I adore trashy TV. I love Gossip Girl, Ugly Betty, Running in Heels, The City and The Gilmore Girls and I could go on. So you can imagine my distress at the fact that I can no longer watch these beloved shows without breaking into a cold sweat, with a familiar icy grip of anxiety taking hold of my chest, and forcing a lump so big into my throat that I’m unable to swallow.

You see, I want to be a journalist. Worse, I want to be a glossy magazine journalist. And it seems in recent years that every young, glamorous girl in every young, glamorous American television show is trying to wedge one shiny Louboutin heel firmly into the magazine industry door before it slams shut so hard it knocks Blair Waldorf’s hair band straight off her head.

It’s not that I’m naive, or trying to bury my head in the sand and believe that it’s an easy ride landing a desk in a magazine office. I’m well aware of the strength of the competition out there for journalism internships and work experience (all those rejections stacking up in the inbox were my first clue), but I would really rather not have my fictional stateside competition paraded on my television screen when I’m trying to kick back and forget about impending graduation-launching-into-the-real-world -student-debt-up-to-the-eyeballs-stress.

Why does she have an internship and I don’t, I start to seethe? We’ve never seen her write anything! We’ve never seen her send off hundreds of soul-destroying ¬applications to every publication with an e-mail address. She’s probably not even literate.

And I know how it’ll play out too. After a hellish start, some perilous disaster, and a predictably ingenious solution provided by our protagonist, the draconian editor will take a chance on her and she’ll land her dream job behind that desk at just about the moment I dissolve into tears of despair. It almost makes me think that when I finally start my internship at a national glossy next year (it’s true that it takes fifty “no”s to get a “yes”) I might go out of my way to spill some take-away coffee over my editor just before she leaves for a super-important meeting/show/premier, just so that I can spontaneously produce a wonderfully resourceful solution and Save The Day. A strategically pinned scarf, perhaps.

For the sake of my televisual enjoyment (and my sanity) I’ve started treating these programmes like a research project – picking up tips for future placements. In fact, I’m going to pop the telly on right now, put my feet up, and start trying to channel my inner Rory Gilmore.