More Kolsterman and More Weeds

I take in a lot of content every day. I’m not just a person with senses and people to interact with, but I read blogs and listen to several podcasts and watch YouTube videos and catch up on TV shows and follow twitter and scan the news and reply to emails and listen to music. I’m so used to the steady stream of noise and visuals that when it’s quiet, I still hear the noise in my head, and when I have nothing to look at, I create scenes in my mind. This semester, my time seems more precious and I’ve become more selective about the things I distract myself with. I’ve stepped up the level of content and while it’s still far from what I’d pretentiously call cultured, it’s certainly more enriching. And worth writing about.

I read Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas over Christmas break and while there were a few standout essays, I wasn’t hugely impressed. Chuck and I, we just weren’t a good match. But, I usually enjoy Chuck on Bill Simmons’s podcast, so I thought I’d give another of his books of essays a chance. This time I went for Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. The first half of the book confirmed my earlier suspicions that Chuck love just wasn’t going to happen for me and maybe I didn’t need to keep reading to convince myself to like some essays just because other people I like like them. But, then, just as with my first experience, there was one essay near the end that made continuing to read worth it. It was the essay on Saved By The Bell that I’d heard so much about. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting. It was full of all the facts about Saved By The Bell that would make anyone who watched smile. Chuck estimated that no one born after 1977 would get the show, but I was born in the last days of 1983 and I and all of my friends watched it, mostly in reruns. And, maybe that’s part of why Chuck and I aren’t bffs. He makes a lot of statements like, some more significant, that I find to be false–not just personally false, but decidedly false. But, then, he also writes about a lot of pop culture stuff that is not part of my generation and for that reason, doesn’t interest me to read about later.

The surprising part about the Saved By The Bell essay is also the point of the piece. Apparently when the gang were all seniors, Tiffany Amber Thiessen (Kelly) and Elizabeth Berkeley (Jessie) were mysteriously missing for most of the season, so they brought in another girl who was basically a combination of their two personalities, named Tori. But when Kelly and Jessie came back for the graduation episode, Tori mysteriously disappeared and was never mentioned or heard from again. This got Chuck thinking that we have a lot of Toris in our lives and sometimes we’re Tori ourselves. People, even people who matter to your life, pass in and out. You’re close to someone for a few months, because you have a class together, and then when the class is over, you just wave awkwardly when you see her once in a while. Or one of the friends in your group is going through something for a while and is absent for nights out. Or, as in Chuck’s case, your friends decided for a while in college that they hate you and you’re excluded from the group for months, and then you’re welcomed back in. The thing is that, these things happen. You won’t have the same friends your whole life and people will come and go and then reappear in ways you sometimes won’t even notice or remember later. So, maybe it’s not so weird that Zack never froze time to stop and look at the camera to say, “Tori got runover by a car and that’s why she’s not here for graduation.” (You can find more about The Tori Paradox (Klosterman coined) on the Saved By The Bell Wikipedia page. You should read the essay too, because I don’t know that I represent it well here; I no longer have access to the book and the details are fuzzy in my mind.)

I’ve somehow managed to mention Weeds in just about every post I’ve written in the last few weeks. All I can say is that I love the show. The last time I wrote about Weeds, I shared my disappointment in Season 5 and called Nancy Botwin the weirdest character ever. Having recently rewatched Seasons 1-4, I want to step back a bit. Even knowing what happens, I think it’s possible to relate to Nancy and like her at least up until Season 4. She does something crazy at the end of Season 3 that makes even her family, who have accepted a lot, stare at her in bewilderment. That’s when Nancy started leaving the ground. And, you know, that’s fine, but what’s annoying about her is that she’s so totally lacking in self-awareness that she never seems to recognize how responsible she is for the situations she finds herself in. I go back and forth about whether I just don’t like her character anymore or whether she’s no longer a well-written character. I think it’s a bit of both, because when Nancy started getting too far away, she stopped being interesting and engaging. I buy her as a character, but I no longer care that much about her or her story.

In Season 4, the show takes a major turn by leaving the suburbs. The writers said that they felt stifled by that setting (how fitting for the suburbs) and like they’d exhausted the story of Agrestic/Majestic. I first started watching Weeds over the Summer. I was at the height of my obsession when I went home to visit my parents in Washington. I remember telling my mom about the show (I might have left out the whole weed plot line) and saying, “I have lived in the suburbs my whole life and it’s nothing like this!!” What I meant is that even as an adult, I don’t believe that all of my neighbors were having affairs and smoking weed. I was super naive then and I’m still naive now, but I just don’t think they were all living these secret lives. Of course, I grew up in nice suburbs, but not super rich suburbs. Not the kind of suburbs where people have money and time to burn. So, there’s that. But, ultimately, it’s of course a heightened reality for the show and whether it’s accurate or not, it’s interesting and funny. And you don’t realize how much you love the suburb angle until it’s gone!

There’s this weird feeling I get when I watch Nancy and I get it with a lot of people. I see them going off track, standing still, or walking down a dark road and I just want so badly for them to pull it together or turn things around. I want it so badly that I can hardly stand to watch them continue to bury themselves, so I look away. I need for them to be okay–my idea of okay–for my sake. It’s pretty selfish, really.

I found out while watching the Season 4 commentaries that they film all the fake-city-near-the-border stuff in Manhattan Beach. After visiting there this Summer and then seeing it again and again on screen, I’ve decided for certain that I need to live there. When I say things like that to my dad, he’ll say, “you’ll buy a place with the money you make off your second book.” (The money from the first is to pay for my extensive education, of course.) There’s something really amazing about having someone believe in you a thousand times more than you believe in yourself.