Old habits die hard

Some people say that in relationships, timing is everything, above all else. I don't completely believe this, but I don't disbelieve it, either. We bring to every relationship we form the sum of all of our experience, along with our current situations. And if we can't imagine our lives having turned out any differently than they are now, most likely it all has to do with one or two decisions we made, perhaps haphazardly or impuslvely, a long time ago.

Which is why "fate" is bullshit. Any of our lives could just as easily have gone a totally different direction if we hadn't ask that person for their phone number, or moved to a different city, or not gone out for drinks one night. It's sort of too overwhelming to think about, but it's something I tend to obssess about. Rather needlessly, of course.

Some very close friends of mine that I respect 100% recently undertook the viewing of Six Feet Under.

Anyone who knows me at all knows that SFU is kind of like my religion. It is what allowed me to be born again. I'll spare you the details (of course, if you've been reading this blog for the past 3 years, you already know the details....), but suffice to say, SFU pretty much ranks right up there with being born as one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. It literally changed my life: it opened up a whole new world to me, and totally altered my philosophy.

But I was also in the deepest, darkest trenches of emotional warfare at the time, fighting a losing battle against enemy insurgents in my brain that wanted to kill me. And SFU was a revelation. Why it was a revelation is too much to get into at the moment, but it was.

And the thing about my friends watching the show is this: they don't really care for it. I haven't discussed it in detail with them because I'm a coward and don't have the stamina for it (and I wouldn't want to put words in their mouths anyway), but I think they find it silly, pretentious and maybe slightly laughable.

Hmmm.

I know I'm overanalyzing here (surprise!), but if they see so very little of what I see when I watch that show, then what can that possibly mean?

Probably very little, actually. It's a fucking TV show.

But it's my TV show!!! It's what inspired me to change my life and become a therapist and go back to school. Hell, it even inspired me to practice a particular kind of therapy.

But maybe....just maybe....

If I saw the show now for the first time, assuming that my life were still in the same place it is now, would it still mean as much to me?

Hard to say, but probably not. I bet I would still like it a whole lot, though. When you find something (or someone) that speaks to you so profoundly, it's impossible to separate that from the circumstances or history.

It just is, it just does. So I can't hardly blame my friends for not seeing in Six Feet Under the same magic that I did: our lives and situations while watching it couldn't be more different. There's nothing more to be read into it than that.

Of course, I still think they're wrong and I still find it disappointing, but there is no deeper meaning than that.

A relationship with a TV show, or any piece of art, can be as complicated (or as simple) as any relationship with a person. It all depends on where you are, where you've been, and where you're going.

Plain as that.

Too Many Movies?

A few minutes ago I'm sitting at my desk in my bedroom, happily playing email Scrabble, when I hear footsteps underneath my window. Ask anyone who knows my backyard, and they'll tell you it's creepy at night. It's gigantic, and extremely dark, and lined with shrubbery around the entire fence that protrudes a good 10 feet into the yard.

I know I heard the footsteps, because my desk is right up against the window and my window is open. So despite the fact that I can't see shit because it's too dark (I never shut my blinds), I hear them and I stop. I perk up. The footsteps stop, then I hear them again, very distinctly the sound of two heavy feet walking on the dead leaves, going in the opposite direction. And it truly sounds like they're about 4 feet from my window. I have a door in my room that goes into the back yard as well, so first thing I do is look over at the door to make sure it's locked.

My roommate Garrett has a telescope he likes to take out into the backyard sometimes, so I leave my room and go knock on his door, thinking maybe it's him outside messing around, but he answers from inside his room, so obviously it's not him. However, he decides to go investigate with me.

I grab a hammer and a flashlight and we go outside. We scour the entire backyard and of course find nothing, but I swear to god it was not my imagination. Yes, I looked at about a hundred videos of ghosts today and watched Session 9 tonight, which was creepy as shit, but I heard it, and I stand by my story.

Both sides of the backyard have big gates, and the one on the north side is always standing open, and fairly secluded by a garage apartment (and that person has moved out, so I know it wasn't her; it's empty right now), but it's still there. Yesterday I saw two homeless people walking down the street, the state hospital is 3 blocks away, and a couple months ago, as I rounded the corner onto my street riding my bike home from work late one night, some cops had the entrance to the street from the main road blocked off and several cops were walking up and down my street with their flashlights. I didn't ask any questions; I just went inside and made sure all the doors were locked.

So even though it was probably nothing, it's not completely ridiculous that someone could have been in the backyard. And I'm still sleeping with the hammer next to my bad tonight.

