maybe not today, maybe not tommorow

Hannibal, eps 1&2.

Oh come on. Gosh this is silly. I absolutely cannot take this seriously, at all, not for one minute. I just kept giggling throughout. Mushrooms! (Oh, the mushrooms! I must be horrifically insensitive, but all that did was make me want to cook some mushrooms.) That's fine, i'm not sure it wants to be taken seriously, but i'm not sure what the point is either. Is it deconstruction? parody? What am I watching this for, exactly, once I get bored of mushroom porn and architecture porn and clothes porn and possibly some amount of porn porn?

Ah, hang on, you say, this thing has characters! Usually, one watches things to find out what happens to the people in them, right? It's just, OMG, do not care. They're too goofy. The depth of Will's carefully conveyed, much-discussed, pretty, pretty angst is just as silly and parodic and ridiculous as the mushrooms.

There's just something about the portrayal of intelligence and social isolation here - which also bothered me in Elementary - where it's just so dignified and downright ennobling. Loneliness becomes this terrifically elegant thing. These guys have a world of people just waiting at their door to protect and befriend and defend their vast specialness, while they gaze out at the rain in their apartness. I could live - just about - with Will. The vast chunks of time devoted to other people discussing how broken and special and broken Will is? It's both absurd in it's intensity, and it just bores me.

Good grief, i'm going to end up watching the Big Bang Theory again, aren't I? Where all sleeves comes with special pockets for hearts and the only thing loneliness does to people is to strip them of dignity and slowly peel them raw. I will seriously take an episode of quasi-funny sitcom featuring two people sitting on a couch and trying to touch and mostly failing for no particular reason, except that it would require them to be ever so slightly braver or kinder than they are, over a season of Will just being too impeccably sensitive or Sherlock being too clever for this mean, mean, muggle world to comprehend. All day long.

Er, tell me it gets better?

I watched most of season 2 of Person of Interest sort of out of the corner of my eye while doing other stuff. It was ok, for the most part, until the thing with the office with the paper. That was fantastic.

Speaking of understated robotic tragedy...that was an upbeat season finale for The Big Bang Theory. I expect one step forward, six steps back in season 7.

Today I had to present some of my final seminar in front of everyone. Fortunately, no grade. Only dignity at stake.

Yesterday is when I emailed the professor and asked if I could do a completely different subject from the one I had been working on. 24 hours of coffee and procrastination later I showed up twenty minutes late, in time to watch the detailed, ambitious, well sourced presentations of the two people that went before me. One had a dozen custom maps knocked up in Arcmap.

I had 7 slides. One was entirely a picture of an aeroplane. One was entirely a pie chart with only two divisions. They were "Yes" and "No." (and pretty close to 50/50, which is just sad.) Two were tables that repeated the same information. I also forgot to put my sandals back on.

I was self deprecating from the get-go, and I insulted post-modernism and the Finnish education system and made a joke about cats. There was an ironic hair twirl at one point. I got a few good laughs and more questions than the other two guys. I feel kind of bad.


For the love of god, will someone please make me stop watching sitcoms when I should be studying? If i'm going to procrastinate, can't I do it with a book, at least? The Community rewatch? Fine. Classy, even. (It's the Nobel-lit-winner-no-one-reads of comedies, ok?) The obsessive Big Bang Theory marathon? Clearly, filling some dirty psychic need I have a hard time articulating. BUT WHY am I now watching How I Met Your Mother?!? Also, man, this show is old. 2006 was ages ago. I managed to avoid it for so long...If you see me posting about Scrubs, just...


Also, Barney and Sheldon are basically the same character. Seriously. No, seriously.

I need to sleep now, I have to drive my parents to the airport at 3 am.

I'm going to make pancakes when I wake up!

So i'm still trying to figure out why I fell for The Big Bang Theory so hard. It's a sitcom with a heavy reliance on bathroom jokes, ffs. I've been bumbling around the internet looking for some nice meta, but can't seem to find much. I suppose I shall have to make up some of my own. I mean, it may be silly to put so much thought into a sitcom, but I always think popular things are worth thinking about, and things that are simple on the surface are worth thinking about, and comedy is particularly worth thinking about, so whatever.

Here's the thing - I typically really invest in the drama in comedies, (and I have a hard time with overly humorless drama.) I need a comedy show to have some edge to it, something a little bitter and sad. That's why I actually liked the recent anti-geek episode on BBT. Sure, it was heavy handed and had a quite obnoxious gender angle that was probably unnecessary and worse, lazy and shorthand for what it seems like they were trying to do. But the episode as a whole? It was nasty, and with that, it had a certain raw honesty. Things don't change, things don't move, what hurt last year is going to hurt this year, and will hurt next year too. I'm ok with that.

Watching Amy makes me kind of twitchy and uncomfortable, but also allows me to laugh and get a bit of catharsis. I mean, I have been that person. I am still that person. More as a teen and in my early twenties, but still now, I will have this moment of being social and having a strange, giddy awareness that this is extremely fragile and weird. "Here I am, hanging out. Just like that. Like a normal person, with other people. At the mall, ffs. Like a person who hangs out at the mall." But, simultaneously, being kind of uncomfortable and having some degree of self contempt for even indulging in all this icky social stuff - "What the hell, this boring. What am I, some kind of person who hangs out at the mall? I'm going home to read academic papers for fun and watch Star Trek. Alone. Like I do." 

So when Amy is blissing out over slumber parties or hand holding at the movies, I can identify. No coincidence, IMO, that those things are very gendered. I think BBT often has a fairly nuanced grasp of gender as something preformed, and is honest enough to admit that it can be a miserable thing to buck. In general, the calculus of happiness/misery, non/conformity, intimacy/isolation on the show is...non obvious. It's not status quo, but it's not that kind of psuedo-academic-liberal emancipation from all mores wish-fulfilment thing either. This stuff is thorny, and thorny it shall remain, and that's what I expect from comedy - not to paper over the cracks.

Anyway, back to Amy. She's needy and desperate for any human contact, and that's funny but it's also sad. It's the desire and the contempt for the desire at the same time, like somehow seeing the two sides of the same coin at the same time. Her neediness is sympathetic, and real, but it's still needy and pathetic. Watching things go round and round, wondering if it will ever escape that duality is, I can't help it, funny. And sad. And also still funny.