Here are my thoughts after revisiting Daria.  I watched most of the series a couple years ago when I found it on You Tube, but otherwise I hadn’t seen any of it since it was last on MTV in the late 1990s and early 2000s–the approximate years I was in high school.

• First of all, it was kind of a surprise to me to realize that the series was on when I was in high school, because Daria is of course in high school, yet I never thought of us as being the same age or at the same point in our lives.  This might have something to do with her not being real.  Or maybe it was because she’s a cartoon character who took five years to finish just her last couple years of high school and I did the whole thing in the traditional four.

• I said this in my earlier post, but I think it’s interesting how Daria is supposed to be so different, yet it’s composed almost exclusively of stereotypes who rarely surprise you.  I didn’t know anyone even half as extreme as any of these characters when I was in high school, but Daria is a comedy and it’s not really about real life.  But, stereotypical characters, in their extremes, are very good for satirizing this real life.

• Daria herself is really so unlikeable.  Her voice is at least as annoying as her sister’s and she is a total Debbie Downer.  The most realistic thing about the series is that she only has one friend.  It is strange how you grow to love her anyway.  I guess she’s just one of those people who is who she is and you either accept or reject her.

• Right from the start she does show she’s human through her crush on Jane’s brother Trent.  One of my favorite quotes is when Jane says to Daria, “Watch out for the girl with the red face, who’s forgotten how to walk.  Oh, never mind.  That’s you.”  She has no illusions about Trent being anything but a total out of it slacker, but she has a crush on him anyway.

• I like the dynamic between her parents where Daria’s Dad is struggling in his career, while her Mom is doing so well.  It seems really common for the time or maybe it just seems true of my family dynamic.  He cooks frozen lasagna every night and she comes home just in time for dinner.

• I love the way Daria’s Mom, Helen, says “Daria.”  Or just talks in general.  It’s like, “Daaaarrrrrrrrrrrrria” every time.  Everyone seems to have such an interesting voice, completely unrelated to their actual location.

• I like the idea that Daria is so principled and so rigid in her idealism, but generally too lazy and unengaged to actually do anything.  At one point, Jody calls her out for it.  She’s called out for it at several points, actually, and she’s contrasted against Lane and Trent who are slackers and Jody who is far more practical.  Her idealism rings true for a person in high school and it’s called into question, but not destroyed.  I think it could have been trampled on a bit more, but there’s still college and post-college for that rise and fall.

• Daria is not exactly a goody goody like Rory Gilmore, but I saw a similarity in their stories.  Rory’s values and image were challenged when she took up with Dean after he was married, and it’s similar to Daria’s involvement in Jane’s breakup with Tom.  I don’t think that Daria took enough responsibility for that and it seemed right to me that Jane took a long time to forgive her.

• When Daria starts dating Tom, it’s so interesting the way she starts saying all the kinds of things she would have rolled her eyes at before.  She worries he doesn’t like her enough and doesn’t take her places and all of that stuff that seems more likely to come out of Quinn’s mouth.

• Daria really treats Tom like crap.  I appreciated the way she has a hard time being in a relationship at first, because she has a lot of walls up.  That seemed right for her.  But, she breaks up with him so many times and shuts him out all the time and gets mad at him for the slightest things and he has to apologize to her at least a million times.  She basically holds him to the ridiculous standard set by her principles, but when she messes up over and over again, he forgives her even if she just barely mumbles that she’s sorry.  It’s true to her character, but it’s not always so clear why Tom likes her enough to endure all of her waffling.

• I like Daria and Jane’s friendship.  It goes through some challenges, but they survive.  The way they get mad at each other without really having a blowout and then become friends again with a mushy moment seemed more realistic to my friendships, at least.

• Quinn and the Fashion Club get a surprising amount of screen time.  I like the way that Quinn basically walks all over guys and has no interest in a long-term relationship, and instead stresses more about her friendships.  I’m over the women hating women theme, but in high school it works.  It’s a result of the perfect storm of uncertainty, competitiveness, and insecurity.  I love Sandy’s (president of the Fashion Club) passive-aggressive one liners.  I also love Stacey.