Television Killed the Cinema Star

An early October issue of Entertainment Weekly that I was reading in the breakroom at work tonight had a fluffy, but mildly interesting article (isn't that every article in EW?) about why no gay movies have been made in the 2 years since Brokeback Mountain was such a critical and economic success. Particularly, it noted, since gay characters have become so ubiquitous and popular on television. The article offered several theories for this, like that studio producers and executives tended to be old, white men who have had their jobs for decades compared to TV producers, which have a much higher turnover rate and tend to be much younger and more diverse, and that there simply aren't any good "gay scripts" out there (which I tend to have a hard time believing; or, well, after programming the Austin Gay and Lesbian Film Festival for 2 years, maybe I don't....).

Whatever the case may be, they had a quote from Alan Ball saying that one reason he saw for this was that so many gay films tended to be about issues (AIDS, coming out, discrimination), and that being gay was the main thrust (ahem) of the story. Whereas on television, you have hours and hours and hours to slowly and subtley reveal a character's true, well, character, and make relationships so much more nuanced and realistic.



This is what drew me into television to begin with, and why I think really incredible television shows have pretty much killed my love of movies. Anymore, 2 hours simply isn't enough time for me to invest in characters that I like. I've never been terribly interested in plot, which could explain why I generally hate mysteries, thrillers, and action films. A good story is nice, but I enjoy television and film for the characters and the richness and intimacy that watching people develop over years can bring you.



All of my favorite shows (Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, Nip/Tuck, Friday Night Lights) have all been character-based, and about extraordinarily complex and nuanced characters (well, maybe not Sex and the City so much, and only the first 2 seasons of Nip/Tuck; seasons 3 and 4 got very plotty and stupid and totally sucked). And not only that, they've all been set in very specific "worlds" (high-fashion New York; a funeral home; a high-end cosmetic surgery hospital; small-town Texas) that generally have very prescribed ideas about how things should be, and all feature characters either creating or breaking those molds and boundaries. So, in another sense, I guess all of those shows have also been about identity and defining oneself within the confines of whatever world it is the characters are existing in.



With movies everything has to be so glossed over, so quick, so surface. With television shows, relationships can begin and end in real time; people can grow up, or change, in such slow and realistic ways, that when you go back and visit them again at the beginning of whatever show it is compared to the end of the show, you can really see the progress and change, whereas you might not have really noticed it while watching the show. In TV shows, characters don't have to have revelatory epiphanies and a conclusion like they do in movies. That's not real life. I'm not knocking movies here, I'm simply saying for my money, movies just don't cut it for me anymore. I like to be able to grow with my characters and become intimately involved in their lives. (To this day, I still maintain that I've never seen a movie that can rival Six Feet Under for me.)



Which goes back to Alan Ball's comment. A lot of emphasis in the gay rights movement has been placed on being "out" and visible, and how that, more than anything, has helped the cause. Because the more people that know gay people, and realize that they're not all AIDS victims, or serial killers, or political activists, the more the regular population will see them as just being regular people. If a middle-aged soccer mom in Iowa who's never known a gay person can watch Six Feet Under and watch David struggle with his sexuality over 5 years, and become really attached to him, and the show can humanize this character and make the anxiety and fear of that struggle very real to this woman, in a way that a film never could (despite how great Brokeback was, it was still two very famous, heterosexual actors playing dress up, and that's impossible to forget while watching it), then I say, bring on the TV.

Own It

I was tagged by Stacy.

List 5 things that certain people (who are not deserving of being your friend anyway) may consider to be “totally lame,” but you are, despite the possible stigma, totally proud of. Own it:

(Well it's funny that she should tag me for this today, because just last night I had a conversation with Tom and Meredith about how we no longer believe in the idea of "guilty pleasures," since, if it's something we like, then obviously it's a part of our essence, thus, we shouldn't feel guilty about it. I like that. So here goes.)

1. I love McDonald's. It flies in the face of everything I believe in, as far as health, politics, sustainable and nutrient food growth, and all that shit, but I just can't help it. I use it as a treat. If I've eaten really well for awhile, or I just feel really bad, I eat McDonald's. It's disgusting, and I hate it afterwards, and I always feel incredibly guilty when I eat it, like a drug habit I have to hide, but man, I love it going down.

2. I love Will & Grace. I think it's brilliantly hilarious, and could watch it all day long. It's one of the few (if the only) shows I've ever seen that actually makes me bellow out laughing when I'm watching it alone in my room at 11:30 at night. Once I got over my indignation that the whole show is just one giant hideous stereotype, I started really enjoying it.

3. I get really big crushes on TV characters (yes, I'm almost 30 years old....). Not on the actors. On the characters. Both on narrative shows and reality shows.

4. I want to have the kind of life that makes people jealous. I want to be envied and admired, and I hope that, in at least some small way, every man who's ever broken my heart forever regrets not ending up with me. I also hope they all get fat and I only get better looking as I age.

