a whole other rant.

For some inexplicable reason, the other day I found myself thinking about the 1994 season of MTV's The Real World--the one with Pedro and Puck. If you didn't watch that show, then this observation may not mean anything to you, but it occurred to me that if a person were going to pick his nose and then use the same finger to scoop up and eat some communal condiment, peanut butter may be among the more sanitary choices. Most or all of the peanut butter that actually touched the booger-y finger will have come up on the finger, and the high viscosity of the peanut butter means that there will have been very little opportunity for the germs to spread into the rest of the jar.

It's still gross, of course.