This is a must watch, totally worth the cost of the whole series.  I was really sad to reach the last DVD and now I’m starting the series over again.

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.

I’m going to go out on a limb and admit how much I love TV shows on DVD.  Oh, wait, it’s very crowded on this limb.  Most recently, I used a gift card from Christmas to buy the first season of Ally McBeal.  I was aware of the show when it originally aired and watched it very casually, but I was excited to see it again.  I had several reactions.  First, these people are supposed to be roughly my age.  Ally is 27 and almost everyone she works with was in her graduating class, so I guess they’re also supposed to be 27.  Except they look 35-40.  I need to watch a show that’s actually about mid-late twenty somethings.  Maybe a comedy-drama about grad students?  That sounds fascinating.  Second, Ally wears really short skirts and really long coats and weird shoes.

Third, Ally definitely channels Carrie in that she makes every conversation with friends about her and her problems only.  Also, she’s clearly kind of crazy, yet every guy loves her.  Fourth, she’s crazy in a way that doesn’t annoy me like adorably quirky female characters. She actually sees things, like dancing babies.  Let me actually go out on a limb this time and say that I think little animated characters dancing is the most hilarious thing ever.  I wish we saw more of this baby.  Fifth, I enjoy the show and if I adopt any Fishism, it’ll probably be “bygones!”  Since you probably have no idea what I’m talking about, because Ally McBeal isn’t exactly topical, you can basically say whatever you want, offend someone even, and then say “bygones!”–like, let’s forgive, forget, and move on already.

Over Christmas break, I resolved to read one book.  I made it Chuck Klosterman IV: Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas, a book of essays.  I heard of Klosterman from Bill Simmons, The Sport’s Guy, who I heard of from Adam Carolla’s podcast.  On his podcast, Simmons recently named Klosterman the czar of social commentary.  I enjoy hearing what he has to say, even though I don’t agree with a lot of his conclusions.  That’s about how I felt about the book.  I started reading it on the plane home to Washington.  By the time I got to the essay on U2, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to open the emergency exit and throw the book out of the plane or keep reading.   It sent me into a mini crisis about how hard it is to express yourself as an essayist and as one of the artists Chuck was profiling.  It’s like, no matter what you do or how authentic you are, someone can so easily come by and poke holes through everything you’ve done.  I was doing the same thing to Chuck that he was doing to Britney Spears and U2 and Val Kilmer. Something about that really bothered me.

There were a few more things that drove me absolutely insane, like a whole essay on how women hate women, all discussed as if it was a hilarious and original concept.  He also seems to conclude pretty often that nothing really matters that much, so what’s the point in being invested in anything.  That kind of relativism seems to completely undermine his own work.  The most redeeming essay was one near the end about guilty pleasures.  Chuck (I really enjoy calling him Chuck) destroys the very concept of guilty pleasures and says if you like something, then you can just like it and you don’t have to be ashamed of that.  On top of which, most of the things people name as guilty pleasures don’t even make sense.  One example he uses is the album Thriller.  Why would anyone be ashamed to like one of the best selling albums of all time by one of the biggest icons of all time featuring a song with one of the best videos of all time and another song with one of the best base lines of all time?  What’s to be ashamed of?