5. I still fantasize about being a rock star and practice my perfect guitar stance in the mirror. At least once a week.

I tag Tom and Mandy.

Taking out the garbage

I've been really excited about Dexter, the Showtime series that came out last year about the brilliant Miami forensics investigator who doubles as a serial killer in his spare time. The twist, of course, is that he only kills "bad guys," the other serial killers that prey on children; mutilate prostitutes and create internet rape sites; awful people who have fallen through the cracks or been freed on technicalities. As the voiceover in the pilot episode explains, with a murder solving rate of only 25% in Miami, it makes his job incredibly easy.

Based on the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay, the show seems built on a gimmick that it doesn't know how to stretch over a whole season. After having watched only the first 4 episodes, I'm ready to write it off. We learn through a series of painfully contructed flashbacks that Dexter Morgan was a foster kid taken in a by a grisly cop who noticed something sinister about the boy at a young age: he loved to kill. He had an insatiable urge to take life. But being a cop, this father didn't freak out, but did his best to try to get his adopted son to channel his impulses into something "positive." He tells him there are a lot of poeple in this world that get away with a lot of very bad things.

As an adult, Dexter claims to feel no emotion, and to be utterly perplexed by human feeling and interaction. He does the best he can to fake it with his family and new girlfriend (who, because of an abusive ex-husband, has no interest in sex and has serious intimacy problems, which suits Dexter just fine), but constantly feels his facade cracking. In the excrutiatingly pretentious voiceover that accompanies each episode, such as episode 4, which takes place over Halloween, he says things like, "People like to pretend that they're monsters. I do my best to pretend that I'm not one." He strikes me as vaguely atutistic in this way: socially retarded in a lot of ways (though very successful in his career), but methodical and obsessive when it comes to his work, and one of the best in his field (in his legitimate and non-legitimate endeavors). But he's clearly not autistic, and I think this is part of the problem with the show; there's no real reason or explanation for his behavior. It just is. But maybe that's enough, or maybe they'll get into that later, I don't know. Though the tension arising in the relationship with his girlfriend, who is starting to warm up to Dexter and wants to take their relationship to the next level, is somewhat engaging, it turns out that having a lead character that's admittedly dead inside, just doesn't do much to create drama. The voceover reveals too much most of the time, and acts, at least in my opinion, as a tradeoff for true development. Granted, I had this problem with Sex and the City when I started watching that show too, and I got over it. But at least Sex and the City was funny and came in satisfying, bite-sized 27-minute morsels. Dexter thinks people yelling a lot and having filthy mouths is proof of depth, but how can a character develop when there's clearly no growth inside? Other than that, it just becomes a not incredibly engaging cop drama, which I have pretty little interest in.

Maybe not watching past 4 episodes isn't giving it a fair shake, but that's a third of the season, and if it hasn't grabbed me by now, I figure it probably won't get a whole lot more interesting. I suppose it could go in some interesting directions by asking provocative questions about morality and situational ethics (moral relativism verus absolutism), but to accept the premise, I think you have to toss that aside a little bit. Having a lead character who perhaps feels a little conflict about his murderous urges, even though he's only taking out people that most people would agree probably deserve it, might add some desperately needed dramatic tension. As it is, he coldly tortures and kills each person in the same way (strapping them naked to a table, tightly mummified in Saran Wrap, while he hacks off body parts and saves one blood sample from a slice on their cheek for his personal collection), but literally thinks nothing of it.

I'm not sure what about this Dexter role would appeal to someone like Michael C. Hall, who so embodied the quasi-closeted, uptight emotional disaster that was David on Six Feet Under (keyword being emotional), it's hard to imagine him as much of anything else. I know that's unfair, but even in this stoney character of Dexter, I see hints of David. Like, if David Fisher had finally fucking lost his shit and gone ape-shit crazy (like he almost did in season 5), I could see Dexter emerging from that. In some strange way. Hall is an utterly watchable and compelling actor, and that's probably the only way I even got as far as I did in this series. It's too bad. I'd really like to see him in another role that's as complex, nuanced, flawed, and magnetic as David Fisher was.

Really exciting TV news!!

Well, at least to me. Brad Pitt and Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy, are teaming up to create a drama on FX about a transsexual man.

Murphy co-created "4 oz." with "Nip/Tuck" writer Brad Falchuk, and they wrote the pilot together. Murphy, who'll direct the pilot, will exec produce the FX drama with Brad Pitt and Dede Gardner, with Pitt making his first foray into series TV.

Murphy will begin casting the key role of a married man with two sons whose life takes a radical gender turn.

