K Pop

The other day, Amanda came home to find Saffy and me camped out on the sofa deeply engrossed in the TV screen.

            She dumped her shopping bags from Prada and Gucci on the floor and came to stand next to the sofa. “What’cha watching?” she asked.

            “The Kar-arsh-ans!” Saffy mumbled through a mouthful of popcorn. My eyes never looked up.

            “The what?”

            Saffy sighed as she struggled to chew and swallow. “The Kardashians!” she said finally, spraying a fine sprinkle of popcorn all over her lap.

            Apparently, Amanda later complained to all her friends that she was living with Dumb and Dumber. “How can anyone watch that rubbish?” she said to Sharyn, who replied that when she died, she wanted to come back as Kim Kardashian’s breasts.

            “Wah, so beautiful, I tell you!” Sharyn said with so much enthusiasm that Amanda shifted a little uncomfortably in her seat.

            And just like that, it seemed as if everywhere she turned, she bumped into a Kardashian-related moment. A random flick through a magazine while getting her hair coloured at the hairdressers opened onto an article discussing Khloe Kardashian’s weight issues. While looking up the crime of kidnapping on the internet, Google threw up the latest on Kim Kardashian’s divorce from Kris Humphries.

            Waiting in line for a taxi outside Hermes, the schoolgirl in front of Amanda suddenly piped up, “Oh my God, did you hear that maybe Kris is gay?”

            Her friend squealed. “Wait, Kris Jenner is gay?!”

            “No, lah, stupiak! Kris Humphries! I was reading it in Star magazine!”

            “Oh my God, I can’t stand him! I don’t know what Kim saw in him!”

            “Oh my God, I also say! She should have just married her Australian bodyguard!”

            “Oh my God, he was so hot!”

            Amanda came home and asked, “Who’s Kris Jenner?”

            Saffy immediately looked up, her famously short attention span laser-focused for once. “She’s the mother of Kourtney, Kim, Khloe, Rob, Kylie and Kendall! She’s married to Bruce Jenner, the Olympic champion! She’s fabulous!”

            “So who’s Kris Humphries?”

            “Oh,” Saffy began knowledgeably, “he’s a basketball player who married Kim for what, like, 70 days?” She turned to me.

“Shh-eventy-two days,” I corrected, through a crunch of corn chips.

“Yeah, 72 days! The wedding was fabulous, but she came up to his navel. She could have done so much better. She should have hooked up with her Aussie bodyguard!”

            “That’s exactly what those schoolgirls in front of me in the taxi queue said!”

            “I’m so glad kids are being properly educated these days,” Saffy said with approval.

            “And all their names start with K?” Amanda asked. “What are they, Hong Kong Chinese?”, a comment that led Saffy to tell me privately that she felt maybe Amanda is a racist.

            “So why doesn’t the son’s name also start with a K?” Amanda asked that night over dinner.

            “Because the son was named after his father, Robert Kardashian,” Saffy said in the tone of voice she normally reserves for ‘The Lord’s Prayer’. “Robert  was OJ Simpson’s lawyer! And OJ’s wife’s best friend was Kris Jenner who, by that time, was already married to Bruce, but before he had that terrible face-lift, so when her ex-husband took the case on, she had a major falling out with him!”

            “Robert, not Bruce,” I clarified helpfully.

            “Yes, that’s what I meant,” Saffy said.

            “But why is any of this interesting?” Amanda cried.

            Saffy looked surprised. “Which part of it isn’t interesting? Beautiful girls, beautiful houses, private jet-planes, lots of paparazzi, useless husbands and boyfriends, lots of money being thrown around!”

            “Kim Kardashian nearly lost her $70,000 diamond earrings in the sea,” I reported. “And in one episode, she went shopping and spent $20,000 on clothes!”

            “I wanna be her BFF,” Saffy said agreeably. “But I love that behind all that glitz, they also fight and love and hate and bitch about each other. And they have issues with their weight, their spouses, their careers, their love lives, their friends.”

            “They’re just like us,” I concluded.

            “Well, they’re more like Amanda,” Saffy said to me, very seriously. “You and I have the same issues, but she has the Kardashian budget.”

            “And the same regrettable taste in men,” I added.

            “Huh,” Amanda said. From the distant look in her eyes, you could tell that she was torn between her high ideals and her now burning curiosity.

            “Only a matter of time now,” Saffy SMS’d me from her bedroom. “She just needs to watch 1 ep. I left a recorded ep running on the TV and she’s in the lounge rm not making a sound. Soon, she’ll join the Dark Side!”