My So-Called Life

For some reason I've been reading bits and pieces of the script to the "boiler room episode" of My So-Called Life all day. Damn, that episode is SO GOOD. I've been just giggling to myself all morning. I intend to watch it (for probably the 35th time) tonight. Some clips:





And just for good measure, the last bit of the series. This kills me EVERY TIME.



The part where he says "But you liked it, though, right? It made you like, happy?" is sort of the Juno "I try really hard actually" moment of the 90s.

Man, I really wish I was not at work right now.

Happy Valentine's Day

My friend Rachel is a goddamn genius.

Exhibits A, B, C, and D.

This is an upbeat post

Well, because my blogs have been getting a little introspective lately (hmm, I wonder if I should blame NaBloPoMo for that), I figure I might as well share with you a few fun lighthearted hilarious things just as a break.

Starting with...

-I think I am going to go ahead and half-participate in the legendary "From the Stacks" reading challenge. Basically what this is supposed to be is, from November to the end of January you don't buy any new books but you read 5 books that you have been delaying reading, ones that have been sitting on the bedside table or in the shelf that you've been meaning to get to. I sort of accidentally started this already, because this week I was struck by inspiration to finally read "The Satanic Verses," which I've been planning to read for, oh, 5 years now, and have never gotten through. I have tons of books like this in my shelves, and it's quite shameful because so many of my friends lately have been asking me for book recommendations or to borrow books and I haven't read half the stuff that I own -- in fact, I've probably read less than half. So I think I'm going to choose 5 of them to read by the end of January. Now, about that not buying books part... I don't think I will worry much about that. (And Dad shakes his head silently and reproachfully.)

-I totally caved and used a $25 gift certificate towards the new My So Called Life disk set. Yes, I definitely already have the set that was released a few years back, but this one is supposed to be better, and I got it for only 22 dollars after the gift certificate.

-I could not recommend someecards.com highly enough. Yeah, I know it's sort of old news since there was a New York Times article about it and stuff, but honestly, every time I go back there I find a new, hilarious card. A few great recent finds:

• This one really speaks to the mood of my blog posts of late
• This one too.
  
• Tivo addicts, unite.
• How I feel about my Thanksgiving vacation, except with less implied hatred of family (I am actually really excited about going home, for family and also naps.)
• Finally, this is in honor of tomorrow. And I am totally going to send it to some people and hope that they don't read this blog entry first.
  

-If you like the Office, which, um, clearly you do, you will love this deleted scene from last week's episode. And you should be very, very sad that last week is the last episode for a while because of that f&*)$#)ing writer's strike.

-How do you feel about these ankle boots? I want them *so* much. These are just part of my new dedication to my wardrobe. It sounds shallow, but I have decided I am not dressing up well enough for work (yeah, I realize I work at a very casual company, but I dress up for weekends and then I don't dress nicely for work, so I feel like it gives off the wrong impression), so I'm on a quest to 1) make the most out of what I have clothing wise and 2) buy a few key pieces to help take it to a new level. The boots, I admit, don't count as a "key piece" because they are, well, impractical and awesome and silly and expensive, but I can dream, can't I?

-I am really getting excited about Christmas. It is really silly but I love it, even though I am so unreligious. I just like the spirit of things and the food and the lights. I mostly love the way Christmas lights look against blue, wintry skies. There's such a great contrast between the warm colors of the lights and the coolness of everything else, the silhouettes and such. As usual I'm hoping to get Christmas cards out, or holiday cards I guess I should say... and I'm seriously shocked that it's already the second week of November. Where on earth did 2007 go?

-On a related note, and this will be my last random comment for now, I was listening to NPR last week and they were talking about how a year from this past Tuesday is the Presidential elections. Wow. These have been so long in coming that they all of a sudden seem like they are incredibly close at hand, like they crept up on us. And now in less than two months there will have been primaries already! I'm so undecided now. I was a big Barack Obama fan early on (you know, before he started running) but now I feel like he's been spoiled by the political-ness of politics. So now I feel like I'm back to square one, and it's just in time for the real gearing up of it all.

Anyway. Hope these stop this blog from being all-contemplation-all-the-time. And now to watch this week's Office.

"This life has been a test"

"So when Rayanne Graff told me my hair was holding me back, I had to listen. 'Cause she wasn't just talking about my hair. She was talking about my life." -Angela Chase

The identity is a mysterious thing, especially the online one, especially the fractured pieces here and there, the different audiences, the different "levels" of communication. Recently, I linked this blog to Facebook, thinking that way, I could share my silly Facebook-posted-items style things with my blog audience, largely consisting of my immediate family, and that I could share my longer stuff with my Facebook audience, if indeed I have one (so far it seems like I don't). But it does present some interesting dilemmas. The stupid shit I post on Facebook seems mundane and boring and unblogworthy here (probably it would seem better on Tumblr, but the real problem is that that is too short-form for the kinds of long posts I occasionally want to do). And then I feel like I can't write a lot about personal thoughts/feelings because in the event that some random news-feed reader comes across that post in Facebook, I don't really want them to know about my issues. (And Facebook is, and I'm being totally honest here, starting to feel a little creepy, just because of all the news of late about Facebook employees being able to read your private messages, change your profile info, log in as you, and, oh right, the big one: look at which profiles you view. I guess it makes me a little more aware of my own Facebook "stalking," which of course I do somewhat, but what about the people I'm just curious about, whose photos I realize I never looked at before, who had a favorite book listed that I wanted to remember, etc. Are people at Facebook going to misjudge or misunderstand my purposes for looking at a profile, and will it have real-life consequences? I don't want to get too far off the topic, and I have a problem with overusing parenthetical statements, so I will stop here, but: still. It's weird. If I do have any Facebook readers out there, and especially if you work at Facebook, which is only unlikely because I don't think any of the people I know working at Facebook would be interested enough to read this, give me your thoughts.)