Though FX has only agreed to 4 episodes thus far, Murphy still hopes to stretch the show over several seasons. The first season would deal with the revelation of the doc's decision; the second would revolve around him transitioning to female; the third would revolve around the surgery, and the fourth would consist of his new life as a woman and his attempt to find love.

Oh man, I'm really excited about the idea of this show. Nip/Tuck always had a lot of storylines involving transsexuals, which was great. I'm curious to see where 4oz goes with it all.

Black eyes and broken hearts

Only someone who grew up in, or has spent a significant amount of time in, a small town (I'm talking 20,000 people or under) can really understand the strange relationships that form between and among people in that environment. People often find themselves friends with the most unlikely of people, simply because when there isn't anybody, as soon as you find someone you have even the remotest of connection with, you latch onto them. Or you're often thrust into unusual situations, or you're connected in the most direct of ways to someone through someone else you know. Rarely is anything random the way life in bigger cities tends to be. But even that randomness is often overstated, I think, especially in art. Movies like Magnolia, Short Cuts, Heights, or a myriad of other motion pictures, play up this scattershot effect in relationships, but it's usually totally contrived and unbelievable.



This, I think, is the blessing of the TV show Friday Night Lights. Obviously, it's rarely a show about football, and actually a show about relationships, and the people that play football, and the literal religion that it can be in small towns. (Which is another thing I think only people who grew up experiencing it can really understand.) The relationships in FNL are complicated, messy, and have real, lasting effects. Nobody gets an easy out. You have to give props to a show, much like Six Feet Under, that constantly pounds you over the head with how rotten everybody is, but refuses to judge, moralize, or condemn. In other words, the writers treat the characters like the flawed, but ultimately (usually) good-hearted people they really are. Just like in real life.



People make a lot of mistakes and hurt a lot of people in FNL, and seeing that it's such a small town, no one can avoid anybody else. It's all right out there, the gaping wounds and letters of shame. There's nowhere to hide in a town like Dillon, Texas, and everybody knows your story. And yet, the drama feels real. It never (well, rarely) feels contrived, and while the people of Dillon learn a lot of painful lessons about life, love and loyalty, the show doesn't shove it down your throat.

In the pilot episode, the town's beloved star quarterback, and the boy who's going to take them to state and fame, Jason Street, is plowed down in the season's first game and breaks his spine. We learn very soon after that he is paralyzed and will never walk again. (That's no spoiler; we learn that in the second episode, and it's strongly hinted at in the first.) The show never shies away from the painful reality of a strong-willed boy being struck down in the prime of his youth, with so much promise and potential. His own recovery and psychological journey is compelling enough, but throw in a small town in utter turmoil and despair, and the ensuing social fallout from people who ultimately care more about the game than about the players, and you've got the makings for drama of biblical proportions. The show does a great job of going from being a show about football in the first few episodes, to gradually expanding the plotlines to involve the more peripheral characters who have little attachment to the game except by geographic proximity.



A lot happens in the first season of FNL, considering there are 22 episodes, and it occasionally gets bogged down in its own melodramatic angst, but never for long. Bad, ugly and painful shit is always gonna happen, but how you react to it makes it dramatic or not. The writers of FNL know this, and usually go to great lengths to temper the drama with level-headed and mature reactions. Thus, for the most part, rendering it exciting, moving and sweet, instead of overblown and falsely sentimental. It figures that a show this smart, funny, insightful, and genuine is struggling so badly. The DVD's come out next week, and NBC is pushing them for $20 for the whole season. That's a steal. I can't recommend highly enough that you get it, and start getting to know the fascinating people of Dillon, Texas.

I know it probably seems like I'm making this up, but I swear I'm not.

My brush with fame continued at work today, as two more Friday Night Lights cast members actually came through my line. They were together. It was Julie and Saracen's Grandma.

When they walked up to the register, "Julie" tossed a container of cheese from the salad bar onto the register and said, "I don't know how to weigh that." Beat. "It's cheese."

Thanks, Captain Obvious. And though I very nearly did, I still didn't say anything about the show. I did, however, make a resolution to myself that if this guy, this guy, or this guy come in, I'll simply have to tell them how much I admire their jobs. Because they're my favorites. Also, "Julie" has really big boobs.

He's not quite as cute in real life, but I still wouldn't kick him out of bed.

Today at work, Scott Porter came through my line. I tried to play it cool (which I think I mostly managed), except that I wrestled, throughout the entire transaction, with whether or not to tell him that I just started watching Friday Night Lights and think it's one of the greatest things ever. But I ended up not, because I didn't want to be that guy, but I did totally stare at him the whole time. I think it was probably pretty clear that he knew that I knew who he was.

Nevertheless, I was very excited.

