Teen Hyperbole: Before Twilight, There Was Dawson’s Creek

I think the best thing for me to do with this blog is to devote it to the horrid crap I like to watch and my opinions on it.  Otherwise, I’m just never going to post, and I always sound like a bit of a long-winded jackass when I talk about other stuff.  More of a long winded jackass, that is.

On that note, I watched the first season of Dawson’s Creek last month.  I never got into it when it was on TV even though I was the target audience.  This was a period of time that lasted from about 1998-early 2003 when I was determined to dislike anything just to prove how clever and tasteful I was.  I also owned a pair of black platform flip-flops in this timeframe that I wore with a black cargo skirt and a necklace that looked like a dismembered dragon arm.  I say this both to give you perspective and to remind myself.  Some things should not be forgotten.

Anyhoo, Dawson’s Creek.  If you remember (and all 4 of you that read this are my age or nearish, so you should) it was quite the controversial show at the time because of all the sex.  Or rather, the talking about sex.  I think only 4 characters ever actually have sex on this show and 2 of them are a married couple.  But man oh man, do they ever TALK about having sex.  They talk long-windedly and nonstop about it, but never get to it.  They hardly ever even get to kissing!  Even then there’s like, a freaking soliloquy every time it happens.  I know if you’re a network TV show and you show teenagers having sex they are like, contactually required to only suffer as a result, but I found myself shouting at the screen at least once per episode “JUST DO IT ALREADY!!!”

Another thing that made it famous was the dialogue.  And it is truly, truly godawful.  Dawson especially.  I can’t understand why he’s the hero of the show.  I know I’m supposed to root for him since he’s the ‘artsy, creative, quirky, smart, shy’ guy, but he’s an off-the-charts jackass.  I NEVER want him to get the girl, EVER.  He doesn’t deserve anything good that happens to him.  Better people than me have taken down the dialogue and lead character of this show, so I won’t retread that.  Still, horrid.

Really though, the crowing glory of this show is the late 90′s soundtrack and the late 90′s hair and clothes.  So many, many female stars in need of a hot oil treatment.  And a properly fitted bra.  Observe the glory of the late 90s!:

 

Don't tell me Paula Cole doesn't immediately spring to mind

 

I had a shirt almost exactly like Joey’s during that time period.  Every boy I went to high school with was dressed like Dawson.  During the first season, they played Savage Garden at a school dance.  They filmed it all in Wilmington, where I used to go to the beach all throughout middle and high school.  There is too much nostalgia for me to ever hate this show.

Mostly I laugh my ass off and am amused that this kind of thing ever mattered so much to me.  Both the shit these kids angst about in the show and the fact that I felt that I couldn’t watch it for whatever reason.  Because I admit, at the time I was kinda curious.  But it seemed to be everything I was rebelling against so I forbid it to myself and swore to hate it.  Clean cut, verbose, all-American, suburban kids.  Because it’s not like I was one of them, right?  RIGHT???  Oy vey.  The revelation of my 20′s has been that my true self is the embodiment of everything I rebelled against in high school.  SHOCKING, I know.

Seriously though, over and over again as these kids fell to pieces about not kissing someone, or the fact that they wanted to kiss someone, or that sex happens to most people in society at some point, I just laughed and remembered when I had the time and energy to think about such things.  What a special time in life, before you have to think about things like if you paid the heating bill or getting a loan from the bank.  Or when you can get to the store to buy roach killer.

I wish I had appreciated how delightfully simple it was.  Onto Season 2.

 

What not to do with Elvis

Like many people with an appreciation for drama and attractive naked people, I am a True Blood fan.  It would be the most accurate to state that I am an Eric Northman fan.  As much as I enjoy the ummmm….display I see on that show week after blessed week, I am not unaware of the source material of this show, the Sookie Stackhouse books, and have been meaning to check it out for quite some time.  Thanks to my mad library hook up, I finally got my hands on the first Southern Vampire Mystery, Dead Until Dark.  I finished it just the other day, and unsurprisingly, I have feelings and opinions.  Feelings and opinions that I will now direct to the internet, because that’s how I roll.

I don’t watch True Blood for the acting or the dialogue, and I don’t know what I was expecting when I started reading the source material, but I guess that I always assume that books are dumbed down for any screen adaptation.

These were not.

It was like reading Tiger Beat by way of a harlequin romance novel, with a dash of 11th grade fan fiction thrown in.

