Lawrence.com

While squatting upon a giant, whirling toadstool which belched noxious sputum into her face, Carol Journey began doubting if she was ready for her glitzy new role in showbiz.

"I was on the mushroom and I got squirted with slime. That slime smelled like vomit, and it had corn chunks and oatmeal chunks in it," queasily recalls the 21-year-old KU senior and cheerleader. "Honestly, the smell made me want to throw up. Not from the spinning, but the actual smell." And that was before she had to coat her body in fake popcorn butter.

When we caught up with her this weekend, Journey had just returned to her hometown Haysville from Los Angeles, where she was the first "houseguest" to get booted off of the CBS reality television series, "Big Brother." She's not exactly torn up about the eviction.

"Oh my God:I have never missed Kansas so much in my entire life," says Carol with the fervor of one who's just been released from a particularly frisky Turkish prison. "It was a great, great feeling to be home."

She says the mechanical mushroom puke and oily discharge shower was actually the least offensive aspects of her stay on "Big Brother," so it's little wonder that Carol was so eager to get the hell back to Dodge.

Earning its Orwellian title, "Big Brother" goes out of its way to psychologically break down its contestants via constant violation of privacy and pride, or-as "Big Brother" producer Allison Grodner and millions of viewers prefer to think of it-frothy summer entertainment.

"Strangers are put in a house and the doors are locked," explains Grodner of the show she calls one of the "granddaddies of the reality/non-fiction genre."

"They have 64 cameras and 71 microphones watching and listening to their every move. There's no privacy, they're completely cut off from the outside world."

Even though she was aware of it beforehand and admits it was a "self-inflicted" experience, it was this constant surveillance which really pushed Journey's paranoia buttons.

"Yeah, I kind of freaked out for a while," she says of her two-week stint of surreptitious scrutiny. "It's scary-it is like an evil eye following you everywhere you go. It's an awful feeling. You don't understand what it's like until you're under it."

In fact, Carol's refusal to submit to the Peeping Tom atmosphere came to define her brief residency for the rabid online community of "Big Brother"-just type "Carol Journey" into Google Video for several "Carol Freaks Out" clips.

The colonoscopy level of intrusiveness and demeaning stunts are pretty much par for the "Big Brother" course, but in this, its 8th season, Grodner and her crew decided to up the mind-game factor another notch.

"On our premiere episode our houseguests were shocked to discover some of them were going to be sharing the summer and living in the house with last people they wanted to see," says Grodner giddily of this year's twist. "In some cases it was their worst enemy, in some cases it was their rival, in some cases it was people with whom they had unfinished business."

Carol Journey was less than thrilled to find out she was being set up as one of these "twists." She considered it a sucker punch when it was revealed that Jessica Hughbanks, a junior high acquaintance of Carol's from Haysville with whom she had a falling out years ago, was also on the show.

Carol believes she was asked to be on "Big Brother" due primarily to Jessica's promise of potential conflict between the two. "CBS told us nothing. I was recruited-Jessica applied and she wrote my name down on the paper and from there they called me," fumes Carol.

"They lied to me right off the bat, like, 'We saw you dancing at the Big 12 Tournament, we loved your look, we loved your personality and we thought you'd be great on our show, blah blah blah.' If I had known that Jessica was going to be there and I had known that I would be a twist, I probably never would have gone in the first place."

The supposed long-standing beef, by the way, revolved around $5 that Jessica claims Carol stole from her 7 years ago, a claim that even the other houseguests mocked as trivial on the air.

Grodner won't divulge if Carol was misled for the purpose of causing sparks with Jessica ("Well, I can't give out casting secrets"), but she doesn't try to kid anyone about the show's explicit desire to create a Machiavellian hotbed of deceit.

"It's a pressure cooker once we close those doors-then the game begins," says Grodner of the tightly engineered socio-psychological experiment that is the show.

"I liken it to high-school times 10,000. We can all sort of remember that, when you never quite knew and you had to belong to a clique, but then they might turn on you. Now imagine being locked in your high school all summer long with those people:with cameras following their every move and competing for food and power and money every week."

It's all part of what Grodner admits is a "contrived framework" constructed to produce drama in this mutant spectrum of television loosely defined as "reality."

Carol, however, hardly appreciated being an unwitting buttress in this "contrived framework."

"I thought it was pathetic, I really did," she says of both Jessica and the non-non-fiction plot devices. "Honestly, I thought our rivalry was staged. I thought it was dumb, and it was really petty and pathetic." She'd like to list her grievances in more detail, but-and only half joking-confides, "I'm afraid CBS will sue me."

Turns out "Big Brother" is indeed watching you.

Grodner says none of this should come as a surprise to those who have seen the show. "The show is about voyeurism and it is about eavesdropping and it's this intense soap opera and game all rolled up together," says the unapologetic Svengali behind the scenes. "I think that the people in the house and out of the house expect that."

Despite her severe reservations about having participated in a show she calls "too evil and too conniving," Carol doesn't regret her overall "Big Brother" experience. "I just hope I did a good job representing Kansas and representing the Jayhawks," says the reluctant reality TV star who looks forward to finishing her Business Marketing degree at KU. "I can't say I'd ever do it again, but it was fun for what it was."