Movies I've Watched: There Will Be Blood

Yes, I am a little late to that game. I always am with these big Oscar movies. The main reason is that they rarely ever make it to Honduran theaters. And when they do, I usually can't be bothered to go to a theater. Or to the video story. Because I am a lazy bum and have no car. Or much money. So I wait until one of the movie channels plays them. At least then I can get them after all the hoopla surrounding them has gone away and I can watch them in peace, knowing that all the pretentious discussion is in the past.

And oh boy I can only imagine the high levels of Hipster Debate that were achieved by talking about this movie.

As for me, I...I don't think I liked it. I mean, it was an impressive movie with some amazing performances, but two things kept me from really enjoying it. First let me just say that I really do love all sorts of movies. Happy, sad, depressing, ridiculous, I don't have a set of requirements for what makes a good movie in my mind. But I'm not a big fan of bleakness. And this was one of the bleakest films I have ever seen in my life. It was so...so soul crushing. There was nothing in it that wasn't depressing. I suppose that was sort of the point, but movies like these just make me want to change the channel and watch some Spongebob Squarepants.

So the bleakness was one. The other was the "music". It wasn't even music. It was one note of a violin held shriekingly for 5 minutes, digging into my brain with its maddening monotony as I begged for something to change. I had to mute the tv a couple of times because I just couldn't take it anymore. And then the shrieking violin would change for the repeated banging of a drum in the same monotonous manner like that leaking faucet that keeps you awake all night. It was just horrible. It's what I imagine the soundtrack of a nightmare would be. I'm not trying to be poetic here, it was just that awful. I'm really freakin sensitive when it comes to sounds (whistling is the art of satan) and I really couldn't take the music in this movie for very long. I am so glad I never saw this in the theater--it probably would have led me to murder. And it was just really distracting from the rest of the movie. I felt like the action itself was tense enough, adding the extra tension with the music just seemed like overkill to me.

But, wow, the performances. Just wow. I heard rants and raves about Daniel Day Lewis, but nothing ever came close to just how freakin magnificent he is in this movie. Everything from the way he spoke to how he moved was just so perfect and meticulous and it just completely blew me away. He was terrifying. There is nothing better than when a character just seems to pop out of the screen at you out of the sheer presence of the actor. Not many people have done that, but this is the second time DDL has done it in my mind. The other was Gangs of New York, but he was far better in this.

And I'm surprised that I heard so little about Paul Dano's performance back when everyone was talking about this movie. Because, damn. He was just so good. Magnetic and powerful, with those big sad eyes of his. I hope he gets a lot more work in the future. He's so good.

So overall, a good movie, but very weird. Bleak. Violent. Technically impressive. More impressive, bizarre work from PT Anderson. Magnolia is still my favorite movie of his, and I wish that this movie had had a little bit more insight into the characters, like Magnolia did. Anyway, it made me think, and look at this huge rant it made me write.

Though I have to confess I decided to write it because a) I'm sick of writing about the situation in Honduras (still the same! still scary! politicians still suck!) and b) I'm putting off the review for Ender's Game because I have no idea how to write it. I hate reviewing classics.

Book #4: Everything's Eventual, by Stephen King

I remember, very clearly, the first Stephen King book I ever read. It was 'The Drawing of the Three', and I read it when I was 13 and only learning English. I stumbled through it, confused by idioms and weird expressions I'd never heard before, but oh man, I loved it. When I was done I started reading every King book my dad had, loving the crazy stories and his easy and exciting way of writing, all the time practicing my English. You could say I owe a lot to Stephen King. Now, we have just about every book he's ever written, and I still love his work with a passion, though now I can be a bit more critical about it. While I concede that a lot of King's work can be cheesy and repetitive, you'll never take away my conviction that no one can tell a story like King does, sucking you in and leaving your brain feeling like it's been sucked dry. It's very unfair (but easy) to dismiss King as nothing but a 'horror writer', yet he is much, much more than that, and "Everything's Eventual" is good proof of this.

