elapses

The truly amazing thing about my TV schedule this fall is that I was not even trying to slim it down. There was no inner voice that said "shit, Alexandra, you watch so much television, maybe you should make your life less stressful and drop some of it!" In fact, my inner voice? KIND OF AN ENABLER. But anyway this is what I'm watching:

( lj cuts add dramatic tension to otherwise potentially blah entries )


SO THE MOST IMPORTANT PIECE OF INFORMATION WE CAN GLEAN FROM ALL THAT AND ALL THIS "OOH FALL TV" TALK IN GENERAL IS THAT FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS IS COMING BACK TO DIRECT TV ON OCTOBER 28. Friday Night Lights!!! My favorite little darling that never ever disappoints me (with the obvious exception of those two storylines in season two, but at this point we have all accepted and grown past those little bits of stupidity, especially since they are directly retracable back to our least favorite network NBC and their gross meddling! Plus, I mean, okay, despite Landry, Tyra, and Matt, season two has a lot of shining moments. LET US NOT FORGET THIS).

ANYWAY, FLIST. You are far far far too behind on this show. Only five or six of you kept up with season 3 as far as I know, and there a lot more of you who have seen all of season one and know how much you love it. And of course there are plenty of legitimate reasons for falling behind, but the time has come to catch up. You have 53 days to watch 13 magnificent episodes of television (twenty-eight if you didn't watch season two either), THAT IS EASY PEASY. We are internerds, we can consume twice that in a quarter of the time. And as motivation, I have prepared for you a mostly unspoilerly picspam from my brand new season 3 DVDs ($23 at Target right now, THAT'S NOTHING AND YOU KNOW IT) to remind you how much you love all of these characters and their pretty pretty show. WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?


( texas forever )

If the various Star Trek series were cop shows, the original series would be Starsky & Hutch, the Next Generation would be CSI, Deep Space 9 would be the Wire (except only at like, 60% intensity, it is still in space), Voyager would be Bones, and Enterprise would be CSI: Miami.

THINK ABOUT IT.

So goldenmelisande and I decided to rewatch Voyager (and, eventually/concurrently/WHO KNOWS WHEN DS9, which is more complicated since the entire series is not up on youtube) AND OH MY GOD, it... is maybe the most delightful thing? I MEAN OKAY, there are parts you have to suffer through -- Neelix and Kes having romantic beats (EW), the Kazon and their stupid ugly hair, and about 50% of the holoprograms are suuuuuper awkward (JANEWAY EYRE IS THE WORST, ick, but Sandriiiiiine's totally makes up for it), and then last night, after a run of three AWESOME episode the show BETRAYED US WITH... really gross hallucinations, but then it's just... Voyager. Objectively I can understand why a person would think that it's crap (except I can't, BECAUSE IT HAS B'ELANNA TORRES) but this show is... my youth. IT'S RUBBER, YOU'RE GLUE, AND ALL YOUR CRITICISMS BOUNCE OFF IT AND STICK TO YOU.

( ANYWAY WE JUST WATCHED "PARTURTION" SO... LET'S TALK ABOUT KATHRYN JANEWAY'S HAIR? )

Yo internerds! It has been a really long time since we have spent extended time remarking on how Gillian Anderson is not only the prettiest, but also basically the best person on the planet. BUT DO NOT FRET, friends, I have prepared a mini picspam (of ESQUIRE OUTTAKES!!!!! Jeeeeeesus, this may be my favorite photoshoot to date) to help correct our blasphemy.


( hard luck woman )

The photos (plus more) are in hi-res here, and given the source I would assume they originate from Haven. Now go make me icons.

( friday night lights 3x04 )

AND BY THE WAY, if you haven't been watching this season, it is really, truly good.

Ha, so, watching this week, I was thinking about cultural stereotypes and ( this got kind of long, so I cut it too! )

THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO KNOW FROM YOU: where do you think your personal mores come from (family, community, city, state, country, class, race, religion, lifestyle, WHATEVER YOU CAN THINK OF) and how it differs (and, almost more importantly, does not differ) from the stereotypes and other cultures as you see them. I wrote an essay on this once, and, uh, it was much more well-worded. SORRY :(

ALSO, if you do watch FNL, I am super curious about how you think it relates back to that.

On that noooooooote, one of the best, most amazing things, I think, about Friday Night Lights is that so specifically set and yet so perfectly, completely relatable even if you know NOTHING about football culture. You cannot say the same thing about our Gossip Girls and our Californications, shiny though they may be. THAT (+ how it relates to personal experience) is the essence of what I'm trying to get at with all these words I can't seem to fit together right. There is something so inexplicably tangible about these people, and that is why, I think, I have shed more tears for Dillon, TX than any other fictional universe. Except maaaaaybe the West Wing.

UGH, I FEEL LIKE IT SOUNDS LIKE I AM SOMEHOW DEMANDING AN ACADEMIC ESSAY FROM YOU. I don't mean that, really! If you don't want to overanalyze your I would really, really love to read dumb personal anecdotes about your town or your nation or your state. Just where you come from, MENTALLY. I eat this kind of thing up (SERIOUSLY, one of the greatest things about livejournal is the differences in experience you can be exposed to), PLEASE, PLEASE INDULGE ME? :D?


