Thank god for a new season of “The Real World.” I was beginning to worry I would have to start looking around in the real, real world for a new set of highly enlightened, awesomely complex, shallow exhibitionist 18-to-24 year-olds to hang out with. God knows there aren’t many self-centered, emotionally fragile, hipper-than-thou, professional-victim pre-adults in the United States.

Finding emotionally immature, soul-sucking sponges who think they know all about life is like trying to find water in the ocean.

I have a love-hate thing going on with that show. I hate 90 percent of the freaks on it and get way too wrapped up in the lives of the other 10 percent I find myself identifying with against my will.

I will be the first to admit it that when the first “Real World” aired, I thought it was a pretty cool idea: seven very different people living together and learning from each other. Political correctness was all the rage, so the premise really seemed to hinge on conflicting characters who might argue a lot about meaningful subjects and end up learning something important. Who knew what would happen when they started “being real.”

Unfortunately, what passes for real these days is as up for grabs as what passes for a good taco. “Real” seems to come down to who can pose the coolest, use the most meaningless psuedo-spiritual terms in the shortest time without laughing or getting naked in the hot tub.

How many times can we actually watch the same scene where the new guy or girl shows up and comes out to the house? You know somebody is going to be gay; it just stands to reason. There is going to be at least one black man or woman, one homosexual and one small-minded redneck. Of course, you can substitute a cloistered, middle-class prude so long as they might take a beating for being racist or homophobic at some point during the season and be portrayed at the end of the season as having grown the most.

These half-assed Buddha wannabes wouldn’t know real spiritual development if it kissed them on the Kundalini while singing tunes from “Jesus Christ Superstar” and doing a rain dance.

The only thing more annoying than the ones who think that because they screw around a lot, take nothing seriously and are about as responsible as crack-addicted 2-year-olds that they are enlightened are the ones who allow themselves to come off as backwards as Barney Fife in a Drag Club. Do you HAVE television at home, Gomer? Then you should know better than to say “colored folks” and not get a lecture.

If you move into one of these “Real World” houses and are actually surprised that one of your roommates is gay, you should be shot from a cannon into a low-earth orbit where your carcass can circle the earth for a year before re-entering our atmosphere in flames leaving the stench of burning hayseed across the sky like a giant skidmark.

But the biggest problem I see with the show is that even though it sucks, the episodes just aren’t long enough. You get a half hour episode with 10 minutes of commercials per week so the anticipation is far greater than the satisfaction. After Los Angeles, I just stopped bothering, until one day …

MTV must have gotten hip to the fact that nobody really gives a damn what they put on their network so long as it looks cool in the background at a party and that is when the marathons began.

I have to tell you, the problems of a bunch of spoiled, diverse posers become a lot more interesting when you get that immediate follow-up to all the little fights about who is a bigot, who ate the last Yoplait or who had anonymous sex with the stripper on the pool table and didn’t clean up the mess.

I don’t need to wait a week to see if Amaya and Colin are still fighting because Justin is playing his little “Dangerous Liaisons” style games. I want closer, dammit.

I catch two episodes in a row accidentally and you might as well throw away the remote because I am there for the duration.

Even though I detest these phonies, I get obsessed with watching them. Imagine how much more interesting it would be if they did something with their lives besides lay around those houses complaining how somebody’s Lyme disease is making everyone uncomfortable and wondering if that makes them a bad person.

How interesting would mine be?

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs. He is opinion editor of the Daily.