Non-stop Glam

This weekend I got to hang out with my adorable nephew, which meant we spent about 40 minutes watching Spongebob Squarepants, half an hour eating peanuts and spinning around (which led to puking for some of us), an hour running up and down the driveway, and about half an hour encouraging the parroting of humorous, non-age-appropriate phrases.

I particularly enjoyed the commercials on Nickelodeon. Since we usually watch the Food Network (which, if their commercials are any indicator, caters to childless old people with dogs), I'm not hip to the cool toys these days.

Here's one I was really excited to see: the Barbie Glamour Camper. Well, I wasn't so much excited to about the product as I was about its pitch, which entailed shots of Barbie and her sisters enjoying the perks of 'camping' while the chipper song playing in the background exclaimed, "Non-stop, non-stop, non-stop glam!!"

Several times.

Okay.

Barbie, Mattel, ad whizzes hired by Mattel, let me break it to you gently. Camping is not about non-stop, non-stop, non-stop glam. Camping is about washing your hands with moist towelettes for three days. Camping is about hammering stakes into the ground and clipping vinyl tablecloths to dusty, wobbly picnic tables and dogs that won't stop barking in every campsite next to yours.

.

Camping has nothing to do with flushing toilets (unless you ride your bike two miles there and back, wearing a headlamp).

.

Camping has so much more to do with you pooping in some shrubs behind the tent at the inconvenient hour of 11 pm because you're too afraid to make the trek to the pit toilet (or you're simply too afraid of the pit toilet, period), and then your boyfriend discovers the turd and makes you impale it with a stick and throw it farther into the woods.

.

And then you are forced to wash your hands with a moist towelette.

.

Non-stop, non-stop, non-stop glam!

.

Camping is not about flat-panel TVs on swivel arms.

.

Camping is about drinking cheap beer, throwing the empty cans into the campfire, and watching them melt. That's your entertainment right there, folks. And if you breathe deeply, probably a secondary source of inebriation.

.

Camping is not about functional kitchens with garbage disposals and sanitary practices.

Camping is about picking charred hot dogs out of your alumi-fire and eating them with hands so filthy they'd make a chimney sweep blush.

.

Camping is not about actual beds and pillows and blankets.

Camping is about damp sleeping bags on air mattresses that will never remain consistently inflated, but will instead deflate beneath your buttocks until you are folded in half, in which position you shall remain until four a.m., when the first birds start singing and/or it begins to storm.

.

If your idea of camping involves a television set, microwave, electricity, comfort, or a chandelier in the screen tent, you are not camping. Also, you should be swiftly kicked in the ass.

.

Anyway, in this economy, it's more likely that Barbie and Ken will be stuck with the hand-me-down Barbie Country Camper when they go to Jellystone.

(PS: my favorite comments about this commercial from YouTube: "I have this camper! My uncle found it in a dump!" and "My older sister had this and I rode it like a car and broke it.")