The real irony is that I've spent my whole life trying to get away from these people, and now I can't stop watching a TV show that's all about them

While we were at Barton Springs this morning, Bryan and I once again started talking about Friday Night Lights, the show. So I finally got his DVD of all the episodes, loaded them onto my computer and started watching.

Holy shit.

No wonder nobody watches this show. I didn't even know network TV could be this good. I just sat and watched 5 episodes in a row, pretty much non-stop. I'm only quitting now because I have to be at work at 8am tomorrow. I think I could probably keep watching it all night. I've pretty much bawled into my pillow 3 times already. I recognize so much of Austin, and there's some very familiar music. I figured it was a great show; I've heard nothing but good things about it, but I had no idea it would be like this.

Wow. I can't wait to come home from work tomorrow and start watching it again. I'll definitely have it done in time for season 2. Which I'm already eagerly anticipating.

I love Workout.

No, not working out, Workout! It's a reality show on Bravo (which, for my money, has the market cornered on watchable, compelling, totally worthless reality TV) about a mid-30's trainer who started her own high-end gym in L.A. That's pretty much it.
The show totally wouldn't work if Jackie Warner wasn't such an ambitious, charismatic and interesting character in and of herself. She's a lesbian, and struggles mightily not to let that characterize and define her. Her father was schizophrenic and committed suicide when she was a teenager, and her mother is a wacko religious nutjob who thinks her daughter is going straight to hell, but loves her anyway, and they're always struggling, struggling, struggling.

Jackie's best friend is Jesse, also gay, and a little flamboyant, a trainer in Jackie's gym full of testosterone-fueled men, both gay and straight, and he seems to always be fighting to prove himself to them. To prove his masculinity but not sacrifice who he is. And he's just so sweet, but he's not a hardbody either, and everybody gives him a hard time about being "fat." He shrugs it off and says, "Well, maybe I'm fat in the gay world, but not in the real world."


The show is just about these people struggling, and living their lives amidst this crazy backdrop of celebrity trainers and supermodels. It doesn't overly politicize, or play to sensationalism. They date, they get in fights, they get their hearts broken, they try to branch out and do other things, they get sick of being so "fit," and binge on ice cream. I also like that the show uses a lot of psychology about people obsessing over their bodies and eating disorders (in "SkyLab," a program Jackie started to help overweight clients develop healthy lifestyles, lose weight, and address the real issues behind their weight problems). Plus, everybody on it's really funny.

I don't know. In the middle of the afternoon, when you're bored and napping on the couch, a marathon of this on Bravo is just the ticket to waste the hours. I love it.

Right now they're building a coffin your size.

The other night Kurt asked me if working at a hospice made me think about my own mortality all the time, and if that was disturbing at all. I didn't really respond at the time, but I would have to say that no, it doesn't. As someone who already thought (thinks) a great deal about my own mortality, I would have to say that if anything, it helps. It helps me to focus more on the here and now, I think, to worry less about everything I'm doing, and what the future ramifications will be. Living in the future has always been somewhat of a problem for me, and it's caused me untold amounts of anxiety. Travis once told me that I was an ideal candidate for religion. It's also created an almost intolerable impatience in me. One thing we were just starting to focus on in my therapy awhile back right before I quit going was to learn how I can further appreciate, not just tolerate, the here and now. How to live in the moment without always worrying about getting to the next point. How to just feel, and breathe, and relax, and enjoy each day for what it was. It sounds corny, but it's really hard for me to do. I have some theories about why I am this way, but I'll save those for another day.

As I mentioned a few months ago, we studied existentialism in my Counseling class this semester. Pretty much all modern psychology, and more specifically therapy, is derived from an existentialist philosophy. Welll, most humanism anyway, as humanism was a direct rebellion against Freud's psychoanalysis, which is very negative and deterministic and essentially posits that we're all just slaves to our pasts. But the basic tenets of existentialism are free will, responsibility, and death. It's about living each day to the fullest; realizing that every single thing we do, even breathing, is done by choice; that we live our lives with the specter of death looming over us, and it's our responsibility to acknowledge that and honor it. The existentialists said that death is what makes life meaningful. We should acknowldege the past, but pay more attention to what we do today. We shouldn't discount the influence that the past has had on us, but we're not slaves to it, and the here and now, and how we treat each day, in the moment, is what's important.

Obviously, this philosophy appealed to me very, very much. It's also the direct basis for cognitive behavioral therapy, which is precisely what I intend to practice, and frankly, what most therapists practice.

It wasn't until much later, though, that something really clicked in my brain: the reason that I loved Six Feet Under so much was because it was a narrative explanation of existentialism! I love it when those neurons in your brain fire off at just the right moment, and things coalesce in a really exciting way. Of course Six Feet Under is about existentalism, it's about death and acknowledging the responsibility you have for being alive! Every single episode is a lesson in existentalism.