The book has been sitting on my shelf, unread, for a very long time. I'm not a very big fan of short stories in general, and aside from 'The Bachman Books' I haven't really enjoyed King's other short story collections. But I finally decided to give it a chance, and I'm glad I did. If you ever need a crash course on everything that makes King who he is, this is the book to read. It's a great, entertaining collection with a few truly great stories, and it makes for a good, guilt-free weekend reading that can be disturbing, touching, amusing and scary by turns.

'Autopsy Room 4', a scary, yet funny story that works as a great example of something that King does brilliantly: he creates a complete, three-dimensional character in a few paragraphs, and he puts them into completely believable, and terrifying situations. 'In the Deathroom' and 'Lunch at the Gotham Café' fall into this category as well, and all three were some of my favorite stories in the book. King uses his talent for quick personality sketches and fast-paced action scenes to write stories that are engaging and fun to read, that leave you wondering how you would react in those situations.

'The Man in the Black Suit', 'The Road Virus Heads North', 'Riding the Bullet'(which I really didn't like) and '1408' take a different turn, dealing with the sort of supernatural horror that King loves writing. Again, he takes ordinary characters and throws them into some seriously scary situations, made even more disturbing for their supernatural aspects. I love horror stories that deal with ordinary days and ordinary aspects of real life taking on supernatural qualities, and King is a genius at this. '1408' was seriously disturbing, and I don't recommend anyone with an overactive imagination (like mine) to read this while alone in your room in the middle of the night. You won't sleep.

At the other end of the spectrum, 'All That You Love Will be Taken Away' and 'Luckey Quarter' are both stories that highlight King's talent for creating completely believable and sympathetic characters, to whom nothing extraordinary happens. They're just regular people living their regular lives, and King shows extraordinary insight into the turmoil that goes on in the human mind while the world passes them by. In both these stories he writes about truly lonely, sad people trapped in their lives, and they are both moving and well written. There's something to be said about a writer who can take you from haunted paintings to a sad man contemplating suicide in a cheap motel. "L.T.'s Theory of Pets" sort of fits into this category; it's not a horror story at all, but it's a touching and hilarious story about regular people, though the ending is a little jarring and strange.

I was extremely happy to find that two of the stories in this book are tied into the 'Dark Tower' series. For those of you who have read the series, 'The Little Sisters of Eluria' is a great little story about Roland Deschain's early travels, and we get to revisit the extraordinary universe and mythology that King created for his epic series. This was easily my favorite story in the book, but I wonder if readers unfamiliar with 'The Dark Tower' will like it as much. This goes for 'Everything's Eventual' as well, which deals with the backstory of another Dark Tower character, though it's not nearly as interesting as story as Roland's. They're both great bits of fantasy writing, but I wonder if readers will get much out of them if they haven't read the 'Dark Tower'. And if they haven't, what the hell are they waiting for?

There are two stories in the collection, 'The Death of Jack Hamilton' and 'That Feeling, You Can Only Say What it is in French' (what a clunky title), that don't really fit anywhere. The first is about a dying mobster, and the second is a very strange story that King in his little introduction tells us is about hell. I found them both a little strange and not very engaging, and I wonder at the decision to include them in the collection.

I suppose, however, that they serve, like the rest of the collection, to show the reader every aspect of King's writing. He can be funny, sad, terrifying, bizarre, shocking, romantic…this is a writer who can write you a story about anything you can think of. He's admittedly written a lot of his books just to get the stories out of his chest, books that he seems to write in the course of a couple of days or only a few weeks. While those stories might not be great literary masterpieces, King knows how to entertain his audience, and what I find even more likeable about him is that he clearly loves to write. King often gets criticized and dismissed for this type of story, but I think you need to look at his full body of work to understand why some of us consider him to be a truly gifted and admirable writer who can't be pinned down into a single category.

'Everything's Eventual' is a good collection, and while not King's best, it's a good tour through his style and imagination. If you haven't read a book by Stephen King, I suggest you pick up one of his classics*, and if you have, this is a nice addition to the collection.

