STRANGER THAN FICTION: THE BOLD AND BEAUTIFUL DAYS OF OUR LIVES

Lord help me, I'm hooked on soap operas.

Back in the days before The Other Half, I never watched them. My very religious mother warned against watching.

"Would you have adulterers, fornicators and greedy people in your home?" she'd say. "That's just what you're doing when you turn on a soap opera!"

I've probably had all three kinds of people in my home since then, whether I realized it or not. And now I'm watching the soaps.

Mr. Half is to blame. He got me hooked on "The Young & The Restless," which comes on at 11 a.m. My job starts at noon, so I listen to Y&R while getting dressed and then bolt out the door after the final scene (always marked by intense music at the end).

When work interferes with my busy schedule of watching soap operas, I feel as though I've missed out on vital information. Did Danny get his divorce from Phyllis? Did Brad and Nikki get married despite Nicholas' warning? Did Olivia agree to let little Nate see his daddy?

There's only one way to find out -- tune in the next day, or even two weeks later. Time moves so slowly on soaps, you're not going to miss anything big in a couple weeks.

Before really considering it, I thought the world would be a better place if it operated like a soap opera. So many beautiful people. So many great jobs.

But nobody ever has a calm, peaceful life on the soaps. Sure, Nicholas and Sharon enjoyed a few days of honeymoon whoopie, but that was only after Nicholas got out of prison for a murder he didn't commit while Sharon kept her future mother-in-law from breaking up the engagement.

Several people in the office recently discussed all this and came up with some other ways the soaps differ from real life:

-- There are two stages of health on soaps: well and dying. Nobody gets the sniffles -- they get cancer. Characters always have their makeup on and hair styled, no matter what the illness. Keesha on Y&R just died of AIDS, and her worst symptoms were dark circles under her eyes and a tendency to fall into her fiance's arms.

-- It's the same day for a week, but soap holidays seem to coincide with real-world holidays. And children go from age 2 to age 16 in a year.

-- No character has a lousy home, unless he's wandering on the street from his ever-present amnesia. Even the apartments have $25,000 worth of interior design done on them.

-- There are only one or two restaurants in each town, even if the town is Los Angeles (like on "The Bold & The Beautiful"). Everyone runs into each other during dinner. Even couples who DON'T want to be spotted by other people go to those two restaurants.

And neither one is McDonald's or Shoney's.

-- Women wear anything to the office, as long as it has a jacket. Short skirt with an off-the-shoulder neckline on the jacket? Come on in! The job is yours! On the other hand, men wear suits everywhere.

-- Nobody goes to the bathroom. You never even see a bathroom in characters' homes. If they put on makeup, they do it at the vanity in their bedrooms.

-- Every soap has one token fat person. On Y&R it's Sharon's mom, who is also in a wheelchair. That's fortunate, because she can be the token fat person AND the token disabled person.

-- No matter what the weather is outside, everyone's always beautiful. If a character runs indoors to escape a rainstorm, she simply shakes the water off her designer coat and goes on with her life.

-- Nobody does any cleaning or laundry. Even the maids only walk through sets with feather dusters or laundry baskets. All people do is visit each other constantly, sit at restaurant tables, socialize at the office, slow dance and have sex.

Maybe soap life wouldn't be so bad after all!

~Heidi Nieland is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.