Over the weekend, I was finally able to watch the fifth season of Weeds.  I was apprehensive, because I didn’t really enjoy the fourth season; it seemed that whatever had been so captivating about the first three seasons had completely disappeared.  It turns out I was right to be apprehensive.  The magic did not return for season five.  There were some good moments, for sure, but not enough to make me watch intently.  At a certain point, I only kept watching because I wanted to be done.  I did, however, cement my opinion that Nancy Botwin is one of the weirdest characters I have ever encountered. She has really never made any sense, but in the beginning, you assign all these feelings to her, because she’s just lost her husband and she’s trying to support her kids.  At first you believe her when she says she’s just doing the best she can.  That eventually becomes very hard to believe.  It turns out she’s just incredibly selfish.  But that’s not really what’s weird about her.  What’s weird is the amount of time she spends chewing on straws and staring into space with her giant eyes.  And the ways she usually doesn’t react to things at all, but sometimes reacts in a really over the top way.  What’s weird is that you can never figure out her motivations.  What’s annoying is that she never seems to realize she’s responsible for the way everything always seems to be going wrong. Finally in season five she starts to get called on it.  My breakdown makes the show seems 100% serious, which it’s not.  It’s funny too, but not as funny as it used to be.

This would be a good time to confess that I loved the show Veronica Mars and I am a total wimp (though not really a push over) who has always dreamed of suddenly being kick ass.

Veronica Mars has everything.  She’s tough, smart, pretty, ambitious.  Okay, so she’s also a little emotionally wounded, but who isn’t?

It’s really the tough thing that I’ve always admired, because I just take everything so damn personally, while she more appropriately deflects all that crap with a hard-as-steel defense mechanism.  I run away from people, while she runs after them.  She plays the game, while I sit on the sidelines.

So, I can’t see myself becoming like Veronica Mars, but I need to pull out my DVDs, because Cassidy Casablancas still kind of melts my heart.  Any Veronica Mars fans out there?

Not having cable for seven years really stunted my TV development. But, the cream rises to the top and I think I’ve managed to see most of the best shows on television. I’m still making my way through The West Wing, but it’s September and one of the many things that makes September magical is new TV. So, here are the shows I will be watching. It’s not a unique list, but it wins out in quality.

How I Met Your Mother
This show has had a renaissance in my own mind. I’ve been watching since the first season, and I’ve always loved the show, but my interest waned over the last season or two until I rewatched all the episodes on DVD this Summer and everyone I know suddenly fell in love with it. I’m more excited about its return than I have been in a while.

The Big Bang Theory
I love this show, but I never get to see it since I work when it’s on and CBS doesn’t post it online! I can’t wait for Season 2 to be released on DVD and I have to find a way to watch Season 3 as it airs.

30 Rock
It’s probably my favorite show on TV. I always expect it to be good and it always is. I hope we get to see more of Liz Lemon in her college years. I especially love when she speaks German.

The Office
I will be watching, but I have to admit that I’ve lost most of my interest in this show. I was barely hanging on before, especially to the Jim and Pam stuff which was so boring to me this last season, and then they had to go with the whole baby plot line, which I hate. I used to always trust that The Office writers would pull it off and not disappoint me, but I don’t trust them as much anymore. Still, the Michael Scott Paper Company episodes from last season were awesome, so maybe I’ll be surprised.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
If you’re not watching this show, what’s wrong with you? It can be abrasive at first listening to idiots argue with each other non-stop, but eventually all that noise becomes music to your ears. Really. I mean, last season actually ended with a musical. And, I’m no fan of musicals, but The Nightman Cometh is one to appreciate.

Community
I have really high hopes for this show, so don’t disappoint me Joel McHale!

Of course, the love of my life remains Forensic Files, but I don’t think they’re big on season premiers.

How do you know you’re busy and important?  You don’t have enough time to stop and talk to people.  You have to take care of business on the move.

So, I’ve been eyeing The West Wing box set since the election.  I guess I was hoping that Amazon would either lower the price by a hundred bucks or I would find a way to justify spending $170.  Neither of those panned out, but I did finally cave and sign up for Netflix again.  The first disc of the first season arrived on Monday.  I was expecting to get hooked and I am.

I haven’t been watching long enough to have any kind of opinion of the series as a whole and reviews aren’t really my thing, but I do have some thoughts so far.

