Fall of twilight

It's not me, it's you. Really.

I read twilight on a four-hour layover in Atlanta this weekend, and I liked it. Period. I know I'm damning it with faint praise, but that's about all I can say for it. It's decently written and enjoyable and worth a read if you've got some time to kill. It is not, however, life-changing, profound, or in any way a rival to the Harry Potter series.

I'm sorry, Twilighters. I'm just not destined to become one of you. There are a number of reasons for this, and they're not necessarily the ones you'd expect. While I had admittedly already found the twilight fanbase overly rabid and annoying, and expressed some misgivings over the religious pedigree of the author, I was determined to go into it with an open mind, which I believe I managed for the most part. I was also at a slight disadvantage, having read spoiler-filled reviews of each of the books, which obviously diminished the suspense, but this wasn't a major handicap, as most authors are reluctant to kill their main characters anyway, so you already expect everyone to survive.

But it just didn't grab me by the throat, as it were. I honestly like Bella, the main character, and I want her to get what she wants. Which is, of course, Edward. Who is also likable enough, I suppose. He's very courtly, very protective, very beautiful, very rich... very everything. And that makes sense, given that he's had over a hundred years to become all of those things. But he's a little... boring. He has no humanizing flaws, no fascinating quirks. And again, that makes sense - he's not human. But I have to say I don't understand the appeal. Sure, if he's that beautiful I'm sure I'd stare at him too. Then what? He doesn't seem like the kind of guy you could watch The Simpsons with, or play Rock Band with, or have a tickle fight with. I know those are my own personal hobbies, but he doesn't really seem compatible with any casual pursuits. All he and Bella seem to do together is walk around and sit around, talking about how in love they are and how much danger she's in. Which is lovely and deeply romantic. For about five minutes. Then I'm bored. And then what do you do?

I do realize that the brooding, Byronic hero is just not my cup of tea. I wasn't all that captivated by the Buffy/Angel thing, either. But at least they had a shared mission - they could slay together. And while Buffy was definitely near-obsessed with Angel, she at least had other friends. She spent time with other people, did other things. Occasionally she even resented Angel for being a part of the supernatural part of her world, being part of what kept her from normal. She was torn between being a Slayer and being a teenager. None of this is true of Bella. I know she doesn't have the convenience of being a Slayer - a defined destiny, a duty - but she doesn't seem to have any wants or needs that are not fulfilled by Edward.

In fact, she doesn't really have anything that isn't somehow connected to Edward (except for her family, which she's willing to give up to be with him). She doesn't have likes, dislikes, hobbies, friends, anything. At the beginning of the book, she misses the sunny weather of Phoenix, but when she realizes why Edward and his family live in rainy Forks, Washington, she stops minding the grey days. As she and Edward start dating, he asks her endless questions about herself - but very few of the answers actually make it into the book, leaving her as much a cipher as she was before. Her only distinguishing trait is that she is extremely accident-prone. All this makes her easy to identify with, but hard to know. I could understand a teenage (or pre-teen) girl wanting to BE Bella, to live out her romantic story, but I can't imagine wanting to be LIKE her. How? The answer to the question "what would Bella do?" always references Edward. If you don't have an Edward, you don't have an answer.

Bella isn't a person, she's a reflection. A pale imitation of the real thing - just as Edward isn't so much a person as a marble statue come to life. They're very pretty, and they're very devoted, but their passion is a pallid thing compared to reality. Give me a guy who gets a little dirty, who sweats and laughs and trips over his own feet and misspells words like "cereal", and I can love him in the passionate messy silly way a real guy deserves. Give me Edward, and I can hang his picture on the wall.

Did I mention how bored I am in museums of art?

SemiGeekGirl's Guide to Fall TV

A brief and by no means objective look at the dreck the networks are trying to pass off as "must-see TV" this year.

