"Swear? Swear on our relationship?" and other reasons why I love Laguna Beach

I now wholeheartedly believe that everyone in America should have MTV cameras following them around during their senior year of high school, because it makes for FREAKIN' GREAT TELEVISION. There's this one girl? Who, like, doesn't totally trust her boyfriend? And so she asks him pretty much every day if he's lying to her about something? "Are you lying?" No. "Swear?" Yes. "Swear on our relationship?" Yes. This is officially my new way of asking questions of my friends.

Now, think about it...if there'd been a camera following you and YOUR friends during your senior year of high school, they would've gotten some pretty good stuff. I'd get into it, but I'm a little high schooled out from my playlist entry from last week. Okay, fine, I've already walked into it...

So you have a crush on your best friend's boyfriend, well actually, you've had a bit of a crush on him from the time he moved to town in eighth grade and he walked into your science class and Mr. Martinson put him in your lab group and that night you wrote in your diary, "I have a crush on the new boy. He's from Buffalo." OK but now you're back in high school and your best friend is dating him. So best friend decides she hates all of you preppy assholes and wants to work at a ghetto fabric store in the next town with high school dropouts, and you try to sympathize with her working class aspirations but of course it's just pushing you and her alienated boyfriend closer together, so you both listen to too much appropriately gut-wrenching music in your bedrooms and you didn't so much as hug him until after best friend broke up with him but she accused you of sleeping with him even though you wouldn't do that until much later, and then she said she was a lesbian even though right after that she started dating that kid Eric. Meanwhile there's all your wacky friends like Rob who lives around the corner and makes you laugh until you can't breathe and he's got a thing for Alison who follows Phish around and smokes up almost every day in her bedroom because her mom doesn't have a sense of smell. And there's Kevin who makes extra money working at the supermarket and lies around with you contemplating relationships and he says he'll never, ever, ever understand what girls want and he's probably married with four kids now. And there's Katie who is dealing with a stalker ex-boyfriend who wrote "my love for you always and forever is as deep as the deep blue sea" or some such shit in his senior quote and now he won't leave her alone. And there's Tara who walks that very thin line between being delightfully candid and totally pretentious and then Jane Pratt writes a book about her.

I'm sure your senior year story reads with different names and only slightly different scenarios. Come on, that's good TV, right?

Swear? Swear on our relationship?