"Am I a hero? I really can't say, but yes."
Belated happy birthday to crankygrrl!
(Slightly less) belated happy birthday to rubberneck!
And miraculously on-time happy birthday to zandra_x!
May the coming year bring you good health, good friends, and prosperity.
* * * * *
The Office 3.20 - "Safety Training"
I'm fairly apprehensive that Andy's anger management training will survive Jim, and am sure that Dwight's shunning will not help. (And oh Dwight, going for the old-fashioned, deeply judgmental and moralistic approach, and clearly announcing the commencement of each period of unshunning and reshunning, because these things have rules.) I don't know what it says about Andy that he needs to literally reinvent himself, renaming himself "Drew" and referring to his past self in the third person, in order to keep the new coping skills in place, but I am very much struck by the fact that, personality-wise, he's a dog. No, really, hear me out. He approaches hierarchy and status in his social group exactly like a dog does, basing all of his behavior on the relative status of the other person. Now Dwight's above him in the pack, so he's eager to try to help with the bouncy castle plan, but before he was constantly testing the dominance of the other men in the office, trying to move up in the hierarchy, and doing it in ways that forced public, status-based showdowns. I suspect that that behavior is innate, and that all the renaming in the world won't change who he is, so it should be interesting to see him try to keep his zen in the intensely zen-destroying atmosphere of Dunder Mifflin.
One thing I really like about Darryl is that he's an actual professional. He's competent and he takes his job seriously. So of course Michael not only undercuts him at every turn but literally kicks the ladder out from under him, because Darryl just wants to run his warehouse without incident, but to Michael the actual functioning of the company is secondary to the role it serves as a way to focus attention on himself. So the safety training becomes a competition, an occasion for dramatizing his own life and giving it meaning, and he concocts possibly the least safe safety training ever. And Darryl, who's walking on crutches because Michael is five years old, ends up grasping for things Michael has to live for, looking around for hints and meeting blank stares, and hitting on the true fact that it takes an amazing amount of courage to be Michael, though not for the reasons Michael thinks. And Michael needs the pep talk, because beneath the blustering facade, he's afraid that nothing in his life is measuring up; he's so busy faking it to impress other people that he's not sure what's real anymore. He's able to pull the facade back together, declare himself a hero for not jumping off a roof and onto a bouncy castle to prove a point and it's absurd and fundamental of Michael on its own, even without the contrast to last week and Dwight's legitimate heroics.
(And although I loved the bouncy castle, which was absurd and insane and so very, very Dwight and Michael, I wish the daytime rooftop shots hadn't made it so obvious that they're filming in LA.)
One of the things that has made me saddest about Jim's relationship with Karen and his lack of willingness to really reconnect with Pam, even as friends, is the way it makes Pam seem like she's on the outside looking in. I think some of it is physical, since Pam's at the reception desk while Jim and Karen and the other salespeople sit together in the main part of the office, but there used to be a sort of line from Jim's desk to Pam's desk, they used to connect across that space, and now that line has been severed Karen is in the middle and Pam seems so much more separate. And that's why it was so lovely to see Pam in the middle of the betting, in her rightful place as part of the office, as someone who knows them all so well, and why it was interesting to see Karen expressing frustration about getting cleaned out, because she doesn't know her co-workers as well as she thought, she's still more of an outsider than she's seemed to be.
Also, on 30 Rock--"The call is coming from inside the house!" HAHAHAHA.
* * * * *
My afternoon off has so far been everything I hoped it could be (i.e. sanity-restoring). The weather is beautiful, sunny and clear but not hot and, most importantly in my neighborhood, not windy. I just spent an hour loafing at the neighborhood bookstore, and bought The Road and Heinrich Böll's Group Portrait with Lady and Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book, which I will hopefully soon even be able to read. (I'm on the last three hundred pages of Neal Stephenson's The Confusion; perhaps starting the Baroque Cycle right when work became insane was not the best strategy, because while I've been enjoying the books tremendously, progress has been slow.) And right now I am eating what the bakery down the street calls a "moon pie" (not a real moon pie, but a pretty tasty cookie sandwich nonetheless) and drinking pomegranate lemonade and catching up on LJ.