Ha, so, unrelated but in fact related, but I'm thinking about adding a sociology minor, or really only test-driving a class to see if I like sociology in academic format? Or something, because I view the world in such sociologically-colored glasses and it seems silly to not think about studying something I so vigilantly pursue in my daily life, if I can get the opportunity? Buuuuuuuut I need to talk to my advisor because I'm a little afraid it'd take me more than four years on top of my (french) major and med school admission requirements. Not that that would be so explicitly terrible, but I'm not sure what it would mean in terms of my scholarship. I also sentimentally want to wait for Vivian, because she's re-entering school in the fall (she's on her six month ~wilderness discovery program~ in Chile right now) and even though she hasn't expicitly decided she's coming to CU (she disliked Macalester, and she misses the mountains -- ha, I DON'T KNOW HOW I ENDED UP WITH THIS CRAZY OUTDOORSY PERSON FOR A BEST FRIEND -- so she's picking between CU and Colorado College. Which is a great school, but IT IS IN COLORADO SPRINGS. Which is the conservative capitol of Colorado. Ohmygoooooodness, I've only ever been down there for skating competitions, but I got the willies every time we passed Focus on the Family. ...SEE? SNOB.) but we sort of decided looking into sociology was something we both needed to do. It would be nice to explore it together. But I also feel funny waiting for something that might not happen. I DON'T KNOW.


IN CONCLUSION, there are these boots in a boutique in Denver that I ABSOLUTELY COVET (grey suede with a slight heel AND THREE ADORABLE SUEDE BUTTONS UP THE EDGES) and I finally (ha, birthdays!) have enough excess cash to go grab them, but I am sick and do not feel like driving myself to Denver. My life: so hard.

ALSO, I am downright CREEPED OUT by the degree to which this and how EXACTLY it resembles a scene I have LIVED THROUGH, this is making me sad, when the hell is Bones coming back?, livejournal should not make ME WILLINGLY SITTING HERE TRYING TO PAY THEM WITH A DEBIT CARD THIS DIFFICULT, AND I AM GOING TO WATCH THE 30 ROCK PREMIERE NOW, and it is going to be awesome.

lalalalalalala it is probably going to take a lot of effort for me to make any post that is not related to the X-Files for the next two weeks (IT'S NOT EVEN THAT! It's like a week and a half!) and probably maybe at least a month after that. I'M SORRY. Except I'm totally not.

Anyway anyway anyway, as my excitement has been building to this weird insuppressible level of anticipation and delight leading up to 07/25/08 I've been reading X-Files fanfiction. For the first time in... a long time? I used to be addicted to this stuff.

This isn't really meant to be a rec list (ALTHOUGH if you haven't read them? NOW WOULD BE THE TIME.) so much as it's... me, wanting to talk (a lot, as usual) about these stories I love in this fandom that writes more and better than any other. They're not hidden gems, a number of them are well-known (and all of them are, I think, in my del.icio.us. plus I think I probably mentioned a lot of these same ones when we did that rec list for eyeinfbi, ahahahaha. I'm a very predictable person) and I'm sure quite a few of you have read them all. These aren't all my very very favorites (I mean, some of them are, but others have been left off), this is just... a list of some stories that I happen to like. But: as my rereads has proven, there are some stories you never get sick of hearing.

( some stories that don't suck )

Yeah so um... yeah. Is anyone else madly in love with these stories? Any favorites you'd like to ramble about? PLEASE DO. The amount of time I could (and have) spent rambling about these two people!

OH BY THE WAY you know what's really hilarious to me about (one of) the TV spot(s) for this movie (YES IT DID JUST POP UP ON TBS AND I'M PRETTY PLEASED TO HAVE SEEN IT. ...again.) is that it um, ends with the music for "O Verona"? There are like seven hundred ridiculous ~dramatic~ faux-promo vids to that song AND THEN THEY USED IT FOR AN ACTUAL PROMO.

P.S. This stupid emergency maintenance better have been for a damn good reason >:(

You know those obnoxious picspams that are more words than picspamming? I, um, yeah. Sorry. This is mostly spoilery for the show, but there's movie stuff under the cut as well, so. Yes.

( the boys of sex and the city )

I think it's super interesting how differently everyone perceives the men (and the women) of the show, though. My sister and I always agreed when we were first watching, but glancing at this article, EVERY SINGLE MAN is both loved and hated. The disparity is fascinating.

Just as a concluding thought, since I've just rambled about the boys SO DAMN MUCH when the girls are the true center of the show -- I think the reason this show means so much to me, in the end, is that it is the closest thing on television to the life I life. Not on the surface -- I'm obviously not a fabulous NYC girl with her own ginormous apartment and god knows how many pairs of designer footwear -- but the heart -- four girls who love each other unconditionally, sitting at a coffee shop, deconstructing every relationship they have? That's what my friends and I do, and that's what girls everywhere do. If you take away the pomp and circumstance, it's very very true to life.