*'The Stand', people. Please, please read 'The Stand'.

Book #3: "Why Girls Are Weird" by Pamela Ribon

I have a love-hate relationship with any book that gets labeled as "chick lit". These are the books that, more often than not, have brightly-colored covers that almost invariably show a pair of legs with tights or funky shoes on (what is up with that? Why the legs? Why?), and they're usually badly written pieces of fluff about shopping and cheap relationships. Yet, when done right, a book directed at (certain types of) women can be funny and insightful, and they make for easy, fun reads when you're not in the mood for something too dense.

After my last two books, I definitely needed a break. A change of pace. I needed something small and colorful and for God's sake, something with a happy ending. This book fit that bill pretty nicely.

The plot is pretty simple. The main character, Anna Koval, starts up an online journal, where she posts stories about her life as Anna K. Most of the stories are true, but her online persona is changed slightly: she is part of a couple, and an actress among other things, while the real Anna is a bored librarian who has been single for over a year. Soon she starts getting barraged by fan mail, and she keeps on tweaking her life for her journal. She strikes up friendships with two fans in particular: a ditzy college student named Tess and a charming male fan who goes by the handle of LDobler, with whom she starts flirting over email. The plot follows Anna as she goes through her boring, single life while having writing on her journal.

Anna is miserable in her job and her love life. Though she broke up with her boyfriend more than a year ago, she is still stuck up on him (or the idea of him anyway). Her best friend, Dale, who is gay and preternaturally happy, observes her life and makes clever little quips about it. Anna soon discovers (thanks to Tess) that meeting fans of her online persona might not be such a good idea after all. She's afraid they'll all discover how fake she is.

Having been hooked on the internet myself for about 10 years now, I know how easy it is to pretend to be someone else through your online self. I found Anna's insecurities and fears about meeting online friends relatable and very, very true to life. There's the fear that you'll never be as fun or smart as your online persona, or that the person you'll meet will turn out to be a serial killer. But the truth (to me, anyway) is that unless you or the people you meet are huge psychotic liars, you can be yourself online, and you can get to know someone pretty well without actually meeting them. What I mean to say with all of this is that I never understood all the drama Anna creates. It felt blown way out of proportion. She just made herself a little more interesting, and who hasn't been guilty of doing this at least once in their lives? From the way she goes on you'd think she had pretended to be a millionaire or a celebrity, or a man. So it's problematic to me that I was supposed to be shocked by the double life Anna was leading, and I wasn't. At all.

My biggest problem with this book is actually that Anna Koval is sometimes unbearably dull. She has great stories, yes, and we're supposed to believe she's had a hilarious and interesting life. We're supposed to find her conversations with her friends funny and charming, but I honestly found them painful and almost embarrassing to read sometimes. I got a strange feeling while reading this book, like I had been watching a medium-quality sitcom. No one talks like this, I thought. It's funny, I guess, but…come on. The supporting characters, apart from Anna, never felt real to me, and she feels profoundly dull sometimes. I could imagine Ribon pulling real quotes from her own friends and forcing her characters to say them. In the end, Anna and her hipster buddies come off as just not that interesting. Then there's the completely unnecessary subplot involving Anna and a high school girl she meets. It felt tacked-on, serving only to provide a cheap moment of enlightenment for Anna, as if we didn't know all along that all she needed was to stop whining and take control of her own life. It's only her that takes an entire book to figure this out.

In the end, Why Girls Are Weird just seems badly matched with itself. There are moments of hilarity and sweetness, where I felt that this could've been a great book. Anna's relationships with her father and with LDobler both felt real, interesting, and touching. But then there are passages where I almost came to hate Anna Koval and her neediness, where it seemed like a whole other character had been put in place, one that I didn't like all that much. I wasn't as impressed by the secondary characters as much as I felt Ribon wanted me to be.
Ribon is undoubtedly a talented writer, witty and smart, but I don't think this book did her talent justice. It felt a bit empty, to be completely honest. That being said, it was an easy, short, fun book that perfectly fulfilled my need for a harmless read. And I got my happy ending, even if it was predictable and silly.
Now…can someone explain to me what the hell is up with these covers and the disembodied legs in funky socks and shoes? And to the boys: no, this book will not help you find out why girls are weird.