I'm spending Labor Day weekend on the East Coast, so you're lucky this is not simply a laundry list of all the things I need to accomplish before my flight leaves tomorrow night. Although I will take a moment to ponder where exactly the term "laundry list" came from. Did anyone, ever, actually have to make a list of the things they needed to launder? Could they not remember by looking at them, smelling them, or just picking up the laundry basket? Granted, not everyone has laundry baskets, and some things are easy to forget to wash (they're sheets. They live on the bed. Who remembers that they should be removed just because? Also, this is why I am not in charge of the laundry at my house), so I can see having "wash towels" or "do laundry" on your to-do list. But a laundry list? Really? Who has time to individually list each garment to be washed? And if you're just listing the types of laundry, are there really enough to forget? As in wash lights, darks, whites, and reds? Maybe if you have Alzheimer's. Which is, of course, a debilitating and particularly unhumorous condition. But also almost certainly not the source of the phrase.

Anyhow, I can't finish packing until my unlisted laundry finishes drying, so Fall TV it is. Sadly, this will be brief, as nowadays I use my television mainly as a radio - on in the background for friendly noise - or a screen for the DVD player. By the end of last season, the only show I watched faithfully in its proper timeslot was Top Chef, and that only because I wanted to talk about it with my mom the next day. I know that last season isn't quite representative, what with the (completely justified) writer's strike. But the season before wasn't much better. At this writing, there are no sitcoms I watch on a regular basis (except The Simpsons and South Park, but I'm not sure they count. I watch them almost exclusively in reruns anyway, so in terms of ratings they might as well be M*A*S*H). There are two hour-long dramas I follow religiously: Heroes and Battlestar Galactica (and if season 3 of Heroes isn't better than season 2, it will fall off my list), and three more dramedies I usually intend to watch but only remember about half the time. I also watch Top Chef, Project Runway, and occasionally So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing with the Stars (although I despise shows where America gets to vote. After we elected George W. Bush the SECOND time, my respect for the American electorate went from tentative to nonexistent. We, as a country, have proven that we are morons. I can only hope we start the long path back the other way this November).

So this fall I'm not looking forward to much. Battlestar Galactica doesn't return until January at least. I will watch the premiere of Heroes, but my hopes are only moderate. (Mostly I hope to see less of the Cheerleader.) I caught up with some of what I missed last season on House over the summer, and I'll be glad to see it return. I've also come to enjoy Bones in repeats, which was a pleasant surprise - David Boreanaz had worn out his welcome with me in the final season of Angel, so I didn't give this show a chance. That was a mistake. I'm happy to see Pushing Daisies return, and I'm interested to find out if Chuck and Reaper can stop seeming like fraternal twins (one sci-fi, one supernatural) and become distinct from each other. I'll give Sarah Connor Chronicles another chance. It didn't wow me the first time around, but the cast is excellent and the premise is solid, so I'll try it again.

And that's it for returning shows. The potential in the new shows is even thinner on the ground. I'm moderately enthused about Fringe, the new X-Files type thriller on Fox. (I'm glad to see Joshua Jackson working again, anyway.) The only drawback is that it's created by J.J. Abrams, the mastermind behind such masterpieces as Alias and Cloverfield. And Lost, which I've never enjoyed but will refrain from bashing here, since my boyfriend reads this blog. I'm also waiting impatiently for Dollhouse, the new drama from Joss Whedon, starring Faith from Buffy and Helo from Battlestar, but it doesn't premiere until midseason.

And I'm done. Oh, there a couple more moderately interesting shows, especially on NBC, which has a couple titled Crusoe (you can guess the premise) and Kings (a modern-day take on the life of King David, who was apparently quite the Biblical badass). But not much to look forward to. The rest of the lineup seems to consist of desperate pandering (the 90210 remake, anyone?), ideas that were kind of stupid the first time around (Knight Rider), and painfully unfunny comedies (check out the ads for Kath & Kim. Molly Shannon lost my sympathies long ago, but I can't help but cringe for poor Selma Blair, squeezed into neon and whining like a thirteen-year-old deprived of Twilight).

I was contemplating getting DVR, but at this point I'll be using it to avoid primetime, not to manage its conflicts.

Of Ends and Endlessness

So I've been thinking a lot lately about the last episode of Buffy. (Now, while I firmly believe that Buffy is the greatest television show of all time, this is not the post where I will defend that point. I don't have that kind of time today.) I'm not actually a fan of the final episode. I can kind of see where they were trying to go with it, but I thought that it fell really short when compared with the rest of the series, and ultimately it left me sad not only that the series had ended, but also that this episode was the last experience I would ever have of it.