Not that they were horrible or unimaginative.  They were just……I don’t know.  So written for younger people than me.  In fairness to Charlaine Harris, they left out some cool shit.  Such as the final Sookie/Renee confrontation.  Sookie’s more of a badass in the books, and less determinedly and willfully stupid than she is on the show (though not by much).

However, the stuff they left out…….that was smart.

For example, did you know in the books Bill is a Kenny G fan?  And occasionally wears Grateful Dead t-shirts?  And occasionally employs Elvis Presley, who has been turned into a vampire, to do odd jobs for him?  Did I mention that there is strict agreement in the vampire world to call Elvis ’Bubba’ and that he is really into feeding on housepets for reasons that aren’t really that well explained?  And that he wears a Graceland t-shirt throughout all of this?? AND THAT IT IS DESCRIBED IN DETAIL????

The next book is called ‘Living Dead in Dallas’.  Every title has ‘dead’ in it somewhere.  I don’t know that I am up for this task.  I don’t know what indignities Eric, my precious, precious Eric, will have to face in book-world, and I don’t know if I want to know.  Will he wear an Allman Brothers t-shirt and hang out with President Kennedy?  It seems like potentially nothing is too stupid for this book universe.  I could have put up with the overly precious dialogue if it hadn’t been for that Elvis thing.

We shall see.  It does remain true to this blog’s original purpose of me consuming and reviewing inane crap for no particular reason.

 

Blogging from the Libarry

Part of my move to a new city has been to once again become a library card holder.  It’s a library that is 2 blocks from my apartment, and I have discovered that having a library within walking distance adds greatly to my happiness.  It’s nice to revisit my bookworm roots, and is also the only viable free internet connection I have access to.  Otherwise, I would have put up far more blog entries.

The downside is that apparently sitting in a public space being completely absorbed in your laptop is a cue for middle-aged homeless men to try to ask you out.  Again and again.  This is also true of walking down the street by yourself in broad daylight with your eyes cast down.  Or waiting for a red light to change to cross the street.  Men like to yell at you in this town, I have discovered.

As a result, I have decided to save myself for James McAvoy.  I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t yell at me from a car.

 

 

I’m Baaaaaaaa-aaaaack!

Well howdy there y’all!

If any of you are still reading this, that is.  Which you probably aren’t and with good reason after a good 4 months of silence.

My, a lot can change in 4 months.

For instance, I have moved.  Not only that, I have moved out on my own again, to a new city for a new job.  A job that is pretty much exactly what I envisioned when I first decided to move away from the Town ‘o Hippies last August.  No roommates, just me, myself and I.  My new apartment is beautiful, with enough space for me to get a few more pieces of furniture that I’ve always wanted.  It’s downtown, and I can walk everywhere.  But wait, there’s more!  I have friends here too, from days past that I’ve reconnected with, happily reducing the ‘bored and lonely’ portion of moving to a new place considerably.  Right now, it seems I have most everything that I want.  I am cautiously but sincerely grateful.

It’s been my experience in life that you do, in fact, get the things you ask for and that the saying ‘Be careful what you wish for, for you will surely get it’ is one of the truest phenomena in humanity.  I have had several scenarios that I wished for myself for years come true, down to the last detail, and the result was abject-though repressed!-misery.  Denial?  Not just a river in Egypt.  A place where many make themselves at home and live comfortably.

I think that ultimately there is a higher power that knows better than you what is best for you.  I know this because this past fall I had everything I thought I wanted taken away from me.  Maybe not everything, that’s a bit of an exaggeration.  But certainly my plans for the next few years that I had spent the summer carefully crafting.  However, I began to discover that I had been subletting an apartment in Denial for quite sometime (again!) and furthermore that I was being ripped the fuck off.  So I went back to the plans I had made for myself and put away when I moved to Denial.  As it turns out, those plans worked the best and were the best suited for me.

So here I am.  Feeling much, much better and ready to blog again.  I will try and refrain from using the overly serious analogies about emotions being places where you live, too.  Everyone wins!

Besides, despite my luck of having friends in this new city, I still wind up on my own a fair bit.  And I think we all know what I do in my spare time when I’m on my own.  Get ready, kids.  I’ve got shitty movies in my Netflix queue that aren’t going to discuss themselves.