Note: I've been reading Pamela Ribon's online work for a while now. I first discovered it back when she used to write some awesome recaps for Gilmore Girls for Television Without Pity. She has a nice online journal of her own, www.pamie.com, if you're interested.

TV Wednesdays: An Ode to America's Next Top Model

Oh, I have fallen behind!

Never fear, the update is here! And boy, do I have a lot to say!

WHAT FIGGY IS WATCHING ON WEDNESDAYS

This is one of my favorite nights of the week. Why? One very simple reason: it features what is probably one of the best shows (and by far best in the reality category) in Television history...

America's Next Top Model

That's right. I said it. This is my guiltiest of guilty pleasures, the show that has never disappointed me in my search for the highest levels of ridiculous imaginable; the show that has introduced me to such classic terms as "Fierce!" and "smile with your eyes!" and "Ugly pretty!"; the show that makes me cackle in glee with every episode.

You guys, this is the best show *EVER*.

I know what you're thinking. Let me put it in equation form.

You say....

Models + Tyra Banks + reality show = everything that is wrong with the world.

I say...

Brainless girls (because, come on, none of these girls will ever be a real model, let alone a "top" model) + relentless camp + hilariously bad clothes + Tyra Banks's utter insanity + everyone (but Tyra) knowing this show is a complete joke and pretending to take it like it's the most important show in history = TELEVISION GOLD.

I cannot stress the pure, unadulterated enjoyment I get out of this show. It's a ridiculous hour of television, but everyone involved knows it, and there's nothing I love more than mindless, harmless entertainment. This is one of the things TV was made for You take this show with a grain of salt, and it'll be the most fun you ever have.

Though of course, if you even think about it a little bit, you'll be disgusted (as you probably are reading this) and will try very, very hard to ignore it for the rest of your life. Don't blame you. I used to loathe the very mention of this show until I watched it by accident with my college roomate (we had nothing better to do, ok?) and realized that it was one of the few honest shows in television: it knows it's a joke, it knows it's a circus, and offers nothing more than to give you a good time. It's the one show that never disappoints. There are no bad episodes, because they're all equally hilarious and silly. And it's a pleasure to watch.

Every episode follows roughly the same formula. The girls (14 to start with), who all very seriously believe that this show will get them fame and fortune (even though after 10 seasons not one of the previous winners has even come close to reaching super-modeldom) are given some sort of modeling "class" and "challenge" at the start of each episode. These usually range from learning how to pose with a guy called Benny Ninja, my favorite supporting character who is the most flamboyant gay man you can imagine, to learning how to walk down a runway with coach Miss Jay (a black man who is, expectedly, beyond flamboyant and insane), to learning how to shill cheap Cover Girl products to high-class make-up stores like Wal-Mart. Mmhmm. A challenge winner is chosen and gets some cheap prize, usually consisting of jewelry or ugly clothes.

The second part of the episode is a photo shoot. Tyra picks out some ridiculous concept (natural disasters, "voting is sexy", underwater photography, etc) and the girls take turn practicing what they learned in their "lessons" while having this guy called Jay Manuel (another flamboyantly gay man with orange skin and silver hair, whose job has never been clearly specified) shout out useless instructions at them while they pose. The episode ends with "Panel", where each girl's best photograph is judged by Tyra Banks, Miss Jay, a bitchy british photographer called Nigel Barker and a real, former supermodel (the role has been filled by Janice Dickinson, Twiggy, and this year by Paulina Petriskova [sp]).

