"Well, kids, what do YOU want to be when you grow up?"

I groaned a little at the hackneyed question she suggested, but when I asked it, the room lit up. I guess tiresome repetitions of simplistic ideas really gets the kids going these days. Kinda like those Wazuuuup! commercials. But whatever the reason, suddenly everyone wanted to answer. And what I heard made me sick. Sick enough to kill my wife and her boyfriend. But I didn't do that. Really. I'm innocent.

"I wanna be a chef!"

"I wanna be a VJ!"

"I wanna get on "Fox's Stupid Behavior Caught On Tape!""

Okay, okay. So that didn't actually happen. I don't really have a kid. And I'm not O.J. Simpson. But I imagine that were that age-old question asked of the children in your typical 2nd Grade classroom in this country, a large amount of them would say that they wanted to be chefs.

Again, that's not entirely true. What I mean to say is, many of their answers would boil down to just one: "I wanna be famous!!"

Whether it's through MTV or Fox, everyone today wants to be famous. There are probably a few overweight kids watching The Food Network right now, emulating Emeril and yelling his repulsively effervescent BAM! catch-phrase, sprinkling their own imaginary recipes with essence and putting on a show for their friends. And I can all but guarantee that there are kids out there praying that they get to host "Total Request Live" someday, or at least be on "the Real World" or "Road Rules." Why? Not because of a lifelong ambition to influence which boy band the next generation favors, and not for a once in a lifetime cross-continental trek in a Winnebago with 6 other cookie-cutter examples of diversity screaming for the chance to escape their parents. No, at the end of the day, they just want to be on TV.

Darva Conger sure did (And if you know who Darva Conger is, then I've made my point). She was the big winner of Fox's ill-fated "Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire" special. She got picked by the groom-to-be as his instant wife, and then did whatever she could to get out of it, including humiliating him in as many varied and exciting ways as she could think of. When questioned as to why she was even on the show after she got the marriage annulled, she said she had wanted to be on TV. I think Kato Kaelin had the same goal in mind when he started hanging with any and every manner of celebrity he could. And they both hit paydirt. Now they've each gotten their 15 minutes of fame, which he parlayed into...well, nothing, and which she was able to parlay into a lucrative spread in Playboy (And why not? She'd already shed her dignity back at Fox).

Fame has become it's own virtue in this country. It has sadly taken the place of the picket fence, plot of land, self-owned business model of the American Dream and become the new Must-See American Dream. Reality shows are replacing scratch tickets as the fast lane to happiness. Celebrity is, for some reason, equated with wealth, which in turn is equated with happiness. Why these fallacies still exist is beyond me. How many "E! Hollywood True Stories" do we have to see before we realize fame is a drug that leads mostly to self-destruction? I guess it must be the brief but intense run of constant sex, money and booze that makes up for it (Too bad the self-destruction can't come first, huh? Then we'd all be rewarded with years of debauchery!).

This obsession with fame is a sickness, and I don't think anyone's immune. I'm telling you right now if I bumped into Puck from MTV's "the Real World," I would be stunned. I would have to step back and collect myself, for he is the almighty Puck. That obnoxious, disgusting idiot who was on TV every week (not to mention reruns), doing nothing but being obnoxious, disgusting and idiotic. Why is he famous? THERE IS NO REASON. Other than the fact that he was on TV, there is nothing special about him. And why is that even special? I don't know.

Reality shows have taken it up a notch, to paraphrase Emeril. BAM! "Survivor." BAM! "Big Brother." BAM! "The Mole." BAM! "Temptation Island." Take a bunch of normal everyday people and force them to humiliate themselves on TV. I can just see them signing up:

"Okay, so there's a better than average chance that you'll edit the 300 hours of footage into 3 minutes of me looking like a nymphomaniac control freak who eats garbage and spouts racist propaganda? Even though I'm Amish and originally from Connecticut?"

--"Yes. And we might make it look like you killed one of the other participants. But that will be during sweeps, so tune in and find out!"

"But I get to be ON television, right? So once in a while I can say 'Hi Mom,' and people all over the world will see me?"

--"Yes, but remember, once you are off the island, millions of people who can't distinguish television from reality will probably hate you. And I do mean millions."

"But I'll be on TV first, right?"

The bottom line is, this country is rapidly turning into a hellhole of avarice, exploitation, sensationalism and lewdness. But I have a solution.

No, again that's not true. I got nothing. But get back to me if you come up with something-

Hey, wait a minute! I've got an idea! We should start a TV think tank reality show! We'll broadcast a think tank filled with people from diverse backgrounds (a kind of microcosm of society, if you will), and force them to come up with profound ideas beneficial to the human race. One by one we'll vote the useless ones out of the tank. But we'll rig it so only the ugly people get booted. And I can host. Well, either me or Hitler.

Michael S. Julianelle is a Boston-based freelance writer coping with his nearly debilitating zeal for entertainment and pop-culture.

Got a problem? Email Michael at onthebox@go.com