Gilmore (or less) Girls

Finally, the torture of watching this series is over.
WHY, OH WHY, did I waste (quick math here –> 45 mins per episode, 22 episodes per season and 7 seasons…) 116 hours on this junk?

Just a quick one: The main characters are – Lorelai (further known as L) Gilmore, mother to Lorelai (Rory, further known as R) Gilmore. These two delicate flowers live in a one horse town, that has an inbred vibe to it. Oh yes and SPOILER ALERT!!

Lauren Graham (Lorelai) & Alexis Bledel (Rory)

It started out innocently enough. I stumbled upon a Buzzfeed list of Lorelai Gilmore’s more awesome quotes and I found myself thinking, she sounds like the American version of me.

And these are only but a few!!

Then I met her, and it took me a season to realise I do not like her. She is pouty and has this THING with her parents that I don’t completely understand. It’s like she is angry at them for giving her everything she might have wanted in life. Ok, I can understand that she didn’t want exactly what they were offering and she didn’t want to be the puppet in their rich-man play, but surely when you become an adult you change?

The relationship between her and R (her daughter who you meet at 15 I think) is more of a friendship than a mother-child relationship. Yes, I understand L would be able to have a whole episode of “Sixteen and pregnant” dedicated to her. But surely a child needs more than, “yoh, kid, I am your friend BEFORE I am your mother.” When L eventually decides to (in extreme occasions) play the MOM card R totally flips out on her, as if she is an adult, and runs away. R grows a bit as a character in the beginning of the season but by the time she is an adult, she throws more fits than when she was a teenager and just makes me want to punch her in the face. Also, these women are skinny, I mean Hollywood requirement skinny, who live primarily on coffee, junk food and no exercise. I don’t care what science says about metabolism, that shit’s just not fair.

I found this post about plot holes in the show… adding fuel to the fire!!

Don’t even get me started on their respective love lives and how totally idiotic they are. First R with Dean VS Jess, cheating on first dean with Jess and then cheating on Jess with Dean (who just HAPPENS TO BE MARRIED) after dumping Dean FOR Jess. Logan seems to be the most stable one of her suitors, whose marriage proposal she turns down after living with him and basically house breaking him.

L, with this chemistry with Luke right from the FIRST BLOODY EPISODE. Then with R’s dad Christopher, whom she sleeps with while being confused about other men, twice!! That’s some kinda role model there!!  Then a few throw-away guys in-between which all lead to her being engaged to Luke but then breaking it off and getting married to Chris, all in one week it seems. Then that whole marriage to Chris going up in smoke and L ending back up with Luke. Take a bloody break woman!!

Something must have kicked in, making me forget most of the awfulness of this show already, but what I do remember is that a lot of the people in this show have serious issues. (yes, people in general have serious issues… but also, people in general grow and adapt and even DEAL with their issues). It makes me wonder if this Stars Hallow town is not actually an experiment like Divergent. With Taylor as the inside man, with his stupid ways of enforcing everything. The people just blindly follow him like sheep. (come to think of it, doesn’t this happen in most countries and cities worldwide anyway?)

Controlled by a whole other bunch of people, safely behind a huge dividing wall! There is just less killing in Gilmore Girls!

What I do LOVE about the show is a lot of the dialog, the to and fro between L’s wit and R’s quirkiness. It’s fun and if they could write all the great dialogues into book form with a short 3 sentences of setting summary per dialogue, I would buy the shit out of that book. Until then, I refuse to watch this show again.

Where is my F.R.I.E.N.D.S box-set?

New years hoax!

December rolls by and you find yourself growing more and more restless because in just a few short weeks you will be able to enjoy some time resting and restoring. January feels far away and so does the idea of having to wear pants or a bra or talk to other adults about anything other than food and swimming.

You structure your life in the way that if something needs to be done in December, like say, cleaning the house, painting that desk, anything that could be postponed, you put it down as part of your resolution for the next year. In effect taking all responsibility away from yourself and putting it onto future self. Weirdly enough the people around you, who have stopped to observe this abhorrent behavior,  go along with it because “it’s good to have goals to work towards.”

Then after the holiday in which you spent to much money on people that you spend too little time with, you have this false sense of bravado. Ready to jump into the new year because, well, it’s a new year. No, dumbass, it’s merely a new month! Making these resolutions to pump yourself up to be a better human being in the next year only serves as a lie to yourself. Because as gym stats have proven… new year, new me doesn’t last all that long. Especially when people discover that it takes way longer than a few weeks to transform oneself into a new person. I seem to have strong feelings about this one… as mentioned in THIS previous post from last New Year.

