I Probably Shouldn't Admit This, But I Have Some Shallow Moments Sometimes...

What is it about television shows? I'm not an addictive person by nature, but I find it impossible to simply watch TV. For starters, it mostly bores me, and I've never been very good at watching without doing something else at the same time (eating, primarily, but also, at various stages in my life, playing computer games, writing, researching, doing homework, doing sit-ups, you get the point...).

But then, every once in awhile, something jumps out at you. Someone recommends a show and you rent a DVD (this is usually a few years after the show has been popular), or you stumble across something (again, this is usually ages after everyone else has discovered it), and, suddenly, without warning, without being given a fair chance to stock up on canned foods and powdered milk because you're not leaving the house anytime soon, you're hooked, in a seriously unhealthy way. There's something that happens in the brain, and all you can think is: I. Must. Watch. Every. Episode. Of. This. Show. That. I. Can. Get. My. Grubby. Hands. On. NOW.

It's a fickle addiction, though, a fragile relationship, and before you know it you've watched every single episode ever made, and all the outtakes, and all the special deleted scenes, and all the interviews with cast members, and all the tribute videos on YouTube, and there's a brief period--a week, maybe--during which you feel bereft, as if a piece of your soul has gone missing somewhere amongst the empty Chinese takeout boxes in your lounge. And then you're so over it. Like, come on, give me something good to watch.

So you tumble into a new addiction and stay up all night watching your beloved characters negotiate their way through whatever new scenario has been created for them, and when you finally fall into fitful sleep, you dream of them, you become one of them.

I guess you could say that I'm not a casual television-show-watcher. A casual drinker I may be, but I never have just one watch. There's no such thing as just one watch. If I like a show, I have to have it all. I'm not saying it's healthy (and I'm certainly not saying it's as destructive as other addictions, so I guess I should count myself lucky), but that's the way it is.

Over the years, I've had these obsessions often, and over the silliest things, sometimes. It pains me, as someone who considers herself well-read and literary, who doesn't own a television, who believes that you can never have too many University degrees, to admit that at various points in my life I've loved and watched with religious but transient intensity South Park, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Veronica Mars, the X-Files, Law and Order: SVU, NewsRradio, The Office, The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and dozens more, some of them even more embarrasing to name (I refer, as I sometimes do, to the quote in my "About Me" section). With the Man and I, it's been House, Gilmore Girls, Spooks, CSI, Mad Men, Teachers, and, most recently, 30 Rock, which we've been watching with great zeal ever since we reluctantly agreed that, since everyone else though it was like, the best thing ever, we should, for the purposes of remaining culturally aware, probably take a look at it. And sure enough, within viewing the first few episodes, a hundred previously-puzzling references suddenly became clear in my mind.

Of course there are always those classics--for me, The West Wing comes to mind--that stay with us longer than a week. But for the rest of it, well--it's all in the name of cultural education, really it is.

(and yes, you get two posts today, because I broke my [already rather tenuous] resolution to write one a day yesterday!)

Life in an English Heat Wave

It's the summer of the ice cream van.  Maybe I was oblivious last year but the ice cream van wasn't around half as much as it is now.  All day, every day: the inanity of the song, as it weaves in and out of our neighborhood streets.  I can't even hum it now; it's just a constant backdrop.  

"Oh, give it a rest, will you?" we say when we hear the tinkling notes from afar.  We cringe as it comes nearer.  But I don't know if we really mind.  It means that it's summertime.  I never see anyone buy ice cream from the van, but maybe, in a weird sort of way, we're all just comforted by its presence.

It's been hot here.  Hot enough to hang laundry outside and have it dry alarmingly fast.  While I'm hanging our shirts and trousers and undergarments I notice a cat who has curled up at the far end of the garden, next to the potato patch.  He looks as if he's guarding the vegetables; he stretches a paw, yawns, settles his head against the warm concrete.  

At midday I open the window upstairs wide and stick my head out of it to get some fresh air.  I like being able to peer down; sometimes, at night, when we hear strange things, we do the same thing.  It's amazing how much you can see when the street doesn't think you're watching.  

I go for a run; I take a circuitous route that leads me to the top of South Park, where I find myself looking down at the spired skyline below.  There's a little haze hanging in the afternoon air, so that the spikes of Magdalen tower look soft.  On the swing set, a pair of teenagers are pumping their legs furiously.  