Which reminded me of a fantastic essay I found last summer, in the National Review of all places, about how great Six Feet Under is. The writer, Radley Balko, makes much the same point, without actually calling it existentalism. Basically, he's praising the show for not taking a stand on abortion, one way or another, which is an issue that figures pretty prominently into the show in a few places, even though it openly promotes liberal values:

The show's critical acclaim and awards are well-deserved. The characters are wonderfully flawed and complicated, made all the more interesting by the backdrop of death: They face same decisions the rest of us do with respect to relationships, friendships, sex, and family, but they carry out their day-to-day lives just a few steps from the inevitably of mortality carried out almost daily in their home. Each episode opens with a death vignette, usually someone unrelated to the show's main characters, but who eventually becomes a Fisher "client," and whose life, death or grieving relatives somehow color and underscore the ensuing episode's themes.

If you have seen the show, you might be curious why National Review Online would publish a piece by a libertarian singing its praises. There are, after all, a number of openly gay characters and plotlines. Drug use abounds, copiously and unapologetically. There is rampant promiscuity, and enough purple language to blush a sailor. Family hour, it isn't.

He goes on to discuss the show's take, or non-take, on abortion, which is an issue that comes up at least twice in a major plot points:

But there's something else about the show that I've found surprising, and that should hold some appeal for conservatives. Alan Ball and his team of writers have shown a courageous willingness to challenge Hollywood orthodoxy on the subject of prenatal life, on the moral absolute of abortion rights, and on the soul-carrying capacity of a fetus. It's probably a stretch to say the show is "pro-life," or even "anti-abortion," but it has at least been sympathetic to the idea that abortion is more than a mere personal choice rooted in identity politics — that it is a very real decision with very real consequences, and perhaps for parties other than just the woman who chooses to get one.

I'm not exactly sure why he thinks Hollywood is so orthodox on the subject of abortion, as even one conservative once admitted, even the uber-liberal ladies of Sex and the City couldn't go through with an abortion on season 4, and Miranda ended up keeping the baby.

Anyway, he goes on to explain the situations for the abortions, and the ramifications for the characters involved, and the way the show deals with them. But ultimately, in both situations, the "drama," if you will, comes down to the characters involved having to face up to it and take responsibility. Or not.

...within that framework, Six Feet Under is in many ways one of the most morally instructive dramas on television. It's rich with human frailty and failure, one of the many reasons why it's so watchable and authentic.

But the show refuses to punish its characters for human failures, the kinds of lapses in judgment and temporary faults we're all guilty of from time to time, the kind that make us mortal. It's only when they refuse to take responsibility for those mistakes that Six Feet Under's writers discipline their characters, often brutally.

And about that, he is correct. So without even knowing it, Balko has argued for the legitimacy of existentialism, and how it only makes sense as a healthy and fit way to live life. Free will, responsibility, and death. Own it, and learn how to live as richly and fully as possible. I'm doing my best to figure out how to do that, and put it in practice. So far, I'm not doing a horribly good job, but knowing is half the battle, right? Right?

Front-Desk Dick

I don't know what's more annoying to me right now: the guy at the table next to mine yapping on his cell phone as loudly as he possibly can in the middle of a coffee shop, or the fact that I've been here for about 15 minutes and already stopped working on my research paper about welfare reform and poverty in the United States. I should have chosen a different topic, like What America Should Do About Alexis Arquette's Face.



If anyone besides me was fortunate enough to have caught the premiere episode of Top Design on Bravo last night, you'll know what I'm talking about. It's just like all those other reality/competition shows, except this one features designers putting rooms together. Last night, the contestants were given 5 objects belonging to a "mystery person" and instructed to design a room around those objects. It's a neat idea, actually, and each team was given $50,000 (!!!) to play with. Anyway, after the rooms are all done, the "mystery guest" was revealed to be none other than Alexis Arquette.

Huh?

When he/she was revealed as the guest, all the little queens in the room (and believe you me, this show contains no small amount of the swishiest, bitchiest queens you never wanted) nearly fainted with delight and excitement. I had no idea Alexis was such a huge icon in the gay world. It appears that he has officially gone through "the change," and the other judges kept referring to him/her as "her," so I guess that's the case. But seriously, what does Alexis do? I know that as a male, he's had a bunch of bit parts in a bunch of movies, but what besides that? When I lived in Dallas I went to a screening he and 3 of his friends were hosting of a "film" they'd made, involving a bunch of dudes in drag pretending to be sorority girls getting killed by a slasher. Um. It was real clever. Alexis and his friends sat directly behind me and my friends and talked out loud, laughed, and threw popcorn throughout the entire film. Which in hindsight, I'm sure made it much better.