If I could be a human behavioral scientist for a day I would study the New Year’s resolution phenomena in depth. To understand the thought process behind needing something to look forward too, to urge us forward and prevent us from losing our minds. To understand why people enter a new year full of gusto that just slowly fizzles and fades away. Until they catch themselves in August thinking, “the desk is still not painted, WTF have I done this year?”

Those have a more immediate deadline!!

We should by all means still makes goals, but rather than postponing them till the beginning of a year, month or week. Why not just jump in and start right away? Take small steps in the right direction that will get you there quicker than the promise of a leap in the right direction at a specific time. If you are wanting to be healthier then start right now, don’t wait for new years because, heck… Jy gaan lank wag, my pjel!

Van uitstel kom afstel!!!

Knowing thyself!

In life there are very little that we as humans have control over. We cannot control the weather, we cannot control if someone loves us or not In fact, we cannot control other people at all… but we can control ourselves. We do this by knowing ourselves. Knowing what you are capable of, knowing what makes you angry and what makes you shy. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses and knowing how to deal with these facets.

Sorry Charles, it cannot be done!!

A phrase that I have begun to believe less and less is “people will never change”. PHA_LEASE!! That is a load of BS. People are made to change, our environment changes all the time and if we do not change with it, it will break us. A very wise man in my life says: “Blessed are the flexible, for they will not be bent out of shape” Knowing yourself makes you flexible.

Knowing yourself opens up a WHOLE world of possibilities ready to be conquered. If you know that you are deathly allergic to bee stings, you carry an epi pen with you and avoid bee hives like the plague. Similarly, if you know you are prone to be Mr/Ms Procrastination reincarnate, then (ideally) you should eliminate all possible means of procrastination. If you know that one of your strengths are to be able to memorise movies that you have only watched once or twice… ok, to be honest I do not know how this benefits anyone, apart from providing laughs through the one-woman theatre (complete with accents and dances) and drawing awkward stares from people who have not watched said quoted movie. My point is, you can control a little bit of the world around you if you simply spend some time with yourself.

Say, hypothetically, you and X (it could be Professor X, yes) are walking along in a park. You did not sleep well (and you know that sleep plays a major part in your happiness or another’s impending doom) and the nearest coffee cart mysteriously had no coffee. Forces are conspiring against you and you feel the tug of anger. X is a close friend who asked for this walk because X has a heavy heart and needs a shoulder. All of a sudden a group of children run towards you, one of the little er… bundles… bump into you and their brightly coloured, sugar filled, ice cream smears all along your clothes. You have an important thing to go to and now you look like a strawberry ice cream. Your agrometer just went from dormant to explosive. All of this while X is pouring from a broken heart.

You snap and tell them to pull themselves towards themselves and to just suck it up and not be a pansy. But prior experience with X has taught you that tough love does not glean the anticipated result. X retreats into a ball in the space of their emotions and you are left with a friend who is even more hurt than they were before, by someone they trusted, and now on top of being tired you have major damage control.

I mean honestly, Charles. Just MAKE yourself walk!!!

Extreme example but it happens. How could this have been avoided? You know you need sleep and a good quality set of it, you know that your backup is coffee and you know for a fact that you have a deep dislike for the smaller younger human species. So, when X asked you to go for a walk, you could have said:

1. “Sure thing, let me get some coffee before we go cos I am cranky as all heck today.”
2. “Do you maybe want to come over and relax here, were there is privacy and no threat of small humans and I have coffee.”
3. “Sure thing”, and pull yourself towards yourself, put your crankiness aside because at the time your close friend needs you. And because being a grown up means being able to cope with the occasional sleep deprivation and bad coffee situation and, of course, going to a park means KIDS.

If you know that a certain action is followed by a certain reaction from yourself, you can control the outcome of a situation. Getting home after work and plonking on the bed is an action that is closely followed by watching mindless series until it is too late to be productive and you give up and go to sleep. So by avoiding plonking onto the bed, you force yourself to be more productive. We can’t control what happens in life but we can control how we react and we do that by knowing ourselves.

I think this song suits the post. Who doesn’t secretly like a bit of ABBA.

It’s not enough to just know ourselves and accept ourselves with the noted flaws. No, we need to be mature enough to change the characteristics that tend to stab others. If you know that you tend to retreat into a ball of anti-socialism (even if you are THE social butterfly) and cut yourself off of the real world every few months, then you already know what the problem is. Yes, it’s a problem, because you can’t expect people to stick around while you emotionally hibernate for months on end only to come and bombard them with socialness. Make an active effort to at least keep in touch even if you are feeling anti-social. Just a suggestion.

People can change, and it is our knowing ourselves that enables that.