For the Write Reason

Here we are in the thick of college basketball season. This is my favorite time of the year. All over the Twitter and Facebook, people are complaining about the cold, lack of sunshine, and blah blah blah. Every time I see a post like that, I think, “Don’t you know how lucky you are to live in Indiana during this time of the year?”

I don’t know when I started liking basketball, but it is possible I was born this way. There is an entry in my fourth grade diary that goes something like this: “Tonight we watched the game.  Duke won.  It was bad.” I can only assume Duke was playing IU, and using the diary as evidence, we can also safely say that I have spent at least twenty years not wanting Duke to win.

I often find myself trying to explain why I love basketball because my partner doesn’t love it. In fact, he doesn’t even like it. He doesn’t judge me for my passion, but because I so respect his views and feelings, the fact that basketball doesn’t light his fire drives me to want to have a great explanation for why it lights mine. But I fear there is no great explanation. It’s nice to throw all my energy into something that doesn’t matter for two hours, but let’s face it, much of my energy is spent in similar ways. Most of the things I spend my time on do not matter. With basketball, it comes down to this simple thing: I like to watch the ball go through the hoop.

This year is particularly special because the Indiana Hoosiers (my team of choice) are operating with a winning record. This isn’t usually noteworthy because this is Indiana basketball after all, but we’ve had a couple of what we like to call “rebuilding” years because “bad” just sounds so negative.

I am not a fair-weather fan, but I do understand the impulse. It is more fun to watch them when they’re winning. What I don’t understand is finding pleasure in anyone’s defeat, especially IU’s. I try not to root against teams. I’d prefer it if Duke and Kentucky would just get the eff out of my face, but mostly I just like to root for IU. Last week, when IU was stumbling a little during a three-game losing skid, many of my so-called friends on Facebook and Twitter felt compelled to assert their smug correctness in “predicting” IU’s downfall. What is the point of this negativity? Why do you watch IU basketball if you expect them to lose? I always expect them to win, which probably means I am too simple to be a real sports fan and that’s OK with me.

I stuck with the Hoosiers through the rebuilding, and this season feels like my reward. For one thing, there is nothing to be embarrassed about, nothing I have to set aside in order to enjoy the game. There aren’t any recruiting violations hanging over the team, no academic or attitude issues, nothing like that at all. There is not one member of this year’s team I wouldn’t have over to my house for dinner. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to say that.

This is the first basketball season I haven’t had cable. First world problems, I know. I thought being without the Big Ten Network and ESPN would help me gain some perspective. I thought maybe I would realize that IU basketball-watching is a fun hobby but it needn’t dictate how I spend every hour from December to April. It turns out that basketball is a necessary part of winter and I just need to deal with it. Since I don’t have cable, I have been running all over Fort Wayne trying to watch games. It is getting tiresome. For example, tonight IU plays Wisconsin at 9:00 p.m. That means that the game won’t be over until 11:00 at least. There isn’t anywhere other than my couch that I want to be at 11:00 p.m. on a Thursday night in winter. So I probably won’t be watching the game tonight. Instead, I will likely fight with the various radios in my home that all refuse to receive AM stations and then finally resort to a play-by-play on ESPN.com. It’s pretty sad. It looks like this:

Well, hopefully tonight it won’t look exactly like that.

Part of my inability to stay away from IU basketball is due to the aforementioned likability of this year’s team. Right now, my favorite is Verdell Jones III. This kid is super cute, and because he is a senior, he represents for me the beginning of the movement to put the magic back in Indiana basketball. He isn’t perfect. Does he commit too many turnovers? Yes. Dude has a tendency to double-dribble when he gets excited, but I find it difficult to blame him because a) I get too excited too and 2) he was there when no one else was. If he were just now entering the program, he wouldn’t be a starter and he might not even be a scholarship player. There is just too much talent there now.

Next year, Verdell will be gone, though, and I’ll have to find a new favorite. I think it will be Will Sheehey. He is from Florida (whereas Verdell is from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois which means something here in Big Ten country) and usually I like the guys from Indiana like Tom Coverdale. Will is a lot like Tom Coverdale, though. He has an orneriness to his style that was definitely evident when he got two technical fouls on Sunday and had to be ejected from the Penn State game. The scuffle was all talk and might not have even resulted in technical fouls if the Cincinnati/Xavier on-court fist fight earlier this season hadn’t prompted tighter officiating all over the NCAA. Anyway, I’m not mad at Will. A Penn State player said some stuff and then Will said some stuff. He was very composed and didn’t object when he had to leave the game. The whole incident reminded so much of my beloved Tom Coverdale that Will Sheehey is now forever cemented in my heart right next to Coverdale and Dane Fife and all the other guys who are just a little too ornery for their own good.