And I'm stealing from the Slactivist to wish you all a very happy Friday the 13th!
(Slightly less) belated happy birthday to rubberneck!
And miraculously on-time happy birthday to zandra_x!
May the coming year bring you good health, good friends, and prosperity.
* * * * *
The Office 3.20 - "Safety Training"
I'm fairly apprehensive that Andy's anger management training will survive Jim, and am sure that Dwight's shunning will not help. (And oh Dwight, going for the old-fashioned, deeply judgmental and moralistic approach, and clearly announcing the commencement of each period of unshunning and reshunning, because these things have rules.) I don't know what it says about Andy that he needs to literally reinvent himself, renaming himself "Drew" and referring to his past self in the third person, in order to keep the new coping skills in place, but I am very much struck by the fact that, personality-wise, he's a dog. No, really, hear me out. He approaches hierarchy and status in his social group exactly like a dog does, basing all of his behavior on the relative status of the other person. Now Dwight's above him in the pack, so he's eager to try to help with the bouncy castle plan, but before he was constantly testing the dominance of the other men in the office, trying to move up in the hierarchy, and doing it in ways that forced public, status-based showdowns. I suspect that that behavior is innate, and that all the renaming in the world won't change who he is, so it should be interesting to see him try to keep his zen in the intensely zen-destroying atmosphere of Dunder Mifflin.
One thing I really like about Darryl is that he's an actual professional. He's competent and he takes his job seriously. So of course Michael not only undercuts him at every turn but literally kicks the ladder out from under him, because Darryl just wants to run his warehouse without incident, but to Michael the actual functioning of the company is secondary to the role it serves as a way to focus attention on himself. So the safety training becomes a competition, an occasion for dramatizing his own life and giving it meaning, and he concocts possibly the least safe safety training ever. And Darryl, who's walking on crutches because Michael is five years old, ends up grasping for things Michael has to live for, looking around for hints and meeting blank stares, and hitting on the true fact that it takes an amazing amount of courage to be Michael, though not for the reasons Michael thinks. And Michael needs the pep talk, because beneath the blustering facade, he's afraid that nothing in his life is measuring up; he's so busy faking it to impress other people that he's not sure what's real anymore. He's able to pull the facade back together, declare himself a hero for not jumping off a roof and onto a bouncy castle to prove a point and it's absurd and fundamental of Michael on its own, even without the contrast to last week and Dwight's legitimate heroics.
(And although I loved the bouncy castle, which was absurd and insane and so very, very Dwight and Michael, I wish the daytime rooftop shots hadn't made it so obvious that they're filming in LA.)
One of the things that has made me saddest about Jim's relationship with Karen and his lack of willingness to really reconnect with Pam, even as friends, is the way it makes Pam seem like she's on the outside looking in. I think some of it is physical, since Pam's at the reception desk while Jim and Karen and the other salespeople sit together in the main part of the office, but there used to be a sort of line from Jim's desk to Pam's desk, they used to connect across that space, and now that line has been severed Karen is in the middle and Pam seems so much more separate. And that's why it was so lovely to see Pam in the middle of the betting, in her rightful place as part of the office, as someone who knows them all so well, and why it was interesting to see Karen expressing frustration about getting cleaned out, because she doesn't know her co-workers as well as she thought, she's still more of an outsider than she's seemed to be.
Also, on 30 Rock--"The call is coming from inside the house!" HAHAHAHA.
* * * * *
My afternoon off has so far been everything I hoped it could be (i.e. sanity-restoring). The weather is beautiful, sunny and clear but not hot and, most importantly in my neighborhood, not windy. I just spent an hour loafing at the neighborhood bookstore, and bought The Road and Heinrich Böll's Group Portrait with Lady and Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book, which I will hopefully soon even be able to read. (I'm on the last three hundred pages of Neal Stephenson's The Confusion; perhaps starting the Baroque Cycle right when work became insane was not the best strategy, because while I've been enjoying the books tremendously, progress has been slow.) And right now I am eating what the bakery down the street calls a "moon pie" (not a real moon pie, but a pretty tasty cookie sandwich nonetheless) and drinking pomegranate lemonade and catching up on LJ.
And I'm stealing from the Slactivist to wish you all a very happy Friday the 13th!