Lifetime...the original reality TV

After running 6 grueling, overheated miles Saturday, then shopping unsuccessfully for new kicks (my size is now on order), gorging myself on a Panera Strawberry something-or-other salad followed by a Rolo McFlurry (all I can say is - I'm not sorry. It was incredible. So worth it)...

I found myself on the couch sucked into a Lifetime movie.

As in "Lifetime, Television for Women"

Or, more adequately entitled, "Television for morons and the criminally insane"

Or perhaps for those of us who just need a gentle reminder that although we may occasionally feel like our lives suck, there are those out there who really have it much suckier.

Seriously - WHO writes these things? WHO? I am more than a little spooked by the likes of Stephen King and his very brilliant yet disturbing mind. But these Lifetime writers are on a whole new level. Which is exactly why we watch. Accidentally. On a Saturday afternoon.

In this particular melodrama, a beautiful woman, "sappily" married to a man who has clearly out-kicked his coverage but more than makes up for it with his almost complete lack of any life interest outside of protecting his beautiful wife from psychotic killers - contacts her ex-boyfriend from high school and meets up for a meal.

After the meal, he begins to stalk her as is the case in most jilted love situations. Threaten her life. You know, your typical psycho-ex behavior ranging from the prank call and anonymous email proclaiming she is a (insert female dog jargon here), to aiming a cross-bow at her head in the backyard, then attempting to run her over in a grocery store parking lot. Normal life in suburbia.

Of course, this has the makings of all the necessary elements of a Lifetime movie.

1) Suspected perpetrator is ALWAYS masked.

2) No one ever witnesses the alleged threat/attack.

3) Regardless of how long the stalker holds the line when placing the prank call, it is NEVER enough for the cops to track. Even with technology evolving through the decades, the call-tracing mechanism remains woefully underdeveloped. Such a shame for police everywhere.

4) The victim, despite numerous brushes with death, police involvement, and the annoying, doting husband, STILL finds herself doing the following:
a) Walking alone to her car late at night in a deserted parking garage
b) Following that strange noise she hears outside in the forest behind her isolated McMansion
C) Running errands in broad daylight as if nothing is wrong in her life because she will NOT be limited by ANY crazy killer stalking her, dammit.

5) Her husband is also NEVER with her when any of this happens, which...

6) Leads you to believe it is the husband who is really trying to kill her...

7) Until some strange woman/lawyer shows up on their doorstep saying she knows the stalker, actually helped get him off on a prior murder charge and out of the kindness of her heart-slash-tremendously guilty conscience she has found this poor couple and has traveled many miles to help them with their current predicament. ("If just one life can be spared it will all be worth it").

8) Which leads you to believe that the doting husband is having an affair with the beautiful-and-smart stranger and this woman is in on the whole thing, a la Double Jeopardy with Ashley Judge.

9) So, despite the fact that you have the mystery solved, you keep watching as lawyer chick and husband concoct a plot whereby victim wife is placed in harm's way "baiting" psycho high school ex until the cops miraculously arrive and arrest him, just in the nick of time, henceforth saving all of humanity...

10) And then - BAM - in typical Lifetime style, you NEVER saw this coming - in a dramatic and climatic scene the husband realizes the lawyer's name doesn't even exist, she's not really a lawyer...and then he breaks land-speed records getting to the abandoned warehouse where wife-lawyer-psycho ex are all together...and then WOW!

Turns out lawyer is the wife of the psycho ex, and she is the one stalking and trying to kill the innocent wife because her husband (psycho ex) has cheated on her in the past (another woman she also killed) and she is MAD AS HELL AND NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE.

Awesome.

I dropped to my knees in shock, then shame...for once again, life is so much more predictable than a Lifetime movie.

And thank God for that.

Now back to your regularly scheduled suckiness.