Last time I was in L.A., actually, Brad and I went to a club in Hollywood, where Miss Arquette just happened to be hosting some sort of "show," where she basically ran around taking pictures of anyone's dick who would let her, then hanging up each picture on a clothesline running through the bar (they were Polaroids). And sucked up copious amounts of cocaine. And this was apparently a regular Sunday night "event" at this particular club.

I've always heard he was a big crackhead.


When I expressed the question out loud last night about what Alexis actually does (and speaking of which, where the hell did the Arquettes even come from? Are they Hollywood lineage of some sort, or did they just have really ambitious parents?), my friend with whom I was watching the show said that he always thought of Alexis as the "front-desk dick" from Threesome. Look, he's even listed in the cast as Dick. Anyway, I thought that was hilarious. I'm not going to explain it if you haven't seen the movie.

Oh, but wait.... Oops.

Never mind. I just realized I made a mistake.

The guest last night wasn't Alexis Arquette.

It was Ann Coulter.



My bad.

That's what I wanted to name my pug....

Lauren Ambrose, the actress who played my second favorite character on Six Feet Under, Clare, the angsty little sister, just had a baby with her weird looking husband. She's so cuuuute!

My new favorite show

Is Million Dollar Listing on Bravo. It's a reality show all about the real estate business in Hollywood and Malibu and it's fascinating.

I love all the crazy buyers and sellers, and the human drama involved in so much of it, like the couple selling because they're getting divorced, and they're both devastated about it, or the gay guys that are about to adopt, like, 20 kids, and need a new, fun kid-friendly house. Or the real estate agent who's trying to sell her ex-boyfriend's house for him, when she's clearly still in love with him.

I love how people spend 20 years personalizing their homes, and then decide to sell and have to spend $15,000 remodeling to make it look more "normal," but that allows them to up the asking price by $100,000. Or how a bigger backyard on the house in Beverly Hills could have upped the asking price by a million dollars. On the episode now, there's a guy leasing his Malibu pad for $30,000 a month, and the agent really wants him to sell the house, because he would make an almost $200,000 commission on it, but the owner is really emotionally attached to the house, even though he doesn't even live there.

It's a really interesting look into this totally crazy world that is so far removed from my life that it may as well be taking place on another planet. I love it.

Misguided revenge can be so sweet, but really it seems like a whole lot of homos trying desperately to "pass" to try to make themselves feel better

Nevertheless, I kind of want to do it.

You know, just to see if I could pass.

Don't laugh. I'll have you know that 2 weeks ago, I was out with 2 straight girls, 3 gay guys, and at a gay bar, and one of the girls who didn't know me was totally hitting on me, then asked if I was straight. She was surprised (and disappointed!!) when I said no. Go figure. (And I might have considered at least making out with her if she hadn't been so fucking annoying.) Then the other gay dudes agreed that I was the "straightest" of the bunch. Except when I laughed. My laugh, apparently, is really gay.

You know, a few years ago I would have appreciated being able to "pass," even among my fellow fags, but now it just feels like I'm doing something wrong.

The finer points of Swing Out Sister

Saturday night, while we were all three drunk, Jody, Travis and I began discussing the frequency, and content, of our history of sexual dreams (and no one In the Know needs to enlighten me on the extreme irony of this anomaly of an event), and I mentioned that I'd only really ever had two sexual dreams in my whole life, and neither of them were even that overtly sexual, they were just sort of erotic. Travis already knew this about me, but I told Jody about them, and how the first I'd ever had was about George Michael in the 7th or 8th grade, at the height of my obsession with him, and how at night I would pretend to make out with his poster hanging above my bed (if my poor parents only knew; and to this day, I still think aviator sunglasses are one of the hottest things going). But I digress. I explained that in the dream I'd had about George Michael, I didn't even actually get to have sex with him, it was all post-sex, and we were lying together all sweaty and spent (probably because at the time of the dream, I had no idea how to really have gay sex).

So I've always been a little frustrated and a lot jealous when people have told me about how they have these hardcore, really explicit sex dreams about people, and especially about real people that they're actually attracted to! How cool is that?

But then last night, completely arbitrarily (or so it would seem) I was finally visited by the God of Hardcore Sex Dreams. And how! Me and Mr. did everything it was possible to do with two bodies, and then some, and it was fucking amazing. But there was one strange hitch: it was with a fictional character that I don't even find attractive, and whose personality (as presented through his character on television) I find totally repugnant. It was this guy:



who, while not being unattractive, does nothing for me, once more making me realize I am truly turned on and attracted to things I either find disgusting or are really bad for me. (Or maybe it's just further confirming my Doctor fetish. Which goes right along with my Professor fetish. And my cute and dorky Scientist fetish. Oh, wait; maybe it's just a man fetish!) But nevertheless, I was grateful to finally realize and understand what I'd been missing all these years. Only, well, I hate to sound ungrateful, but there's one more major drawback: I've been hornier all day today than I think I've been since I was about 15.