One of them, the boy, says, "I'm going to jump!"  The girl giggles coyly, but when she sees he's serious, she says, "Don't do it, Will.  It's too high Will."  She has very short hair, a sort of 1920's bob, and a striped t-shirt.

Her voice changes as he prepares to leap.  

"Will NO!  Will, I'm begging you, no!" She says.  She implores him so earnestly I turn to watch; he pumps his legs one last time and propels himself from the seat of the swing.  He is suspended; then he lands in an awkward cat-crouch, off-balance.  He falls to his knees, rolls sideways.  He whoops and begins to laugh very hard.  The girl, who had sounded so desperate, is laughing too.  Her shoulders are shaking with giggles and she ceases to move her legs, just rolling forwards, backwards on the swing.  

A woman walks past talking to a tiny, fluffy white dog.  The boys with the remote-control helicopter at the crest of the hill pin their eyes skyward to watch it hover; perspective makes it seem that it could be real, could be hanging just above the point of an Oxford tower.

I take a lukewarm shower and think of all of the things I need to do.  

I take the laundry inside to the tune of the ice cream van.

Ms. Knightley Meets Ms. Vane...(But I'm Not Paying Attention)

Rather weirdly, the last 5 films I have watched feature Keira Knightley.

I didn't notice this until just yesterday, when I finished up the 3rd Pirates of the Caribbean, and thought, "gee, I've seen an awful lot of her face lately..."

I wonder if this says something about me...am I just naturally drawn to the kind of film that features leggy, cheekboned, puff-lipped beauties? Probably. I'm certainly not drawn to the kind of film that makes you think too hard. I've discovered I don't have the patience to sit through movies, really. I get distracted and want to get up and come back later. Even in the fifteen minute long streaks that I can sit through, I have to be doing something. Eating, generally, though once I've run out of food, I go back to picking my fingers (eek). I've smuggled food and drink into movie theaters across the world (that sounds far more impressive than it is). I constantly need to lean over to my companion (provided I have one) and offer a running commentary, which I, of course, think is ceaselessly witty, but everyone else thinks is just annoying. Full stop.

So when I do indulge in a film, it's generally the kind that doesn't require you to pay it your fullest attention. I certainly enjoy the moviegoing experience, occasionally, and find that takeout and a DVD is often a blissful combination. All this having been said, ought I really be surprised that Keira Knightley is in every other movie I watch?

Probably not.

On another (slightly more literary) note, I've finally finished Gaudy Night. I took my time with it, because I have found that curling up on the pile of blankets on my floor with a cup of tea and a diverting novel is a great pleasure these days. Especially when an Autumn wind blows cold against the window, and the leaves come fluttering from the trees on my street. Now I can turn my attention back to one of the other 400 books I'm reading.

I'm beginning to see a theme here, and I'm not sure I like it. If attention spans were measured in something concrete, mine would be, I suspect, lilliputian.

On the Power of a New Pair of Shoes, & Various Artistic Impulses, Among Other Things

I am quite excited that my fancy SLR camera has, thanks to a little battery purchase at CVS, been brought back to life! Now I can be the geeky girl that not only carries a thick notebook, ten pens, four or five books, and several changes of clothes in her handbag, but also an enormous, hulking black camera! Am looking forward to getting back at all the tourists who have glowered at me (or made rude comments to my retreating back) for unwittingly stepping into their perfect picture of the entire family, including great-great-grandparents and several unborn fetuses, standing in front of the Statehouse, by kneeling in the center of the sidewalk for an artsy shot of, I don’t know, say, some paint peeling off an old fence, thus blocking the progress of said family as they meander (and by “meander”, I mean compete with the snail and the tortoise for the ‘it will take me six hours to cross the street’ award) towards Fanueil Hall.

When we were in Fés (in the good old days of the digital camera—lost, I’m afraid, inexplicably somewhere between the King’s Arms and Hurst St., or, quite possibly, in the house itself—stranger things have happened) I used to stop every five seconds to take what I thought would be an amazing picture of that really cool thing! (Perhaps, in retrospect, my camera was confiscated until I could learn to control my artistic urges) We called it having “tourist eyes” and came back to Oxford with that same breathless way of seeing things. So I’m equipped again for such adventures of the lens.

