Report from the Illness Room

Some people, when they get sick, get sad and then they whine. These people usually were as healthy as a horse growing up. I grew up getting sick often (due to massive allergies, hayfever and asthma). I learned how to be sick - that in essence I have to put life on hold and wait the illness out. So when I get sick, I tend to get bored and angry, and then bitchy. And that's why I tend to cocoon when I get sick. No one needs to be around a sick, bitchy man.

I do not want to be bitchy, so I've been trying to keep myself occupied. When I'm feverish, I cannot read very well. Still, in my more lucid moments, I managed to finish reading Peter Hoeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow. I cannot decide whether I liked it or not. I enjoyed to first parts more than the latter parts, I think. I've gotten through a few more pages of Chivers's The Gun, too.

Television has been of limited use, but I've kept up with my stories, e.g., The Vampire Diaries, Burn Notice, Supernatural, etc. But Syfy's movies have been their usual awfulness, and the other channels just aren't cooperating with me either.

The internet has been a lifesaver this time around. I've watched shows (The Venture Brothers, Community), surfed and reblogged on Tumblr, and built a playlist on Hypster.

Now Some Good Stuff

And now for the good news:

1. Friday night I did a bourgeois thing and went to see Margaret Cho. I laughed so hard I was sore the next morning. The woman still has it, and she was unafraid to share it.

2. Saturday night I had a nice, long chat with my West Coast friend James. We made preliminary plans to attend Burning Man 2012. This gives me something to plan for.

3. Sunday was a nice, quiet Samhain at home with Manuel. I made colcannon, which is excellent.

4. Speaking of Sunday, The Walking Dead premiered Sunday night, and it was really, really good. Intense.

5. On Monday I traded in a bag full of books at a used bookstore, and got a ton of store credit. I'm encouraged to take more—my library is going to go through a shift in focus over the next several months.

6. Speaking of books, on Monday I picked up the new novel The Instructions by Adam Levin. So far it is really, really good—and at 1030 pages, it had better be.

7. Yesterday Mom got through her third surgery of 2010 just fine, and I had a fun, brief chat with her while she was high on morphine yesterday evening.

TV: Cops and Vampires

I forgot one other summer TV show in my last round-up: The Glades. Again, this show demonstrates what great casting can do. Matt Passmore is dead-on as the jerk-with-a-heart detective, and all the other characters (the hard-pressed buddy, the geek, the conflicted girlfriend, and the conflicted girlfriend's growing-up-to-fast son) fill the constellation of the show well. Most of the episodes are well written, and the camera work eschews the glare of CSI: Miami. (In fact, I'd say the camera work is even better than that of Burn Notice, the other Miami-based tv show.)

With almost all the tv shows I watch, I usually do something else while watching them. The writing is light enough, and the plots formulaic enough, that I can follow the show while picking up the apartment, playing with the cat, even studying sometimes. This paradigm does not hold for The Vampire Diaries. When I watch the show, I have to sit down and stare at it (unless I stand up and stare at it, which happens). I talk back to the show, I tell the characters what they should or should not be doing, etc. The show is much closer than the Meyer oeuvre to how my inner teenage girl would write vampire stories. And given that they have killed off characters I thought would be returning, I can honestly say that when I watch it, I'm not sure what will happen next. Also, they eschew the weird pseudo-religionism of Supernatural, which makes the show much more palatable (although I still love Supernatural, if for no other reason than the rare glimpse of Jared Padalecki's forearms - *swoon*). The Vampire Diaries is simply a well written vamp-teen soap opera, with engaging characters, multiple plot lines, and enough sufficiently creepy situations to keep me riveted all the way to the last second of each episode.

Which brings up the question: has anyone read the books, and if so, how do they compare to the TV series?

Summer Television Recap

I watch too much tv. I have it on in the evening, but I'm usually doing other things around my apartment, such as rearranging my books, picking up the apartment, doing the dishes, surfing the net, playing with Manuel, etc. Still I've developed opinions about what to watch and what not to watch. Here's my brief review of this past summer's shows:

1. Burn Notice is still the best summer show. It drooped only a little bit this past season, but over all it stayed strong. The casting remains excellent, and the addition of Coby Bell only served to strengthen the mix.

2. Rubicon is the best new show. Again, it comes down to casting, and James Badge Dale is a brilliant choice for the lead. (Also kudos to Dallas Roberts as the obsessive analyst and Arliss Howard as the Geffenesque boss—complete with gay lover.) The show is so quiet and understated that the understatement becomes part of the creepiness factor. I adore this show.

3. Syfy shows all have formulae, and the formulae are starting to wear thin. I watched Warehouse 13, Eureka and Haven, and I'll still watch them, but as a rule I wouldn't miss them if I spent the evening out with friends. Warehouse 13, due to its strong casting (C. C. H. Pounder is a goddess!) is still the best of these three, and I hope they bring back Claudia's love interest "Todd" (Nolan Gerard Funk—total hottie!).

4. Royal Pains and White Collar are still good shows. The Closer is still epic and at times moving. On the other hand, Rizzoli & Isles did not live up to the hype. It had a potentially good cast hampered by bad writing (they couldn't decide if they wanted another The Closer, or another Bones.)

5. Covert Affairs frustrates me. It features not one, but two total hotties, Sendhil Ramamurthy and Christopher Gorham (whom the directors have been taking pains to show shirtless as much as possible—and he is BUFF!). But the writing is really sloppy at times. The Iraning asylum-seeker episode was downright offensive. I watch it for the flashes of eye-candy.

6. Dark Blue went from disengaging and glacial to downright awful. Even the Logan Marshall-Green eye-candy couldn't pursuade me to tune in by the end of the season.