Panel is the best part of the entire episode. The girls are SUPPOSEDLY judged by how good their photographs are, but the guidelines for this are very blurry, and most of the time the girls are judged by something outside the photographs; their personalities (because everyone knows that what counts in modeling is how shrill and "crazy" you are in person), how bitchy they were to the photographers, or just how much Tyra Banks likes you. This is where our illustrous host shines. The show is clearly all about Tyra, and she lays down the law over who wins or who gets to go home. She gives out ridiculous advice ("smile with your eyes!" "stretch your neck!") with her insane eyes, and woe to whomever encourages the wrath of the Tyra monster. There was an epic moment a few seasons ago when Tyra exploded in fake yelling at a girl for "not being grateful" that Tyra had magnanimously put her on the show.


I WILL EAT YOUR SOOOOOOUUUUUL!

In the end, two girls are picked for having the worst pictures, or rather, for not being good enough for Tyra. One is kicked off the show and fades into utter obscurity. And that's the show.

With a formula this simple, it's easy for a show to get repetitive and predictable; but that's not a danger in ANTM. It's completely predictable only because we know how insane Tyra Banks is, but it can't be repetitive because the range of girls chosen is usually highly varied and the photoshoots and challenges get increasingly more insane as the seasons go by.

It's the one show you can watch that will never disappoint you. You can root for one girl or another, but you know it won't make a bit of difference how good a model the girl is, because Tyra will choose whomever will make Tyra look better. Tyra LOVES picking out "firsts", for example, the First Blonde Winner of ANTM, the First "Plus-sized" Winner (who was, hilariously, a size six), and the First Winner To Come Out of Tyra's Model Camp (that's a real thing). She loves pretending that any of this matters, while everyone around her knows that if any of these girls were really meant to be models, they wouldn't have auditioned for this show at all.

In short: you don't watch this show for the realism: you watch it because it's hilarious and insane. Judge me all you want for loving ANTM, I will keep watching as long as its on, and at least I'll know before you do that the moment has come in which Tyra Banks has decided to take over the world.

And who'll be laughing then? HA.

****

Oh, boy. Do I ever shut up? NAY! There's more!

OK, not really. The only other thing that's watchable to me on Wednesdays is Pushing Daisies , a quirky little show about death and love, that is sadly too formulaic and too over-the-top cutesy for me to watch regularly. It's a visually stunning show, Lee Pace is a total dreamboat and Kirsten Chenowith is hilarious, but, really, it's very twee and too saccharine for my tastes. And I know, I just spent an hour praising ANTM, but if I can't get into a show, I just can't. Besides, it doesn't seem like it'll last very long, so better to not get too attached. As with a lot of other shows, I'll watch the odd episode every now and then, but will usually lose interest halfway through. It's a procedural wrapped in very pretty paper and bows, and not something that'll hold my interest for very long.

Check it out if you like murder mysteries and quirk with a touch of dark, if that's your kind of thing. You might like it.

And that's it. Please give ANTM a chance, and remember: don't feed the models. Or Tyra Banks, because she will eat your hand, and then, THE WHOLE WORLD.

The pit that is Tuesday nights, plus a movie reccomendation

WHAT FIGGY IS WATCHING ON TUESDAYS!

Um.

Um....

Uuuummm....

Nothing. I watched nothing at all. Tuesday night is the deadland of the television week; the pit, the desert, the Bermuda Triangle, the North Dakota of the week. It is where bad shows half-heartedly pushed by the networks go to die. It's a night of procedurals and results shows, the night where absolutely nothing catches my interest. Tuesday night is a night of Channel Flipping.

I suppose I could have watched House, but there's only so much of that formula I can take. House is the Corn Flakes of cereal-- bland, unsurprising, repetitive, the thing you eat when there's nothing else in the house, and it might be tasty for about 5 seconds but you'll end up bored by the second spoonful. While Hugh Laurie is fantastic, he deserves something better than this frutrating and stupidly repetitive show, where he is surrounded by annoying characters and increasingly ridiculous plot lines. I'll watch maybe one episode a month, but it's definetely not something I can watch week after week.