So, the subject at hand is how to express yourself, or, let's be straightforward, myself, and really be honest, when you want an audience, and you want it to be somewhat general, but not worldwide? Maybe there isn't an in between anymore, or maybe there isn't for someone like me who has this urge to share in the first place. (Clearly I could just e-mail close friends, or something, or family, or write in a diary, or not connect my Facebook to my blog, or have another blog, but these things all seem less than ideal for a variety of reasons.) I'm not sure. A while ago I said I was just going to be honest here. You know, to own up about being hungover or sending a stupid text message or being unsatisfied with myself or being happy with myself. But that's really hard to do and see in print, even if it's just in HTML. And no one wants to be a whiner, and no one wants to read whining. Even if (my brain spins too fast -- I feel like I always have a rebuttal to my own statements, so pardon the circularity) that's what blogs are all about anyway... or at least personal blogs, the whiny ones, the stupid ones like this one. This isn't a real blog, it's not of interest to anyone who doesn't know me, and I am not sure if that should matter to me or not. (It sometimes matters. Sometimes it doesn't.) I'm also not sure if brutal honesty would be more interesting or less.

My point is, I'm thinking about things a lot lately, and feeling more than a little unhinged and disorganized and too high (figuratively) and too low and too all over the place. I know what my ideal life is and I know what my life is now and I don't know if the two shall meet or can meet, and I don't know if I can ever have that ideal; I assume I can't, but trying to rationalize and wrestle and ground your ideals is sort of like what happens to little girls watching fairy tales and playing with Barbies, this shit gets ingrained, and then you want a prince charming or what have you and you've lost sense of reality, and if you are aware enough of that then you end up second guessing everything and third-guessing everything until you're blue in the face and writing extremely babble-y blog posts for no one. (Insert John Mayer reference here.) I just don't know what version of the story to trust anymore, and I mean that in most senses - I don't know what people to go to for advice, I don't know whether my paranoia or my overthinking is my instinct, I don't know whether the way my life is now is just a phase or maybe just the way life is, maybe it never stops and it is always baffling and tiring and awesome at the same time. I wish I could explore that here, or somewhere. I wish there was a freelance magazine column titled "Girl tries to figure shit out" because I think I'd be qualified to write it, and that's about the only thing I feel qualified to do right now, so that's unfortunate it's a figment of my imagination.

You see what I mean? Lots of stuff going on here. And I can't pin it down. I would like to try, here, but I just don't think that's a good idea either... not when I am so exposed as me here. Except that's the fucking point. What's the point of partial exposure, and what's the point of expository self-writing if you don't go there, if you don't push the boundaries at all. I don't know. Maybe I'm not brave enough, or maybe I'm too self-conscious (um, this is likely, but I don't think it's everything), or maybe I'm not old enough to pull a Stephen Elliot or insert-famous-writer-here and just bare it all. Or, maybe I just need to stop, for a second, and take a breath, and stop trying to puzzle out the meaning of it all ("one of those 'what does it all mean' things") and just take my life without contemplation (the unexamined life may be easier to live) and just go to sleep now and wake up tomorrow and start all over again.

But I'd rather not. (I am going to sleep though. I will think more about this tomorrow.)

Just to round things off in style, I leave you with another of Angela Chase's brilliant moments: "This life has been a test. If this had been an actual life, you would have received instructions on where to go and what to do."

The sad truth is, sometimes I do feel like Angela has it right.

MSCL

I need more free time, for a lot of reasons, but one such reason is that I need to re-watch a lot of TV shows. I've been going through this weird (for lack of a better word) parental thing with Justin because he's watching The Office from the beginning, and I'm loaning the DVDs to him, watching occasional episodes, and receiving reports on the ones he watches by himself. (Not actually as formal as it sounds.) So I'm of course feeling this pang of nostalgia for the first watching of the Office, an experience really that no one can understand until they've watched them all and are witnessing someone else do it for the first time (hence my use of the word parental). I'm also feeling the need to re-watch all the Wes Andersen movies, because I saw The Darjeeling Limited a couple of weeks ago, and I need to re-read and re-watch Wonder Boys, because I recommended the book to my friend Peattie and now can't remember anything about it. This is a disturbing trend given how much new media I have that I'm behind on - my Netflix are gathering dust, I am still not done with Season 1 of Deadwood, and if I delay anymore on watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer my friend Santiago might just kill me. Plus there's all the books I need to read and the New Yorkers and Believers threatening to pile up... it's a problem. Anyway, with all of this it's a really bad time for the release of the updated, apparently awesome boxed set of My So-Called Life, which I already own in old, apparently not awesome boxed set form but, well, the point is my set isn't awesome, and now that I think about it I do kind of want the awesome set. I also want to watch My So-Called Life again, and get my nostalgia on for the first time I watched that, which was sophomore year in college, while I was finishing crocheting an afghan, and I stayed up until like 4am on a school night alone in the lounge watching MSCL and crocheting in the dark. It was awesome.

Just occurred to me: Is it wrong that I have nostalgia for watching TV?