Here isn't really the place to go into full detail on that either. Although I will say that the lack of mourning for Spike, the compression of mourning for Anya into one tossed-off "That's my girl" from Xander, the complete waste of time on an in-joke so obscure that all the dedicated fans I know missed it (the Trogdor joke - the only non-fan in the room for the finale had to explain it to us) - suffice it to say that the only thing that kept me from hiding in my room and bawling inconsolably afterward was the fact that I had thrown a party to watch it and my guests were still in attendance.

But all of those minor annoyances aside, I still had a major problem with the big spell. You know the one - Willow sits on the floor with the legendary Slayer scythe in her lap and pulls all the power she can handle to modify the ancient spell that creates and activates Slayers. Connected through the scythe, she holds on long enough to activate every potential Slayer currently on the planet - girls as young as eight or nine up through teenagers. As the show puts it, every girl who might have been a Slayer now is a Slayer. (The show's mythology was always a little vague on Slayer creation - it's hard to say what the earliest age it's possible to identify a Potential is, and there's also no information on at what point you presumably age out of the possibility. I'm assuming the spell did not also activate women in their thirties and beyond, who might have been Slayers if the current Slayer when they were fifteen, say, had died.)

To be honest, I wasn't initially that bothered by the spell. I thought the episode spent a little too much visual time on it (there was one recurring shot in particular, of a girl batting in a softball game - please, just hit the damned ball already!), but in general it seemed a fairly ingenious solution to the hordes of demons the Scooby Gang was facing. What bothered me came later, when a friend told me that Joss Whedon had explained that the spell was supposed to symbolize the final step in Buffy's journey to adulthood - the realization that she is not the only Chosen One, simply one of many, and that her life, no matter how heroic and dramatic, is not the center of the universe.

Which, let's face it, is hugely depressing. The idea that the final step to growing up is, essentially, realizing that you just aren't all that special, horrifies me. I agree that the life-or-death self-centeredness that is the hallmark of adolescence must eventually give way to a more nuanced and inclusive view of the world, of course. And I do occasionally marvel at how little time I spent thinking of others as a teenager. But that ending still seems to take it a step too far. Because if you're not the star of your own life - if you don't get to be the Slayer or the Princess or the Jedi Knight - then you're just a number, living out your tiny life alongside the billions of other tiny lives, lost forever in the vastness of the universe. If that's adulthood, I decline.

But what got me thinking about this was the endless go-round of everyday adulthood. The constant cycle of bill paying and grocery shopping and laundry and everything else. Especially lately, as I've had to deal with getting slightly older on all fronts: socially, where many of my friends are getting married and one pair even managed to buy a house; financially, where I've discovered that saving for retirement is what you get to look forward to even before you've paid off your student loans; and biologically, where I'm having to start taking into account things like maybe I should start wearing sunscreen every day if I don't want to look like my grandmother by the time I'm forty. Which is all pretty depressing in its own right. And I got to thinking that maybe Joss was right after all, that you do grow up and settle down and settle for what you've got.

So I was depressed by my tiny life and the tiny events that could eventually be expected to parade through it (if I could ever scrape together the funds to finance any of them): wedding, house purchase, children, vacations, etc. Until, thankfully, I remembered something that happened on another Joss Whedon show, when Angel had an epiphany.

"If there is no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters... then all that matters is what we do. Cause that's all there is. What we do, now, today."
Angel, Epiphany (2:16)

Angel was both an adult and a hero, and this sounds like a pretty good philosophy to me. What you do every day matters, at least to you and the people around you. It matters a lot, in fact, even if all you do is all you can do in your tiny life, even if you're not a Slayer or a vampire or a Jedi Knight. And if that doesn't make you the hero of your own story, then I don't know what does.

I grew up with Buffy - went to high school in Southern California the same years she did and graduated college a week before the final episode aired. But it looks like I can't follow her to adulthood (a metaphor which actually works really well, as her story continues in comic book form, which I don't read as I can't seem to connect to the medium). I've graduated to Angel instead. Guess now I know why I moved to Los Angeles.