You might know Susie Meister from her many seasons on MTV, first on Road Rules and then on The Challenge. Or maybe you know her from her podcast Brain Candy which she hosts with fellow MTV’er Sarah Rice, or the one she hosted before that The Meister Piece. When she first popped up on screens she was known for being super religious (pentecostal) but over the seasons her beliefs changed and now she has a different relationship with religion, along with a PHD in Religious Studies. We talked about her experience on MTV and her thoughts about reality programming in general, her morphing relationship with religion, how her mom feels about her no longer being born-again, motherhood, marrying the sound guy, hoarding versus purging, Timmy from Road Rules, scrunching versus folding when it comes to wiping and so much more. We also took your questions over Twitter and did a round of Just Me Or Everyone.
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I hate it when your guests talk politics (AND religion! sheesh). There is no way I can comment on how abortion and the death penalty are like, almost opposite without sounding condescending…see!?!
I’m pretty sure the problem is people let their opinions be biased by politics and they just can’t see it.
Alison, you have ADHD. Don’t listen to these normies and their organization-fu. They are simply manifesting their personalities and psychologies and so must you, but yours is different. The normie-organization stuff just doesn’t work for the cluttered/hoarder + ADHD syndrome. They are energized (“I couldn’t sleep”) by the need to tidy a cluttered space and ‘we’ are de-energized. I don’t know what actually does work, but I know your open-ended job doesn’t help because it always fills the time/saps the energy available for organizing. But the problem is that the open-ended job is ideal to your personality. The normies gravitate to compartmentalization, so that’s not a prescription that works for us either. All I’ve found that helps is tools. Why don’t you write an essay as an excuse to do research on it?
Glad to hear you’re working on a book! Already looking forward to it.
I suppose if we have a right to spout off on politics or religion, so do her guests.
Yes, I caught that piece of info too and was glad to hear it!
Great interview! I feel like this is an interview that could’ve gone longer, even though it was already a generous 1:40 minutes. I would have loved to have heard more about her marriage that didn’t work, her current marriage and what it’s like for her husband to live with a control freak, and more about how she hated being a new mom and her presumably evolving relationship with her son (who was a terrible baby). I also would’ve loved to have heard more about her relationship with her mom and family now that she’s no longer “a believer.”
I’ll say that I’m suspicious of people who don’t like animals and that I scrunch my toilet paper while my husband revealed that he folds his around his hand. How precious.:)
Everyone has a right. They are just ignorant, arrogant and not funny when they do.
But Alison is not that way, so she understands what I mean. This guest was certainly close to being a bad offender, except the one instance was a doozie.
Let me rephrase. I don’t mind their personal beliefs, and I even enjoy and appreciate them, although they shouldn’t be surprised if they receive feedback.
What is irritating is when they discuss (disparage) strawmen on the other side of the debate from themselves. Entertainers being part of perhaps the most biased and thus politically insular groups simply aren’t qualified to do that. In fact,unless they do have actual qualifications for it (and I’ll accept almost any), they are uniquely unqualified to do it.
This is kind of a known issue, but we can propose it as a JMOE.
The timing is bad on my part, because Ms. Meister really just irked me with half a sentence, but that’s when I was irked. I’m more referring to who I think are the comedians who realize they really only want half the population as their audience and then start pandering to them by disrespecting the other half the population…and I think that “halves” of a political “spectrum” is really big problem to begin with.