First, people who have worked in the real life West Wing, liberals and conservatives, have commented on how accurate the depiction is, but it’s not how I imagined it at all.   There are so many people around and they’re always bustling .  I pictured a quiet Oval Office that you get to through quiet halls with several closed doors to rooms where quiet meetings are taking place.  I don’t know why.  It’s not like I ever imagined the staff and the President didn’t work hard, but I guess I naively thought that at that level, there was less bustling!  I imagined less walking and talking.   I never realized I had all these ideas about life in the West Wing until they were challenged.  Now, of course, they seem ridiculous.

Second, another level of my ignorance was reveled as I tried to figure out what staff position each character held.  It’s true I didn’t know there was such a thing as a Deputy Chief of Staff.  Apparently Obama has two Deputy Chiefs of Staff.

Third, I kept going back and forth on whether the show was outdated or not.  In one of the first scenes of the show, you’ve got two characters getting their pagers mixed up and then another character answers his cell phone and the thing looks like the kind of cordless telephone you might use as a land line.  The show also seems a bit outdated in its look and feel.  I think dramas are much more stylized now.  But, I was over and over again surprised by how relevant the plot was, especially to a liberal like me.  The Democratic president is accused of not being patriotic enough or being weak on defense.  You’ve got problems with the Religious Right.  You’ve got Democrats turning against Democrats for not supporting key legislation (on The West Wing, it was gun control, but now it’s health care reform).  And a million other small things that a person like me thinks is new, but is really politics as usual.

Fourth, you think the Gilmore Girls talk a lot?  This show is basically all talking and I think they just involve the walking to make the talking seem more exciting.  It’s not unrealistic dialogue like Dawson’s Creek or anything, but sometimes there are too many words.  In general, though, impressive writing.  I’m just not a fan of unnecessarily big words or people who never pause to take a breath.

Fifth, according to the world’s best source of knowledge–aka Wikipedia–the show was criticized for being unrealistically optimistic.  I haven’t watched enough to really make a judgment and I don’t know that I care to.  Fiction is not reality and that’s okay with me.

This is my 200th post. For my 100th post, I listed 100 facts about me. I will spare you the torture of reading 200 facts about me, and do something fun instead. As some of you know, I’ve recently been re-watching all the episodes of Sex and the City. Well, last night I finished. So, here are my conclusions after watching the series again.

• I want to live in New York. If only for a short period of time. Actually, I’d probably prefer only a short period of time. I know that SATC does this to a lot of people–makes them fall in love with New York. But, up to this point, I’d been immune. I’ve never felt any strong desire to go to New York. I guess the bug finally caught this west coaster.

• Kristin Davis is gorgeous. I swear I actually started looking for faults, but she’s beautiful even when she cries. That’s not fair.

• I can’t say “I’m a Charlotte/Samantha/Miranda/Carrie.” I’m really not like any of them. I’m too cynical to be a Charlotte, too much of a good goody to be a Samantha, and too emotional and weak to be a Miranda. I guess I’m most like Carrie just because she has the least extreme personality.

• I’ve never really bought Carrie as a writer. Why? Probably because I’m a big snob. She just didn’t seem introspective or focused enough to be a writer. Plus, it annoys me that she’s constantly telling people she’s a writer. Again, I’m a snob. Okay, but this time around, I finally noticed just how much she “wonders” about things and just how much time she spends sitting in front of her computer writing. I don’t like all the puns and hypothetical questions, but I’m sure I’d enjoy her column otherwise.

• Speaking of the column, I don’t quite understand how she manages to write about her friends–using their real names–and her relationships without it getting her into trouble. Like, it would be weird to be questioning your relationship in a newspaper column just to have the other person and everyone you know read it. I guess it’s kind of like The Office, where you have to forget about the whole mockumentary angle, because it stops making sense after the first season.

• I don’t like Carrie with anyone but Big. Berger was the absolute worst. She just seems most herself with Big, and they laugh a lot together.