I had one of those “I just rolled out of bed and my hair’s sticking straight up—oh great, there’s someone I know!” moments today in the grocery store. Went to pick up supplies for dinner, etc. and ran into an old friend of mine from several years back. We were close for about a month, until she, and then more gradually I, moved on. I didn’t realize quite how disheveled I looked until I got home, but my hair was falling out of its rubber band, my t-shirt was four sizes too big (and stank slightly of stale sweat, I’m afraid to say), I wore no makeup. Luckily, however, I bought a very cool pair of Keds on Saturday, and I felt fantastic. Thought I was the hottest damn thing walking those aisles, I swear. And if this girl happened to glance foot-ward, I’m sure she’d have agreed.

Am feeling fantastically uninspired about my thesis. I just tried to fiddle with a story and ended up making it both worse and shorter; and I’ve lost the impetus to start a new one. Perhaps my trip to Oxford next week will, by making me incredibly happy, also serve to rekindle my creative impulses? If not, guess at least I’ve got my camera…

Have been slogging my way through Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I don’t mean to say “slogging” as if the book is bad—it’s not—but it’s awfully slow (shades of the tourist family, perhaps?). I’ve been reading up on the employment of narrative and story-structure in political messages (by the way, Kingsolver’s message is political. It can’t not be; there’s no way to separate “my family and I are moving to a farm in the south to grow all our own food so that we can reduce the oil-fueled mileage our sustenance has to travel” from “oh yeah, there’s a huge energy/environmental crisis happening in the world”, and Kingsolver doesn’t try to).

She’s following some of the things that people like Lakoff and Gardner suggest quite well; so the scholar part of me is impressed, but the reader part of me begs for more dialogue. That’s all. I suck up (and, more miraculously, since I suck up a ton of words all the time, remember) the bits where she talks to her kids, or her husband, or their neighbor who’s selling rhubarbs at the farmer’s market. I gloss over half the rest of it. Lesson for my own work—not that it’s doing much, at present, except festering in the folder called “thesis” on my desktop.

Another cup of tea and then to bed for me, I think, where I shall ignore Kingsolver in favor of a good old-fashioned murder mystery. In the end, story always wins over politics, for me…

More on Books & Guilt (Weary Ramblings)

Today was going to be a long one. I knew it, right from the start, 6 AM, darkness, hot, humid. I was tangled in my sheets; something had bitten both my legs. It felt like midsummer.

As is my habit, I dressed accordingly: right down the adorable kitten-heeled suede shoes (I like the way they click in hallways and on streets) I acquired at an obscene discount several years ago. I did a lot of clicking and clacking; this evening, for instance, all the way from campus to the edge of Brookline, St. Mary's Street, the first aboveground stop on the C Line. A year ago, there would have been a reason for this (outbound aboveground trains were free); now it was more a symbolic gesture than anything else. It was hot; I wanted a walk; I had the time.

But when I finally sat down on the train, I realized a number of things: first among them, that my adorable little suede shoes had rubbed an impressive blister along the side of my left foot. Also that I was sweating profusely in my little silk shirt; that my shoulder ached from carrying my king-sized handbag; that I could easily fall asleep right then and there; and that I was starving. Go figure. I comforted myself briefly with the thought that the driver had been so preoccupied he had waved me on without charging me; then remembered that I actually like public transport, and want to support it, and hate when people weasel their way out of paying for the service, and then I just felt guilty. (Of course.)

Happily, it was to a bookstore I was headed, so after the author reading I perused the shelves for sake of my spirits. Luckily for my wallet (and also any fellow enthusiasts who might want to dig around the Brookline Booksmith in the next few days), I couldn't buy the entire store, and only came away with four books in the end! (ok, so I was all of three steps away from the cash register when I finally shed two, from the original pile of six, out of sheer cheapness).

Then I treat myself to some ice cream; and some Japanese noodle soup takeout; and a viewing of the spectacularly bad Eurotrip (chosen at random because it fit all the categories of a good "I'm too tired to think/laugh too hard/cry/be moved by a film" film). I feel, if still weary, at least somewhat emotionally bolstered.

Am happy that among my purchases were Dorothy Sayers and Max Beerbohm; I look forward to diving into their respective Oxfords with great hunger and anticipation. Perhaps something to tide me over till I am happily where I want to be? Or, failing that, at least a few sympathetic pages in which to temporarily lose myself.

Must now take out my trash and dump my recycling into the neighboring building's bin, since my apartment complex, for some unfathomable reason, lacks one. Here's hoping that the thought of all the jars and bottles I'm recycling alleviates some of my earlier public transportation guilt...