"No question about it, I am ready to be hurt again."
OMG I stayed up waaaaaaay too late last night reassembling the pieces of my brain that exploded during the Babylon 5 season 1 finale, and then watching The Office, and the coffee is not lasting the way it should. The rest of today is going to be AWESOME.
The Office 4.09 - "Dinner Party"
This episode was full of sad and frightening little metaphors. Jan has an office and a workspace; Michael is sleeping on the footstool while Jan has taken the bed; Michael's Dundies crowd together on the bottom of a corner shelf; in the living room, he has the world's tiniest plasma screen TV and a narrow little slat-table he made himself. These are the tiny corners and margins of Michael's former life that Jan is now allowing him to inhabit. Jan, in the meantime, has sublimated all of her anger and frustration into scented candles and Martha Stewart domesticity, and has produced an odor so overpowering that it looks like it's literally making Jim sick, and a picture-perfect meal that the guests have to wait three hours to eat, and that Pam ends up being afraid is poisoned. And in the end, Michael and Jan stare daggers at each other over the sliding glass door, which Jan had cleaned to transparent, and which Michael had run through because he thought he heard the ice cream truck, and over the St. Pauli Girl neon sign that casts the final, nauseatingly blue pall over the entire sorry affair.
Michael, who has always been so willing to do anything for a relationship--three vasectomies, Michael?--has finally hit the wall. He didn't have the heart to really try to sell Andy and Jim on Jan's home business; he gamed the rules like a lawyer to invite Dwight to that dinner party; he's started to assert himself. And Jan, who has never really been satisfied with Michael, only with what she thinks she can make him into, boils over. It was heartbreaking watching her try to glue that broken Dundie back together, only to realize that she couldn't fix what was broken. When Michael and Jan are good, when she's being honest with herself and him about what she's getting out of the relationship, it's a scary but real thing; but it is, more often than that, a trainwreck.
Dwight, in the meantime, keeps getting better and better, showing up with his wineglasses and his turkey legs and his babysitter, relentlessly determined to be a part of this thing that everyone else (but Andy, who is not one to pass up an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the boss) just wants to get as far away from as possible, rescuing Michael from the wreckage at the end and driving off into the Scranton night in the Trans-Am, leaving his "date" in the dust now that he has what he really came for. And Michael finally triumphed over Jim, first getting him to the dinner party in the first place and then deflecting the my-apartment-just-flooded move; Jim tried hard to get him and Pam out of there, but when it didn't work, he stayed rather than abandoning her. That's love right there.
I suppose there was nothing inherently wrong with the products of Hunter's musical "genius," aside from the mediocrity and the emo, but in context---ew.
The Office 4.10 - "The Chairmodel"
Michael is always looking for the thing he can't have, isn't he? The hot girl was a prize to be won; he was both fixated on his dream of a family life with Carol and weirdly dissatisfied with her as a person; Jan was unattainable, cool and beautiful and perfect, until she actually started dating him and he had to deal with everything under that surface; Pam's sweet, warm landlady is probably someone who could actually put up with him, but she is, bluntly, not pretty enough, and he's too clueless and immature to even realize what he's doing. (She's not: "That's really rude.") He wants a fairy tale, the chairmodel, someone who can never disappoint him by being human and messy (because she was KILLED IN A CAR WRECK; oh Dwight, you tenacious pit bull of an amateur detective). And Dwight finally got to be the sidekick he's always wanted to be, as Michael has started buying into his heroic narrative, went along to that grave for "closure." I am weirdly happy to see Dwight getting what he wants.
Jim has certainly gotten what he wanted; he's had the ring since the week after Pam and he started dating, and after all of the bitterness last year, it's lovely that that earlier certainty he had, that incredible focus, that Pam was everything to him, hadn't died off when she rejected him in "Casino Night," had just been banked and flared up again right away when it had the chance.
In the meantime, the office has thrown another petty indignity at its staff, the parking situation. The drama around that was wonderful, the epic importance of the business owners who share that park (loved the local-TV-ad shots of each of them that accompanied the narrative list), the way Andy was going to give up if he couldn't get Michael involved but Kevin, who has apparently suffered one indignity too many lately in his personal life, is frustrated enough to stick his neck out: he's not going to take this, on top of everything else.
And after a whole five seconds of talking head time, I am officially really scared of what's going to happen when Creed gets that third chair.
