So egregiously awful that everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves. Oh, except the writers; they should be shot before they can even feel a thing.

I married a guy who is more religious than I am. Not by leaps and bounds, mind you–we both grew up observing the minutiae of Orthodox Judaism, like not activating electricity, cooking, or driving on the Sabbath; not eating packaged food which does not bear a mark of kosher supervision; shaking palm fronds and citrons and eating in huts on Sukkot and forgoing the five grains on Passover. You name the insanity, and we’ve observed it.

Recently, Monsieur Lama et moi had an argument in the car regarding cover songs. This is no surprise, as Signor Lama and I disagree about pretty much all things music. He hates anything that came after 1973, with the exception of U2, and I live for 90s alt-rock, no matter how dead and gone it may be. These particular tastes might perfectly explain the subject of our disagreement: Turn the Page, by Bob Seger, and its cover, by Metallica. “I hate this cover,” Gospodin Lama has complained on a regular basis. “I like it,” I would respond, which really does not make for stimulating conversation. “But then again, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the original.”

I have a song in my head, and I really don’t want to be the only one. It’s been in my head since I heard it on Vampire Diaries, and it’s continued to linger in my brain, clawing at it and forcing me to buy it on iTunes. I’ve done everything it’s told me too, but still, it remains. And so, because its nails have really dug deep into my cranium now, I present it to you along with four other favorites of mine which have graced the background of some of television’s greatest* dramatic scenes in recent years. Enjoy!

I’ve been introduced to a lot of great websites in my time (present company excluded), but probably none as great as Pandora.com. I’d love to say that someone was paying me to advertise for them, but alas, this is just me pathetically shilling for ‘em on my own free will. Because they get me through the workday. And because they sure are good at introducing me to random music I would never have heard otherwise.

I wanted this show to suck. No, I don’t mean that in a cute, pun-ish way; I mean that I wanted this show to be so godawful that it would be pulled off the air faster than The Beautiful Life actually was pulled off the air. But you know what? It’s kind of…really, really good. The romances are fairly well-developed, they incorporate all the little vampire things (e.g. not being allowed to enter a home without being invited) without beating you over the head with them, the men are absolutely beautiful, and the villainous brother regularly makes me jump out of my seat in terror. If Twilight looked like this, I might actually be tempted to watch it.

So much better than I expected. Not that my expectations were high, but if they were, this would almost have met them! Also, who doesn’t love Busy Phillips?

The summer before I started college, I spent my 13th summer at the same camp to which I’d unwillingly dragged my feet for the first time the summer after first grade. I worked as sports staff, teaching hockey and volleyball, and lived with three girls–all friends who were a year younger than I–whom I originally despised but then eventually grew to like in the way we all force ourselves to like people with whom we’re stuck living. All summer, they loved to tell me how when I went to NYU, I was going to meet their friend Mike who was amaaaaaazing.

No, no, this is totally different from DahlELama’s 20 Questions–you’ll see! Please note, I was going to put this in Mad Lib form, but too many of you dirty Smokers can’t be trusted.

1. I’ll buy pretty much any magazine with ____________ on the cover.

2. If every show I watch aired at the same time on different channels, I’d watch _________ and DVR __________.

You’d think that simply watching Gossip Girl would be guilty pleasure enough, right? Well, you know me–I’m not easily shamed by all the crappy TV-for-teens that I watch, or, sadly, by all the young adult books I read. In fact, the one thing I’ve been sure of since my best friend introduced me to Rage Against the Machine at 12 was that music would be the one area in my life where I wasn’t a perpetual teeny bopper.

It’s a recession. We all have to give up certain things, and I gave up professional pedicures. Naturally, I missed them–the warm, luxurious water; the massage chairs; fragrant lotion and exfoliant scrub and ahhhhh bliss… But then I got a wonderful self-righteous feeling from buying my own nail polish and doing it myself, and I learned to go without, because isn’t feeling awesome for not spending money so much better than feeling awesome because someone else is getting paid to massage your feet?

Remember when Kimberly ripped off her wig? Remember when HIV-positive Matt cut open his hand at a dinner party? Remember when Sydney blackmailed Michael into marrying her, even though he used to be married to her sister, Jane?

Remember when Jo shot Reed?

Remember when Billy was endlessly boring?

TV is so fickle. It dangles beauteous glory in front of you, and then rips it away. (See Veronica Mars, Arrested Development.) It provides fantastic careers, which then naively propel actors into thinking they’ll have even greater success in movies when they’re actually just headed for the great void of the irrelevant. (See David Caruso.) It goes on the fritz and refuses to provide you with the channels it promises. (See Comcast.)

I had trouble sleeping the other night. It was late, and I was tired, but you know when you tell someone that you’re having trouble sleeping and they say “is something on your mind?” Well, something was. I was really, really pissed about the season finale of Make It or Break It. Which had aired a week earlier. And which, at my age, I should never have been watching in the first place.

You know how Wedding Crashers was a really funny movie, and then for some reason, when it seemed like the movie was over, there was another hour of pointlessness that no one needed or wanted to see that was nowhere near as good or entertaining as the first half? This thing is like that thing.