The only other choice this night is the Dancing With the Stars results show, and if you don't watch that silly show on the night that matters, why would you watch an hour of 'tense' expectation and filler? Not worth it, even if you do like the competition. Results shows are the pits.

I'm very lucky to have a pretty varied package of channels from our cable provider, so there's always something or other playing that might catch my interest for a while. Last night, for example, I watched "Memento" for about the 6th time, and was again confused because I didn't pay attention for 5 minutes. Oh brain movies, you deserve better than my scattered brain.



Watch this movie. It's trippy and strange and confusing, but with flawless direction by my new hero, Christopher Nolan, and Guy Pearce's freakishly angular yet fascinating bone structure, it's definitely worth a watch. It also features my favorite That Guy!, Stephen Tobolowsky, who makes every movie he's in pretty awesome indeed.

So that was my Tuesday night. Memento, reruns, pointless talking at the tv for being useless, and other such filler.

I'm bored just writing this entry. I'll have something better tomorrow, I promise, for tonight is the night of my guiltiest of guilty pleasures; America's Next Top Model, plus Pushing Daisies, a nice little show I have some thoughts on (oh Figgy, what don't you have thoughts on? Shut up!). I also have to tell you guys about this craptastic Mexican teenage soap-opera I've been watching, whose rampant misogyny and stupidity deserves its own lengthy post. It shall be forthcoming.

This is such a colorless entry. But it's been raining since before I woke up this morning; I can't go out into the garden, I can't play with the dogs, I've been sapped out of all energy to do anything, even write very enthusiastically.

This calls for a video game.

TV Review: What I'm Watching on Mondays

Confession: I watch a lot of TV.

*Cue GASPS SHOCK AWE PEOPLE FAINTING CHILDREN SCREAMING*

Shocking news, I KNOW!

I won't attempt to justify it or explain myself; one of the things I've pledged to myself in starting this blog is that I'll stop justifying or defending myself for the things I like or don't like. It's my life and I'll do what I want to, etc, etc, etc rousing 80s music. Don't like it, don't read it, go find someone else to lecture on the effects of trash tv on intelligent brains. Talk to the hand cos the fig don't wanna hear it.

Oh, right and I need to be less defensive all the time ;)

*AHEM*

So, yeah, I watch TV a lot. And one of the things I'd like to feature on this blawg is just reviews of what I'm watching, listening to, reading, loving, hating, etc at the moment. In the best of cases, I could convince someone to give something new a chance. In the worst of cases, no one will care, but at least I would've written it down for...um, myself. So, win/win. Win. We ALL win!

Well that's all nice and fine, Figgy, but where's the damned entry?

Oh, right! Here it is!

************


WHAT FIGGY IS WATCHING ON...MONDAY (onday! onday! onday):

Now that the TV fall season is in full swing, my TV watching schedule is finally shaping up, and I've settled on a slew of shows to watch every week. Of course, this is only sustainable until one of four things happens: a) reruns start showing up, b) the times change due to DST ending or starting, c) one of these shows starts to suck and gets the figurative axe in my mind and d) I get a job again and can't stay up til 1am every day. So while I'll have some DEFINITE shows on my viewing ritual, there will also be ALTERNATES and changes. What I'm saying is nothing is written in stone.

Onwards.

Monday night starts with Heroes.

I've been watching Heroes since the very first episode, mostly because I'm a sucker for anything with superheroes in it and will give most of these shows a chance. Smallville fell by the wayside half an episode in, but Heroes managed to hook me completely in the first season. Good characters, lots of good super powers going insane, very pretty visuals, good storyline, not to mention the oodles of man candy prancing around in very little clothing. It all worked really well, and I was easily addicted.

Then came the second season. To put it succintly, it blew chunks. Big ones. The shrinking of the season (because of the writers' strike) apparently shrunk the talents of everyone involved in the show. The plots were either messy or completely uninteresting. New, largely useless and disposable characters were added left and right while older characters became increasingly stupid and annoying while being mired in nonsensical plot lines that never went anywhere. The whole thing sucked, and we went into summer hiatus hoping for an improvement for the next season.