* * * * *
The PowerPoint Anthology of English Literature! I particularly like the bullet points on the Hamlet slide.
The Office 4.09 - "Dinner Party"
This episode was full of sad and frightening little metaphors. Jan has an office and a workspace; Michael is sleeping on the footstool while Jan has taken the bed; Michael's Dundies crowd together on the bottom of a corner shelf; in the living room, he has the world's tiniest plasma screen TV and a narrow little slat-table he made himself. These are the tiny corners and margins of Michael's former life that Jan is now allowing him to inhabit. Jan, in the meantime, has sublimated all of her anger and frustration into scented candles and Martha Stewart domesticity, and has produced an odor so overpowering that it looks like it's literally making Jim sick, and a picture-perfect meal that the guests have to wait three hours to eat, and that Pam ends up being afraid is poisoned. And in the end, Michael and Jan stare daggers at each other over the sliding glass door, which Jan had cleaned to transparent, and which Michael had run through because he thought he heard the ice cream truck, and over the St. Pauli Girl neon sign that casts the final, nauseatingly blue pall over the entire sorry affair.
Michael, who has always been so willing to do anything for a relationship--three vasectomies, Michael?--has finally hit the wall. He didn't have the heart to really try to sell Andy and Jim on Jan's home business; he gamed the rules like a lawyer to invite Dwight to that dinner party; he's started to assert himself. And Jan, who has never really been satisfied with Michael, only with what she thinks she can make him into, boils over. It was heartbreaking watching her try to glue that broken Dundie back together, only to realize that she couldn't fix what was broken. When Michael and Jan are good, when she's being honest with herself and him about what she's getting out of the relationship, it's a scary but real thing; but it is, more often than that, a trainwreck.
Dwight, in the meantime, keeps getting better and better, showing up with his wineglasses and his turkey legs and his babysitter, relentlessly determined to be a part of this thing that everyone else (but Andy, who is not one to pass up an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the boss) just wants to get as far away from as possible, rescuing Michael from the wreckage at the end and driving off into the Scranton night in the Trans-Am, leaving his "date" in the dust now that he has what he really came for. And Michael finally triumphed over Jim, first getting him to the dinner party in the first place and then deflecting the my-apartment-just-flooded move; Jim tried hard to get him and Pam out of there, but when it didn't work, he stayed rather than abandoning her. That's love right there.
I suppose there was nothing inherently wrong with the products of Hunter's musical "genius," aside from the mediocrity and the emo, but in context---ew.
The Office 4.10 - "The Chairmodel"
Michael is always looking for the thing he can't have, isn't he? The hot girl was a prize to be won; he was both fixated on his dream of a family life with Carol and weirdly dissatisfied with her as a person; Jan was unattainable, cool and beautiful and perfect, until she actually started dating him and he had to deal with everything under that surface; Pam's sweet, warm landlady is probably someone who could actually put up with him, but she is, bluntly, not pretty enough, and he's too clueless and immature to even realize what he's doing. (She's not: "That's really rude.") He wants a fairy tale, the chairmodel, someone who can never disappoint him by being human and messy (because she was KILLED IN A CAR WRECK; oh Dwight, you tenacious pit bull of an amateur detective). And Dwight finally got to be the sidekick he's always wanted to be, as Michael has started buying into his heroic narrative, went along to that grave for "closure." I am weirdly happy to see Dwight getting what he wants.
Jim has certainly gotten what he wanted; he's had the ring since the week after Pam and he started dating, and after all of the bitterness last year, it's lovely that that earlier certainty he had, that incredible focus, that Pam was everything to him, hadn't died off when she rejected him in "Casino Night," had just been banked and flared up again right away when it had the chance.
In the meantime, the office has thrown another petty indignity at its staff, the parking situation. The drama around that was wonderful, the epic importance of the business owners who share that park (loved the local-TV-ad shots of each of them that accompanied the narrative list), the way Andy was going to give up if he couldn't get Michael involved but Kevin, who has apparently suffered one indignity too many lately in his personal life, is frustrated enough to stick his neck out: he's not going to take this, on top of everything else.
And after a whole five seconds of talking head time, I am officially really scared of what's going to happen when Creed gets that third chair.
* * * * *
The PowerPoint Anthology of English Literature! I particularly like the bullet points on the Hamlet slide.