Skip to main content

Monday Miscellany

1. Remember how I was mentioning that there was no snow here in Northern Ohio in December? Yeah, um, whoops, because this weekend I shoveled my driveway five times. FIVE. I'm a good Wisconsin girl, and I'm not above a little shoveling, but five times? RIDIC.

2. When I was in Wisconsin over the holidays, I went on a walk one night and was reminded how nice it was that there was a city ordinance that requires everyone to shovel their sidewalks. Seriously, it was great to be able to walk around the neighborhood without tromping through two feet of snow. So now I'm shoveling my own walk, even though there's no ordinance in my city that requires it and no one else does.* Thanks, Wisconsin; you make me want to be a better person.

3. I may be going roller skating this coming week. While I used to be good at roller skating, I'm pretty sure that skill has abandoned me. If I don't post for a while after that, you'll know that I fell down and broke something vital for typing. This is such a bad idea.

4. In honor of the third season premiere on January 16th, I've moved on from The Wire and am re-watching the first and second season of Friday Night Lights, another show that I seriously cannot recommend enough. I didn't think I would like it, because (a) it's about football and (b) I didn't like the movie based on the same book, but, boy, I was wrong. The show is about so much more than football, and it's incredibly well-acted and well-written. And, although the adults (especially the football coach, obvs) play key roles in almost every episode, it's by far the best teen drama on television. Unlike Gossip Girls, or One Tree Hill, or the execrable new version of 90210, FNL understands that real drama and scandal are character driven. It's not "scandalous" if the head cheerleader cheats on her quarterback boyfriend with his best friend--that's just base line fodder for drama in the television world. It is scandalous when cheerleader Lyla Garrity cheats on quarterback Jason Street with his best Tim Riggins, because Lyla is truly not that type of person and really loves Jason, so something awful must have driven her into the arms of ne'er-do-well (but Super Hot) Tim Riggins, and both she and Tim probably feel pretty horrible about the fact that it even happened, let alone more than once.

All right, this just got way too long for miscellany, so long story short, Friday Night Lights: WATCH IT.

5. I haven't watched The Real World since San Francisco, but I get the impression from the snippets I've seen here and there that I'm not missming much. What started as an interesting social experiment turned into stupid kids getting wasted on Mtv's dime. That said, I'm totally charmed by the first episode of this new season, which has a bunch of interesting characters in it. Highlight thus far: the Iraq war veteran and the Mormon guy who may or may not be gay make up some songs about the other roommates, and Mormon guy says that one of the other (male) members of the house is cute and Iraq veteran starts singing about "I knew my roommate was gay all along," and Mormon guy sings back "I may be Metrosexual, but that's not a sin. Not a sin." Also, it's totally catchy.

~~~

* Seriously, there's an ordinance here that I cannot put my trash out in trash cans, and that my recycling has to be in blue -- BLUE -- plastic bags, and that if I want to paint my house I have to get the color pre-approved, but there's no requirement that I shovel my sidewalk. ::shrugs::

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

On Mary Sue

I recently read a Very Popular Book in a Very Popular Series, which I was going to talk about here until I read the second book in the series and realized--OH NO--that the main character of the book is a total Mary Sue. sigh. For those of you who didn't spend time in the fanfic world, a Mary Sue is a character who everyone else loves. She's a stand-in for the author (fanfic is written mostly by women, which is why "Mary Sue," although there are some Gary Stus out there as well).She's beautiful (but not too beautiful), she's funny, she's self-deprecating, she's smart, and all the other characters will fall head over heels in love with her and think she's awesome. (An example, if I wrote Friday Night Lights fanfiction, Mary Sue would move to town and become Riggins' girlfriend, and Jason Street would have a crush on her, and Lyla Garrity would like her and even Tyra would must us some grudging respect, and their lives would all be better for k...

Jay Is Not On Vacation

Despite my absence from this blog, I am not dead and/or on a beach somewhere. I wish I were (on a beach, not dead), but I am not. I would sing a song about how busy I am with work (true), and how busy I am with teaching (also true), and how busy I am with working on the new projects (true dat), and how busy I am with life in general (double true), but the real reason why I haven't been posting here is because I've been querying. For some reason, querying has made me especially leery of posting here. I've seen posts from agent blogs that talk about how they don't want to know that the author they're considering representing has been rejected by everyone else in the world. Likewise, I don't think it's good form for me to post about the responses I've received when the agents haven't given me permission to do so, although some writers do it. I know I wouldn't want to see my query letter posted on someone's blog and commented on, although som...

Why Are The Characters Friends?

Lately, I've been reading a lot of books where the main character and her best friend don't get along. This is confusing to me. Why is the main character friends with someone she dislikes, or is afraid of, or actually hates? I get that it happens--I've seen Mean Girls . I've read Queen Bees and Wannabes . Heck, I'm old enough to have been the prime audience for Heathers . But in order for this fractured best friend relationship to be convincing, it has to be set up. In both Heathers and Mean Girls , there's a reason why the protagonist is friends with a bunch of b*tches--she chose to be. She knows that they're jerks. In fact, she can feel herself becoming a jerk right along with them. It's part of the character arc, the point of the story, that being friends with these girls is not who she really is. But the relationships I've been seeing lately don't make that kind of sense. The protagonist doesn't have a reason to be friends with...