Only bored as I get older

First, I'm going to apologize (because that's what I do); I usually like to be a little more optimistic than I think this post is going to sound. But it's Monday and life is again real, and these florescent lights are a little more irritating than usual.

One of the most boring things to me is when writers write about what just happened on TV. There was a MAJOR plot twist in The Good Wife! Somebody got annihilated on Game of Thrones! Robin Williams voices the genie AND the merchant at the beginning of Aladdin! (Just go with it.) What does it meeeeeaaannn?



Who is reading this shit? (Probably a lot of people, hence the articles' existence and their many accompanying advertisements...)

I don't particularly care about spoilers, though I do think it's odd that some people seem to need so strongly to blab. But I'm not really the kind of reader/watcher who gets upset knowing the basic plot points or even 'major' twists (I enjoyed Titanic just fine, thank you); and at least as far as mainstream TV is concerned, you can see a lot of these things from miles away. Like the Chekhov rule, when a gun is introduced to the story you can bet your ass it's getting fired. But I'm probably in the minority here; I can certainly understand people not wanting details given away.

So if you didn't watch the show, there's absolutely no reason to read the recap and plenty of reasons to avoid it. If you did watch the show, there's still no particular reason to read the recap. Other than to be told what it all meant, what it could have possibly meant, who did it, why did they do it, who else might have done it, where do we go from here, what was the setup, what's the fallout...these are all things the talented writers who created these shows are already doing for you, and will continue to do for you as you watch their story unfold. I get the desire to talk about it all, but it's not a need (just a very strong desire to not feel so lonely in this world...sorry, sorry that's the existential psychiatrist in me).

Most shows that make it to the popularity of things like Game of Thrones/Mad Men/The Good Wife/True Detective/whatever are there because, on some level, they are great and created by talented people. You should be damn sure that these talented people usually know how to make all things unfold with time (unless it's Lost and everybody's just making up nonsense), and eventually they make you realize that what happens isn't nearly as fun or important as why something happens and why the characters involved are so interesting.

I think this is the right moment to say what anyone reading this likely already knows: I'm way more of a reader than a watcher. So feel free to tell me that I'm perfectly capable of ignoring articles I find boring. You are correct. But should I have to? I don't know exactly what it says about our silly First World that two of the four main-slot articles on today's theatlantic.com are about TV shows, but I don't think it's entirely good. I know I can swim to safer Internet waters, but sometimes the thought of doing that is like standing in the supermarket's soup aisle confronted by a thousand different versions of tomato soup, and I haven't even looked at other kinds of soups and already I just want a fucking blanket and a pacifier...

Actually, I think I'm going to read outside. This has been Melvin Ralsh's florescent Monday morning; 'til next time, folks!

I Have a Question

Do you think people make up their own minds less often than they used to?

This is kind of an overly general question, the type I'm not usually too fond of, but I do wonder about some stuff...

When I was in college and liked writing music reviews a whole lot more than I do now, I had trouble shaking a bad habit of checking out other reviews of the same album to see where my opinion landed in the vast nothingness of music reviews. If I didn't like an album, I needed to double-check that other folks didn't like it either to make sure I wasn't an idiot, and this was way too easy to do. YouTube didn't even exist, and there weren't nearly as many blogs n stuff, but there was already an overload of opinions out there to Google. I could not stop doing this, but I can understand being younger, insecure, and not very confident about my musical taste/opinions. There were even a couple times I softened a review based, at least a little, on the fact that a bunch of 'professional' people had liked something I didn't. That's pretty hard to understand now.

So does the overabundance of Opinions out there mostly serve to feed our insecurities?

Are people actually more Opinionated now than ever before, or does it just feel that way because I spend a shitload of time on the internet, where Opinion is king?

Sometimes I get the feeling there are folks who get outraged by stuff only because a lot of other people got outraged by it; maybe this is no different than Time Before Internet, but it sure as hell seems to happen a whole lot faster and in larger quantities. Then it goes away and things move on more or less the same, but LO, we have ENTERTAINED ourselves. And probably somebody made a buck or two off it.

I have a question.