The new season's started (the 5th episode aired last night), and I've been largely disappointed. While the show has somewhat returned to caring more about its lead characters and some interesting plot lines have been set in place (but again, not til last night!), the show has become largely dependant on rehashing plots (visiting the future, saving the world, people making stupid decisions and having to fix them) and very impressive visuals while sacrificing character development and, well, interesting plots. It's become really soap-operaish, and there's no end to the amount of yelling I do at the TV every monday night.

Last night's episode was decent; I'd give it at most a B. While some really annoying characters SEEM to have been taken care of, I wouldn't put it past the ridiculous plot "twists" of this show to bring them back. The writers seem really scared to go balls-out with killing characters or plotlines; they usually settle for predictable and melodramatic, and it wears very thin very quickly. I can easily think of 5 characters (Tracy, Matt, Mohinder, Hiro, Nathan) who either need to be killed off or get some IMMEDIATE revamping before I get completely tired of them. When we've come to the point where I'm completely uninterested in Mohinder's impressive shirtlessness, you know we're in trouble.

While Hiro seems to have made quite a surprising switch-around (though again it might be some lame fake-out), Nathan and Tracy have done nothing but stand around pondering their lives and powers and not making a decision for 5 episodes, and it's come to the point where I get angry when they even show up on screen. And I used to LOVE Nathan and Hiro! And where are Elle and Micah and Monica? If you're gonna hire someone as cute and awesome as Kirsten Bell, have her DO something in your show! And Monica's power was pretty interesting, but she seems to have completely disappeared from the map.

Is there a way out of the hole that Heroes has dug itself into? Maybe. Probably not; by this time in the season thing should've gotten better, you know? But all is not lost yet, and maybe the writers will be clued into the fan's disgust from the falling ratings (between week two and week three Heroes viewership dropped 11%!) to make some necessary changes and bring Heroes back to its first season of awesomeness.

Will I keep watching? Sure. For a while, anyway. The only other option at this time is Dancing With the Stars, and while that might be fun when you need something useless and glittery, it's not something I'll ever get into. It's too repetitive for my tastes.

Oof. That was a long rant. But let's keep going.

Next is Gossip Girl on the CW. Yeah, I know, I can't believe I'm watching a show called 'Gossip Girl', either. But I admit I'm a sucker for clever little teen soap operas with pretty clothes and fun storylines, and this show fills those requirements perfectly. Yes, it's vapid and ridiculous in its depiction of uber rich children in Manhattan, but the writing is surprisingly clever and insightful, and it can be pretty hilarious at times. It's a pretty fantastic guilty pleasure of a show, and it's refreshing to watch a well written silly show every now and then. Plus, you get to see some ridiculous clothes (Oh, Chuck) and outrageous storylines, which is always fun.

After that, my COSMOPOLITAN CHANNEL (yurgh) shows a marathon of Sex and the City from 10-12 (6 episodes) that I watch out of some inexplicable compulsion to make my brain hurt. It's a fantastically stupid and sometimes offensive and insipid show, but every now and then you get a fun plotline and very pretty clothes (none of them involving Carrie, surprise surprise) and some clever writing. I started watching to see what the BFD was, and I got sucked in, and while it's largely annoying and vapid and I want to slap Carrie every time she opens her mouth, I like it enough to watch it after everyone has gone to bed and there's nothing else playing on tv but news and bad movies.

So that's my Monday. If I get annoyed at any of the former there's always some Seinfeld or Friends rerun airing somewhere (it's a truth universally acknowledged that you will find either of these shows, plus Law and Order-which I don't watch- playing on some channel at any time of the day, any day of the week) and I'll watch that while playing a computer game or drawing.

Hey, I also read a lot. So don't give me that look.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's presentation of What Figgy is Watching On Tuesdays. I promise it won't be this long.