• Like everyone else, watching Sex and the City makes me want to prance around the city in fabulous clothes and shoes. Except, I realize now that I don’t want to prance around New York as myself, I want to prance around New York as five foot nothing, hundred and nothing, plenty of free time Carrie Bradshaw. Yeah, that’s healthy thinking.

• For the majority of the show, Carrie had terrible hair. Her hair finally redeems itself in season 6.

• I know several girls who do not like Carrie. I do like Carrie, and I think she’d make a good friend. But, there are a few things she does that are seriously annoying. First, she talks about herself too much. I love that all of her friends have to tell her at one point that she needs to shut up and listen to their problems for a while. Second, she’s always telling people how they should react to her; she’s always schooling them on being a good boyfriend or friend. I hate when she tells The Russian he can’t talk about his friend who died of cancer, because it upsets her. But, the absolute worst is when she yells at Charlotte for not offering her money for her down payment.

• There’s this one part of Carrie’s apartment that I’d never noticed before. Right next to her kitchen, there’s this tiny little built in desk thing with a lamp. Weird that I’d never noticed before.

We all love Jim, right? Right. But, I have to admit something, and I think it’s finally safe to do so. Even though I do like most of what the writers of The Office have done with Jim over the last couple seasons, so much of the time, he didn’t feel like the same guy I giggled over and commiserated with in seasons one and two.

In season three, he was going through some things. I understand. In season four, I don’t know what happened.

But, season five, well, it’s like the progdigal son has returned. I don’t even know what the difference is. I guess it’s the jokes. Or, maybe it’s that when the series began, Jim (even more than Pam) was our entry point into a crazy world where on any given day your boss might throw an awards night at Chilli’s or grill his foot on a George Foreman Grill. This season it feels like we’re getting a lot more one-on-one time with Jim. He’s talking to us again about what’s going on in the office, and it feels like old times. Welcome home, Jim. I missed you.

I hope you remember that scene from “The Convention” and aren’t thinking right now that I don’t know how to spell prodigal.  I even know how to pronounce it.

THE FAVORITES

The Office: I started watching sometime in the middle of the second season. At the time, all of my favorite shows had ended, and I wasn’t watching anything regularly. I watched only sporadically for a while, but then it became my show–perhaps my favorite of all time. I love dry humor, though sometimes I actually have to walk away from the TV, because I can’t handle the awkward stuff. Watching has become easier since they minimized the uncomfortable pauses. I’m excited for this season; the premiere gave me the feeling that this is going to be a season that moves the characters forward, but draws still on all that stuff we love.

30 Rock: Don’t tell The Office, but in the last year, 30 Rock has made a serious play for the #1 place in my heart. I love Tina Fey like everyone else. The flashbacks to her time in college are too much. Alec Baldwin? He’s always cracked me up. And, Kenneth! Oh, Kenneth.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: This is a new one, but I’ve been watching the whole series over and over all summer. At first, I found it kind of annoying listening to jerks yell at each other, but eventually they won me over. Same kind of dry humor as the others–people acting completely ridiculous, but taking themselves completely seriously. I don’t actually have cable, but thank you universe for hulu.com.

How I Met Your Mother: I started watching in the first season. I don’t care that much about the unconventional style, but I like Ted as an everyman, Barney is hilarious, Robin is . . . Canadian, and Lilly and Marshall are nauseatingly adorable.

THE SECOND STRING

48 Hours Mystery: I started watching this show because it’s the only thing on on Saturday night before SNL/Mad TV. I stay because I like real-life criminal mysteries, and each episode has some ridiculous title like “Storm of Murder” or “Love and Death in Alaska.”

The Big Bang Theory: I really love this show, and it should be in my faves, but, for some reason, I often forget about it. A lovable nerd, a hot girl who’s also very sweet, and Sheldon. Love it.

Family Guy/American Dad/King of the Hill: Love them all, but don’t usually catch them on the first airing. King of the Hill is actually one of my favorite shows ever.