Michael C. Hall

I am so excited about this new show on Showtime called Dexter, about a Miami forensics investigator who also happens to be a serial killer, but with a twist: he only kills people that "truly deserve it," namely other serial killers. And it promises to be very, very gory.

The show stars Michael C. Hall, who played David, the uptight, resentful, lonely, and insecure gay brother on Six Feet Under, who also happened to be incredibly sensitive, compassionate, intelligent, and kind, and who cried a lot.

I read an interview yesterday where he talks about creating a character that not only didn't display, but actually had no emotions, and the challenge of getting the audience to care about someone like that, but now I can't find it. Mr. Hall seems like a really cool person in real life.

You can catch a brief teaser clip of the show here. Unfortunately, I don't have Showtime, so I'll have to wait for it to come out on DVD, but I think it looks awesome.

Man, I love T.V.

Queer as in "strange?"

The Advocate this week has a cover story this week on my new obsession, Nip/Tuck, and more specifically, on the new "gay" direction Julian McMahon's character seems to be going.

Although I think it's interesting that the Advocate calls it television's "queerest" series, unless they're using it in the context of the true definition, which is "strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint." Recently I decided that I was going to start using the word queer in its original context as well, which I've managed to do fairly successfully, though I always feel like I have to qualify its use, by clarifying that I don't mean "gay."

Anyway, as far as I know, and I've seen every episode thus far, Nip/Tuck has never had an overtly gay character on the show, unless you count their anesthesiologist, who is an out and proud lesbian, but only about, oh, one show ever has focused on her love life. Which was with a transexual.

Which brings me to another point, which is that Nip/Tuck does have an inordinate amount of storylines involving transgendered people, starting with a major one in season 1, where the doctors were fixing surgeries that another hack doctor was botching, by preying on poor men who wanted the operations. Then season 2 had Dr. Mcnamara's son accidentally falling in love with one, then season 3 had a through-story about how a 17-year-old boy (his son) deals with realizing he was actually in love with a man and coming to terms with that(apparently it's by engaging in gay-bashing and flirting with Nazism), although I think the story-line was handled very delicately and smartly.

Well, I'm very curious to see where this whole gay thing goes on the show.

Saved by the Butts

Yesterday, all the gay bloggers in the land were all in a tizzy about leaked photos from the upcoming season of Nip/Tuck, in which Mario "A.C. Slater" Lopez joins the cast as a third surgeon, and of course he and Dr. Troy start gettin' it on at the gym. Or something.


Naturally, that's the direction Dr. Troy would go in. He's a raging sex addict, a complete mysoginist, and hasn't been interested in a woman for more than 15 minutes, ever. And he's a total narcissist. All that equals latent homosexuality.

It's too bad, really, that I don't find either of them particularly attractive.

I'm very excited about season 4, though, even though I haven't seen season 3 yet. Most of season 2 was occupied by the Carver, which was totally boring and ridiculous. He was basically a serial rapist who wore a funny mask and only attacked supermodels, and raped them and slashed their faces to make some mundane point about how pretty people have life so much easier than everybody else, or some bullshit. At least he was equal opportunity: he'd rape and pillage both boys and girls. So the doctors started taking on the victims as clients (for free, of course, because they're wonderful people) and as the television world dictates, the Carver started stalking them and attacked Dr. Macnamara in his home, after he kicked his wife out of the house for sleeping with his best friend (Dr. Troy) like, 85 years ago, and he'd just finished fucking a blow-up doll made from one of Dr. Troy's ex-girlfriends who was hitting it big in the porn world, because he was kind of in love with her, very attracted to her, and he missed his wife, even though he wouldn't let her come back.

(Actually, the reason he kicked her out and was so mad was because she finally revealed that their 18-year-old son was actually Dr. Troy's, and no one knew but her; meanwhile their son was having an affair with his middle-aged "life coach," played by Famke Janssen, who turned out to be a MTF transsexual, but no one knew that either until Dr. Troy tried to fuck her, and surprise!, she had no vagina. Then Dr. Mcnamara's wife spiraled into an out of control depression and became addicted to mixing painkillers and alcohol, then one night stumbled through a glass door in her new, depressing apartment, cutting her face all up, which her husband had to reconstruct for her, but still wouldn't let her come back home. Which was all extremely depressing.)

Such is the world of Nip/Tuck. So I know the Carver mystery gets solved in season 3, and I still don't know who it is, though I have a pretty good idea.

I should be blogging about school or something. There's a whole in my life now that Six Feet Under is over.