Aside from Verdell and Will, who are major contributors to the team’s success this season, we have two former Indiana Mr. Basketballs on the team. Two! Jordan Hulls has been around awhile, but Cody Zeller is a freshman. Cody has been a much-celebrated addition to the team, and so far he has lived up to the hype. He has talent to spare, but what I like about him is how he has somehow made the whole team better. It is as if all they needed was some pressure removed and suddenly everybody is a damn star. It has been so much fun to watch.

And just watch that ball go through that hoop here.  (And ignore that Coach Crean sort of looks like he’s going to be sick.)

One day last week, while I was on my way to class, I passed the instructor I had for Math for Liberal Arts Majors approximately 300 years ago.  She was exactly the same from her grimace to her long, gray hair.  She was wearing the same old turtleneck and cardigan combo and dragging behind her that most signature of signature adjunct accoutrements: the wheeled suitcase pretending to be just a bag and not airport-ready, straight up luggage.  She wouldn’t have recognized me, and I didn’t give her a chance to anyway.  I was so mortified that we were both still in this place—in this building, even—not moving on, that I had to turn away.

Of course, I am not still taking Math for Liberal Arts Majors while she is by all appearances still teaching that or some other course as an adjunct instructor.  In the years upon years since that semester we spent together operating under the lackluster presumption that there is a such thing as math for Liberal Arts majors, I had somehow become this woman.  I teach six classes a semester with varying degrees of enthusiasm.  I claim not to have time to do research and write papers so that I may someday not have to teach six classes a semester, but the truth is that I don’t have the motivation or mental energy.  My brain is easily fried from an increasing lack of stimulation, and it is just easier to come home from work, watch Jeopardy!, go to bed, and sleep for nine or ten hours than sit at my laptop wondering why I’m not smart enough to think of something to write about.

I don’t have the wheeled bag yet but, really, it’s just a matter of time.

I have mentioned before that I never had a bad breakup.  I found my terminal relationship without getting my heart broken (but not without some turmoil).  Perhaps because of this lack of personal experience in the romantic department, I take other kinds of heartbreak particularly hard.

Last February, when I didn’t get into grad school for the second year in a row, there was a physical pain in my chest and a persistant lump in my throat.  I wanted to get under the covers and never come out.  I didn’t get that opportunity because the very next day, my beloved Uncle Jim died.  I put the grad school rejection on the back burner while I worked through the grief and worried about my family getting through the grief.  A death in the family is a much more socially acceptable reason to be a mess than not getting into grad school—not because grad school can’t get no respect but because only a fraction of the population even wants to go to grad school but everyone experiences death.

Once I got past the initial grief over Uncle Jim’s death, I settled into a dull, aching depression.  Most of the time, I was fine, but getting out of bed each morning remained a struggle.  It was time for me to face that my life wasn’t turning out how I’d planned.  I kept running across things that I had done in anticipation of moving: either to California to chase Andy’s dream job or to Columbus to chase mine.  The fact that we weren’t moving at all was sometimes so heavy that I could barely move.

Maybe this heartbreak isn’t the same as romantic heartbreak, but maybe it is.  When a couple breaks up, what they mourn is the future their relationship will never have, the dreams that won’t get realized.  What each person experiences individually is the sting of rejection and self-doubt.  That is pretty much exactly what I felt when I opened that email telling me I wasn’t good enough.  Again.

When I hear Adele’s “Someone Like You,” no failed romance comes to my mind.  Instead, I think of grad school.  If grad school were a person, I would indeed show up uninvited to try to figure out why I wasn’t good enough.  I would pretend to be happy that grad school can be successful without me, to preserve my pride when in reality I can’t believe that grad school doesn’t even think about me anymore.  Grad school and I even have a history.  I do, after all, have a master’s degree that I had a ball getting.  I thought that getting a PhD. could be even better, but I guess I’ll never know.

Thank science I can’t drunk text the Ohio State Women’s Studies Graduate Admissions Committee.

I was not my best self during these months.  Oprah would not have been pleased.  I sucked at my job, doing just enough to get by, and I sucked at my relationships.  I was hyper-sensitive and defensive.  I even picked a fight once.  Yelled conflicts give me severe anxiety and it took me a good two hours to calm down enough so that I could sleep.  I learned my lesson there.

Then I went to Nashville with my best friend.  She all but insisted on it and it did turn out to be good for me.  If this were a romantic comedy, this would be  the part where I turn off Adele and start washing my hair again.  Nashville got me far enough out of my funk so that I could get out of bed without effort.  It also gave me a happy place to close my eyes and think about when the overwhelming suckiness of 2011 started to get me down.

Shortly after I got back from Nashville, Aubrey was born, and she is truly the bright spot of last year.  However, it is hard to use personal happiness to compensate for professional disappointment and dissatisfaction.  I remained lost in that deep part of myself that might be my soul not in a religious sense but in the sense that it is my essence, that part of my that doesn’t change even when I have amnesia.