 

Riverdance

Does anyone remember Riverdance?  As an Irish-obsessed middle schooler, I certainly thought they were the height of cool at the time.  I also thought Star Wars was the coolest thing ever, wore overalls, wrote for the school newspaper and belonged to a competitive book reading team, so make of that what you will.

But still, Riverdance.

Something about the way they stood in a line with military precision and stoically banged their feet against hardwood floors while making no movement with their arms just got to me!  For while in the mid-to-late nineties, you could not get away from Irish line dancing.  They were in Folger’s commercials, for chrissake.

And the Lord of the Dance.  Oh, Lord of the Dance.  Pretty much the same deal as Riverdance except for one cast member who decided that he needed to stoically bang his feet against hardwood floors with a headband and white, puffy shirt.  At least, that’s what it looked like to someone who has never had more than a passing interest in the politics of touring Irish dancing groups.

A quick visit to their website reveals that they still tour…..in Poland and the Czech Republic.  And only in March.  And have decided to take tips from Tron Legacy on their costuming.

Fucking stupid.  Whither the headband, Michael Flately?  Whither?

My point here is that I would still like to see Riverdance.  I bet I could nowadays too, given that they don’t quite pack the monetary punch they did back when I was in middle school.  Maybe I could see them for less than $10.  Probably not.  Nonetheless, it is my goal.

Now I really want some Baileys and Lucky Charms.  I cannot wait for St. Paddy’s Day.

If anyone knows how to see Riverdance for less than $10, PLEASE LET ME KNOW.

*Edit: SHUT MY MOUTH, LORD OF THE DANCE  IS GOING TO BE IN ASHEVILLE IN 2 WEEKS.  Starting at $40, but still!  You guys. You guys. YOU GUYS!  I have some things to think about.

More Soon.

It’s been quite a while, I know.  As it turns out, I need a bit of time for some personal things.  I am settling out and settling down, and surely you all will know my feelings about the episodes of She-Ra I’ve been watching lately.  Soon, soon!

Thanks for bearing with me and understanding.

On discovering romance

I have never viewed myself as a romantic person.  In fact, up until recently I would call myself one of the least romantic people that I know.  I loathe romantic comedies.  I hate most love songs on the radio.  Most love songs period.  When people in movies declare their heartfelt feelings for each other, I tend to roll my eyes and make sarcastic remarks.

Lately, I’ve been rethinking all that.

I mean, I will always feel the way I feel about the things I just mentioned.  But you know why I feel that way about them?

Because I feel like they are not sincere enough.  They aren’t doing love justice because they are making it far too easy and overly simplistic.  And when you take an emotion as wide, complex and variable as love and concentrate on one overly watered-down facet of it, you take all the honesty away from it.  I hate dishonesty and insincerity.

By far the worst thing that is done with it is treating it as a solution to every romantic problem.  Every problem in general.  Love is all you need, Lennon said.  Lennon, I love you but you are dead wrong.  And choke on shit, Stephanie Meyer.  For that and countless other offenses.

Love is almost always the reason, and rarely ever the solution.  It’s the active ingredient, but far from the only one.  It wouldn’t work right without the others.  In fact, it might kill you in high concentrations without being tempered with other ingredients like respect and trust.

I get called ‘hopelessly unromantic’ and ‘cynical’ for assertions like that.  It’s not how I mean them at all.  I am a pragmatic romantic in the end, I guess.  I believe wholeheartedly in love, and I believe in it so much that I want it to WORK!  Without other things like respect, or trust, or unselfishness it won’t.  And then it’s just a bunch of pretty words and good intentions and teenage hormonal crap scrawled onto notebook paper and shoved into someone’s locker before 3rd period.

All of my favorite stories are love stories.  I love them because they feel honest to me.  None of them are easy.  All are full of self discovery through the love of another person, and none of them feature anyone getting so swept up in loving the other person that they lose themselves.  That’s an awful way to love someone.  Discover yourself through someone else, don’t lose yourself in them.

If you were curious, my favorites are: Pride and Prejudice, The Color Purple, Their Eyes Were Watching God and Sense and Sensibility.  I also love Emma and Cold Mountain.  The amount of Jane Austen featured in this list should have clued me into my romantic sensibilities long ago, but I am a stubborn creature.

I think I’ll go watch Pride and Prejudice for the frillionth time.  Go enjoy the love you have, why don’t you?  It’s a wonderful thing.