"i'm fart and smunny and i'm a prize."
- Damn it, guys. My last entry is kind of both silly and extremely inadequate - basically I screwed up kind of major exams. A part of me acknowledges that I am far more intelligent than these results have proven me to be, but I know I’ve disappointed people and shocked people and these results may possibly define what I choose within the next few months, and that’s what has me this upset. Exams are just exams, though, and I will keep doing things and being things beyond that piece of paper - I just have to find the confidence in my own abilities again to get back on track.
- And as long as we’re talking about things that bum me out, going this long without Parks and Recreation is actually hurting my soul a bit, and that’s not even an exaggeration. I need this show’s joy back in my life. I need Leslie. I need Leslie with every other character on this show. I need Leslie/Ben. ugh. Coming home on Friday the week before the last bawling and not having this show to focus my attention on only made my mood worse. I have been intolerable company in the last week or so, I know it.
- I’ve had a Parks and Recreation-specific post saved in my Google Docs for a few days now and I hope to post that extremely wordy thing before Harvest Festival (!!!!!) airs, but can I just say, very quickly - all of you must know, surely, that my adoration for Parks = adoration for every single thing on this show, but just thinking about Leslie/Ben right now is making me get excited - they’re sweet and simple, yes, but there’s also so much potential there, and I adore that how fleshed out these characters are (especially Ben, which is a pretty major feat considering he’s been on the show for eight episodes) only contributes to how easily you can envision the ways they will fit together and influence each other and the things they can do or become? It’s sappy, I know, I know, but they’ve owned my heart so effortlessly. And this is before both of them even start interacting like that! - all we’ve had so far are little slip-ups and looks of adorations when the other’s not looking!! AH. And fuck, watching Ben fall in love with Pawnee is going to be glorious. This show. These characters. I can flail very intelligently about this show, but all this paragraph is is mindless.
- I have been a publishing intern for three weeks now! So far it’s been kind of awesome - the company’s so tiny that I get to be involved in so many steps of the process: editing, proofreading, layouts, design, getting files ready for e-book conversions. I got to communicate frequently with an author to talk through the final stages of the editing of his book, and I got to write to the National Library Board, and I talked to my boss a lot about how to publicise two of the books we’re releasing in the next couple of weeks. It may sound lame, but it’s exciting, guys!
- And the last couple of weeks have been very layout-work heavy because we’re getting ready to send off a batch of e-books for conversion and then release, so what I’ve been doing is converting a bunch of episodes of shows I’ve wanted to watch, dropped it into my iPod, and paid half-attention to both my work and my TV. I’ve watched so much TV in the last two weeks, you guys. So much TV. I finished Greek (all four season) in eleven days and absolutely adored it - it deserves a lengthier post than I have the patience for right now. I hadn’t watched more than the first episode of S2 of The Good Wife until last week, and now I’m all caught up on that, too. And now I’ve started on White Collar!! Exciting.
- The Good Wife feelings -
- I didn’t think the writing had been as tight as S1 had been (which literally packed these characters and storylines together so neatly and beautifully that watching everything unfold was kind of thrilling), but it got back on-track after the eighth or ninth episode, which was a relief. And it made me happy, too, because this show is actually pretty fantastic - the writing of the plot is what drew me in first (and that’s not usually what gets to me first, but TGW’s understanding of structure and pacing and everything is just flawless), and watching it when it’s running on all of its cylinders is a fantastic way to spend time.
- I’m really liking, though, the emphasis on character this season? Not an emphasis in an obvious way, but I can tell that characters growing is a greater concern of the writers, and that’s wonderful.
- And the women on this show, goddamn. These women. I’m so impressed by the way these three main female characters are written. They’re interesting and flawed and allowed both successes and failures, and the fact that they’re women is addressed brilliantly - they are discriminated against, and they’re the minority in the worlds that they’re a part of, but they’re also powerful, sharp, sexual; they are wives and mothers, but not in a ‘my family/love life is my handicap’ kind of way, but in a ‘harm my family/love life and I will handicap you' kind of way. These women are not only great characters, but they’re great female characters - where their sex is integral to the way they’re written and treated, and I love that. This show addresses women as women, and the issues they face, better than a lot of other shows I know, and I adore TGW almost entirely for that.
- It helps, though, that the female characters themselves are fantastic. Diane is fabulous and badass but also has interesting, sweet weaknesses; Alicia is brilliant because of how much we get to see her face and how much we get to see of the way she faces it all, and - something about my love for her can’t actually be defined. It’s a little difficult for me to articulate - maybe because she gets to me in a strangely personal way, because I understand her. I see it all.
And Kalinda - oh man. I think the criticism I’ve seen about her character tends to focus on the fact that we know so little of her (especially because she refuses to say anything), but that’s one of the reasons I adore her and the way this show treats her. I love her because she doesn’t have secrets just to have a Token Hot Girl With Secrets - because you can see the way her past affects her and the way she’s forced to interact with it, and that’s fantastic. She is a character with secrets not because she can have them, but because they’re a part of who she is. It’s brilliant. I like characters like this. Characters with complex pasts~ need to be written this way more often. - And finally - the romantic relationships on this show haven’t ever really gotten to me, because I’ve always preferred watching the ladies interact or watching Will and Diane work together to take down stupid people while trading wonderful banter (oh, they are fabulous - when they agreed they would be on the same team, everything felt right again) - but Kalinda/Cary. What.. I’ve always liked them, back from the beginning of the series, because I liked the way they interact with each other, but in S2 they went from “oh wow, I kind of want to rewatch that scene with the two of them talking because their dynamic was pretty cute/sweet”, to “fuck, I need to rewatch this scene for the 100th time because their faces moved a second earlier than I expected it to and I need to commit this to memory”.
The build-up between this two has been beautiful. I like that they went from simple information-exchange to her dropping by his office just to say hi (and his reaction to that, by the way, is that he’s too preoccupied by his concern for her that he chases her out of the office so that they can walk together and he can warn her about things) and him actually hunting down and intimidating (in his lawyer-y way, of course) the guy who’s trying to break her down. I love that in this season he says the only person he cares about helping is himself, but actually cares about what could happen to her. I love that she’s letting herself see that he gets it, and letting herself return that by letting him see a little of what she feels.
That conversation in The Great Firewall - everything even before the kiss is pitch-perfect, because here are two characters interacting in ways they’re not used to interacting with people. He’s trying to help her without giving too much away. She gives him her address but doesn’t really know where to go from there because she’s a little unused to being sought after to give help, not receive it. And god, that kiss? My favourite thing about it is that it’s just one tiny peck, because it’s such a huge contrast from the aggressiveness of Kalinda’s scenes with Blake throughout the earlier half of the season (Blake, by the way, is by far the weakest part of S2 of this show, I’m so glad we’re done with him) - he can’t help her, but he’s there, and that’s all that is. It kills me. They kill me. They have ruined me. I rewatch their conversation at least twice every day.
Some day I will talk about other things I love about this show, including the way morality is written in it - uptheapples and I will have plenty to say! morality on this show is another thing that’s intriguing and beautifully-written in this show - and the way Cary Agos should be a one-note, predictable character, but is far from it, but for now, because it’s late and I have been typing furiously for the last half-hour, I will stop here.
My wrists hurt. I’m going to continue reading A Game of Thrones (I’m over halfway through, and Jon Snow is looking like he’s my favourite).
-- rachu