SNL/Mad TV: I usually switch back and forth, landing on Mad TV more often, because it’s consistently funnier. But, when SNL hits, it really hits.

Daily Show/Colbert/Leno/Letterman/Conan/Craig Ferguson: I tune in sporadically, and watch only the monologues and intro skits, but I love ‘em.

THE ONE I’M EMBARRASSED TO ADMIT

Lipstick Jungle: It’s a decent show, but I continue to watch probably because a) the episodes are available on hulu, and b) the guy who plays Kirby sometimes works out at my gym.

I swear I used to watch dramas, but I’m not interested in any right now. Let me know if you have any recommendations.

I think Fridays are good for random entries. Here we go.

• I don’t have a lot of 4th of July memories. I’m sure I’ve had some good ones, and I definitely remember the fireworks from when I was younger, but we’ve never had any strong July 4th traditions in my family. I didn’t even realize the date was approaching until a couple days ago. For some reason, it hit me this year as something exciting. I wanted to do something. Lucky me, a friend wrote me a short time later to ask if I wanted to go to an event at the Rose Bowl. I was all set to say yes, but then I found out that there would be fireworks and . . . wait for it, marching bands! I’m so excited!!

• As I’ve probably mentioned a million times now, I moved last Tuesday. My arms have still not recovered from carrying all those boxes of books. But, I love love love my new apartment. I don’t have the space issues I thought I would, my patio is perfect, and I’ll be saving more than $300 a month on rent. I’m really happy with this decision.

• After passing the 50,000 word mark, I took a few days off from working on the novel, so that I could get some school-related writing done. I think it was a smart decision, because my brain has been flooding with ideas. The end is in sight, and so now every scene feels really important. My dream is still to finish this month. I can do it if I just keep my pace up.

• A couple nights ago, I turned off the lights to go to sleep, but there was no sleep to be found. It was very strange, but my sleep cycle resumed the next night, so I didn’t think much of it. Then, Wednesday night the same thing happened. It was 2 am, and I was not tired at all. I don’t know what’s going on, but this is very unlike me. I’ve been exercising, I haven’t been drinking too much caffeine, and my mind is not racing. I don’t know what’s going on!

• I finally gave in yesterday and went shopping. Wearing pants 2-3 sizes too big finally got old, and though I originally intended to wait until I reached my goal weight before buying new clothes, I decided that my hard work earned me some pants that fit! I cannot believe the sizes I’m wearing now. I look at the tags, but I don’t believe it.

• Last night, the Bizarro Jerry episode of Seinfeld was on. I think it’s a favorite of many, but I don’t know if people remember that the Bizarro world is only one story line of what’s an all around awesome episode. The others include George and the forbidden city, Kramer gets a job (to which he carries a briefcase full of crackers), and Jerry dates man hands. Nothing but laughs.

• After months of pestering, I got a friend of mine to start reading the Twilight books. As I figured, she loved them, and now I have someone to gush to. Oh that Edward!

Happy 4th!

I’m watching So You Think You Can Dance. Yeah, I admit it. Anyway, in the midst of beautiful dancers that have been training forever and the untrained but extremely talented and interesting dancers who we love to see succeed, are the people who really entertain us in this first phase of tryouts. Well, they entertain most people. I can’t usually watch them. They make me uncomfortable. If there’s one thing I cannot stand about the reality talent competitions, it’s watching people’s dreams get crushed. But, even within this group of people who cannot dance or sing or design clothing, there is a special group that will never know just how untalented they are. No one can crush their dreams. As someone who is hypersensitive to how people react to her–who searches their faces to be sure they don’t disapprove–the thought of going unphased by direct criticism sounds like the relief my life needs. But, it’s just a pleasant thought that doesn’t stand up well to critical reasoning. I don’t want to be someone so lacking in self-awareness. That wouldn’t be me at all. But, for a moment, I can pretend the grass is really greener over there.