So um, a week in to ankle sprain #3, and I've already broken an ankle brace. I knew it was coming -- Vivian and I had to do x-treme duct tape surgery on Sunday, but aaaaaaugh.

AND AND AND: happy (belated) birthday, allibabab!!! (Um, for the record, this post has been stewing in semagic for awhile -- when I started it, it WAS your birthday.) I know our LJ friendship is only a couple of months old, but DUDE, how right were we about being random soulmates?? I hope you ended up having a woooooonderful day.

P.S. book_babe: I am a horrible person who is going to the post office ASAP. Tomorrow.

Happy Birthday captaincatapult!!! Oh Annnnnnna, you light up my life in a million different little ways. You're going to make such a wonderful adult now that this birthday has sort of kind of really actually made you one (oops, adverb vomit). Thanks for being born!


Today was convocation! This semester is officially 100% over, and I am so unbelievably glad. I MISS SCHOOL, and having silent conversations with the kid next to you when class is really boring, that last glance at the equations you wrote down on a notecard before you walk into a classroom to take that damn midterm, skimming because you don't feel like reading, having things to whine about!!! I'm sure this is falling on deaf ears because you're all finishing up finals and CANNOT WAIT TO GET OUT, but I cannot wait for fall academia.

But! Summer should be great too.

ANYWAY, this was a really nice week. For a lot of little reasons -- this part of spring always makes me unbelivably happy because the TREES! ARE SO PRETTY! and the air smells nice because of that, and I love my sister, and I have suuuuuch amazing friends who like to think about people as much as I do (it's funny how transient college makes my social sphere -- this week I'm losing a lot of people to their homes, but I'll see them next fall, but my best friends! are flying home!) and just music and smoothies and shopping and crappy soft serve ice cream. Life is so NICE sometimes, you know?! Not for any big reason! Just nice!

I also figured out how to torrent things (24.1% of Outrageous Fortune season 3, HA!) and I am unreaaaaasonably proud of passing this important internet rite of passage.

Plus, OHMYGOSH, television was phenomenal this week. AND SO! A kind of mini picspam.

( except it's kind of large. EVERYONE WAS PRETTY, IT WAS HARD TO STOP MYSELF. )

Is anyone else kiiiiiiiiiind of annoyed about this whole ~internet release date~ for the XF2 trailer? They were going to be on the big screen! Looking large and pretty! In front of Iron Man! Pulling it and putting it on IGN is so... anticlimatic.

Hi guys! I am back from California! It was nice, it was sunny (well, sunnier), I bought things, I had fun. But now I want to talk about Friday Night Lights!

( Or, well, picspam the most recent episode. Same difference! )

Do you think flooding NBC studios with our tears would make an effective "Save Our Show" Campaign? Yes, no, maybe so? I bet I can produce enough to fill Ben Silverman's office.

So there is kind of this thing going on in the world right now, where everyone is like "Wow, musicals are kind of... really awesome? How 'bout that?". Which is great. I'm glad everyone is excited about Sweeny Todd, I'm glad the world loved RENT and Hairspray and Chicago, and I'm glad this possibly probably bodes well for future productions of movie musicals with awesome costumes and people dancing and singing happily around soundstages. But here are some cold, hard facts for you: you have not seen enough musicals.

I know you all know about the golden age of the Hollywood musical. 90% of everyone has seen Singing In the Rain and Wizard of Oz, they have earned their place as cultural relics. But there are so many more that most people haven't seen. And I'm just saying, there's something to be said for an age where the producers would shell out to make a cake full of singing people or a red, smoky swimming pool with eleven full-access diving swings. Those days are gone.

( but not forgotten! )

P.S. AMTP -- this is what happens when I go through Office withdrawl: massive picspams of MGM musicals.


Hey guys, I've been a super crappy LJ friend as of late, thanks to having a life, which is... weird. School's over twoish weeks (for the semester, I mean), which will be niiiiiiiice, but I'll try to be around more this week too, because I miss you all and this is basically our last of TV. I am sorry I missed birthdays! And I'm sending out Christmas Cards tomorrow or Tuesday, so last call for that. I've kind of lost track of which of your links I've already gone to and which ones I haven't, so if I leave you my address twice, or something, just... ignore me. I'm overzealous about the Holiday season.

I also want to do this meme, just because: Name a character (or few) from one of my fandoms and I'll give you (a) three facts about them from my personal canon/fanon, (b) a reason he/she sucks, (c) a reason he/she is awesomecakes, (d) five things that never happened to that character or (e) five people that character never fell in love with and why. You pick the character. I pick the letter.

So guys, you should be watching this show.
( Chuck! )


IN CONCLUSION: I love Zachary Levi and this show. And yeahhhh, I really don't care enough about Heroes to picspam you with any of that. There wasn't even any Nathan. GET BETTER NEXT WEEK, I really do want to care.