You're the bedtime story, the one that keeps the curtains closed.
OK, it's official: I am a hard-core addict. My drug of choice -- nay, necessity -- is Lost.
Oh children, do not do as I have done. Not, that is, if you are not prepared to give up as much of your life as is necessary to keep watching this show. I'm fortunate not to have the ability to watch TV, which means that I only get to watch TV shows when they come out on DVD, which means that I get to watch the entire first season at a single stretch, without commercials. And thank Gertrude I stumbled upon it at the beginning of winter break, or I'd either be taking sick days or coming to work haggard every morning from lack of sleep.
I wasn't expecting to be so involved. My previous exposure to the work of J.J. Abrams was Alias, which I stopped watching after a few episodes because a), Jennifer Garner has the emotional range of a kumquat and b), come on already with the gratuitous diva-licious costume changes. Not television's finest hours. Lost is different. Though it has its share of mainstream TV tropes and clichés, it uses our familiarity with them to subvert expectations -- not always, but enough to keep me guessing. There is enough detail and continuity to allow me to suspend my disbelief, and just the right balance of revelation and suspense to keep me hungry for more without feeling cheated along the way.
It's been raining, and all three of us are in different stages of the same cold. Marla and I work tag-team, taking turns wrangling the baby downstairs while the other watches the next episode up in the aerie. I am so loving this daughter of mine and the time I get to spend with her now, watching her little self flap its stubby wings. I am Rascal Dad. Tonight I fed her at the dinner table, pasting short strands of linguine to both our noses and demonstrating how to eat them off.
We hold shrieking contests, tickling sessions, hide and seek with pillows. I eat her feet over and over again. I hoist her up on my shoulders and she smacks my head, and I grab her minuscule tuchis, which makes her screech and convulse with laughter. I use a scarf to drag her across the hardwood floor in the laundry basket. I hold her and rock her and moan along sympathetically when she bonks her head on the doorframe after running around like a wild thing. She brings me book after book, climbing in my lap to sit and turn the pages. She says "apple" and "dress" and my favorite, "papa".
And after a while, mama comes downstairs again going "Whoa. Dude. Just -- whoa." And it's my turn to go upstairs and get lost for another forty minutes or so.
Nice balance, really.
Oh children, do not do as I have done. Not, that is, if you are not prepared to give up as much of your life as is necessary to keep watching this show. I'm fortunate not to have the ability to watch TV, which means that I only get to watch TV shows when they come out on DVD, which means that I get to watch the entire first season at a single stretch, without commercials. And thank Gertrude I stumbled upon it at the beginning of winter break, or I'd either be taking sick days or coming to work haggard every morning from lack of sleep.
I wasn't expecting to be so involved. My previous exposure to the work of J.J. Abrams was Alias, which I stopped watching after a few episodes because a), Jennifer Garner has the emotional range of a kumquat and b), come on already with the gratuitous diva-licious costume changes. Not television's finest hours. Lost is different. Though it has its share of mainstream TV tropes and clichés, it uses our familiarity with them to subvert expectations -- not always, but enough to keep me guessing. There is enough detail and continuity to allow me to suspend my disbelief, and just the right balance of revelation and suspense to keep me hungry for more without feeling cheated along the way.
It's been raining, and all three of us are in different stages of the same cold. Marla and I work tag-team, taking turns wrangling the baby downstairs while the other watches the next episode up in the aerie. I am so loving this daughter of mine and the time I get to spend with her now, watching her little self flap its stubby wings. I am Rascal Dad. Tonight I fed her at the dinner table, pasting short strands of linguine to both our noses and demonstrating how to eat them off.
We hold shrieking contests, tickling sessions, hide and seek with pillows. I eat her feet over and over again. I hoist her up on my shoulders and she smacks my head, and I grab her minuscule tuchis, which makes her screech and convulse with laughter. I use a scarf to drag her across the hardwood floor in the laundry basket. I hold her and rock her and moan along sympathetically when she bonks her head on the doorframe after running around like a wild thing. She brings me book after book, climbing in my lap to sit and turn the pages. She says "apple" and "dress" and my favorite, "papa".
And after a while, mama comes downstairs again going "Whoa. Dude. Just -- whoa." And it's my turn to go upstairs and get lost for another forty minutes or so.
Nice balance, really.
hurled forth by Felix Helix | 9:04 PM
1 Comments:
Lost is a great show, but difficult to watch on TV. We TiVo it, which means getting to watch it without commercials, but we are still stuck waiting for days between episodes.
Another effect of the TiVo is that we watch shows we normally wouldn't get to. Our TiVo happily sits up until 2 in the morning to snag us a rerun of Malcolm in the Middle. Which means that while we're skipping through the commercials, we see Kate from Lost doing an add for LiveLinks - a "real girls in your area are waiting for your call" company. Luckily, it's pretty tasteful.
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