At some point last fall, I started engaging in my life again, namely writing.  What I mean by “engaging in my life again” is that I started writing because when I’m not writing I feel quite disengaged from everything.  I have this friend named Erin who is super awesome for a lot of reasons but the main one is that she is authentic.  It seems like a simple enough concept, but it can be quite difficult for people to be self-confident enough to avoid pretending, even for a moment, that they are someone or something else.  Erin never worries what other people think (although she is plenty compassionate) because she is only interested in being as Erin as she can.  That is a quality I admire and try to adopt, even though it is sometimes difficult to figure out who it is I want to be, mired as I am in self-doubt and rejection.  The truth is that I feel the most authentically myself when I am writing.

Unfortunately, I am not talking about blog writing.  This is fun, and when I can harness my thoughts efficiently, it is even useful as a way of organizing my reactions and ideas.

But the kind of writing I really love is fiction.  My problem has always been that I’m both afraid of rejection and not quite convinced that publishing my stuff would be worth it.  All I want to do is write.  I don’t care if anyone ever reads it.  It’s a very high school attitude, and I’m working on it.  Sort of.  Mostly I’m just working on giving myself time to write so I can keep from going nuts.

So now I’m not sure I even want to be a professor, which I suppose is a good thing since the universe doesn’t seem to be allowing that, but I do like teaching.  I just don’t think I have it in me to be an adjunct instructor forever.  For one thing, the pay is dismal.  I don’t want my job to be secondary to Andy’s in spirit or in financial terms.  Also, I sort of hate my job exactly half the time because three of the six classes I teach are composition courses at a community college.  This situation feels particularly adjunct whereas my other job is teaching women’s studies courses to people who actually want to be taking women’s studies—and it includes an office!  Things are all right for now, but I am concerned that someday “for now” will have become “forever.”  I’d like more than all right to describe how I spent my life.

Being 30 and not knowing what I want to be when I grow up is not my favorite feeling in the world.

What do you do when you start to realize that a thing you love will cease to be a thing at all during your lifetime?

Last year, both All My Children and One Life to Live got canceled.  Today I learned that SOAPnet will end in late March.  I wasn’t a regular viewer of AMC or OLTL, and I don’t have cable so I don’t watch SOAPnet.  Even when I did have cable, I rarely watched it.  It was nice to know it was there, though, in case I needed it.  I bet this is how many people treat the soaps these days.  They don’t watch them, but if they’re sick or otherwise at home unexpectedly during the day, they’ll tune in for a bit.  I don’t begrudge people their choices.

The culture can’t support soap operas anymore.  Ironically, soaps have a diminished audience (a thing I dislike) because more women are working (a thing I like).  With all the alternatives available for entertainment and Americans’ increasingly busy schedules, the people watching soaps these days want to be watching soaps.  I’m not surprised that these people couldn’t sustain SOAPnet.  What I liked about it wasn’t its programming or content.  What I liked was that the mere fact of it meant that soap operas still existed, that the genre had a prominent enough presence in the TV landscape to warrant its own network.  Without that validation, I guess I’ll just have to write blog posts about Kate Howard and make my own validation.

That, after all, is the answer to my “what do you do” question.  I have some stuff to say about Kate and I might as well say it now.  At some point, I will have to find something to fill the space soaps occupy in my heart and mind, but that day isn’t today.

No one was more irked at the recasting of Kate Howard than I was.  I thought Megan Ward was a great addition to the General Hospital canvas.  She was fresh and the character was just different enough to add some spice but similar enough to last–or so I thought.  It turned out that the character didn’t really last.  After she and Sonny split up, TPTB couldn’t find anything for her to do and she faded into the background.  She was allegedly having a fling with Coleman but we rarely saw any of that since we rarely saw her at all.  Indeed, she was far more likely to be on the phone with Maxie than on screen.

When I read that the show was recasting Kate Howard, I was confused.  Megan Ward was perfect and she didn’t seem to have another job.  Why wouldn’t they let her continue if they wanted to revive the role?  I have no idea if Ward still wanted to be Kate Howard.  Maybe she is disillusioned with the way she had been treated.  She certainly has a right to be.  I wasn’t watching GH much when I read about the recast, and that news certainly didn’t reinvigorate my love.  What eventually led me back to the show fulltime was the death of All My Children.  You know how they say that death puts things in perspective and helps you see what is really important?  That’s what happened to me.

So I was a little beaten down by life when I came back to GH at the tail end of Suck Fest 2011.  This was the optimal frame of mind for me to be in in order for the transition to be as painless as possible.  I just wanted to watch my show; I didn’t care about the details.  I was glad that TPTB had recognized that the show needs Kate Howard.

And you know what? Kelly Sullivan is OK.

I still prefer Megan Ward, but I’ve gotten used to Kelly Sullivan.  Somehow, amid all the chaos of switching head writers (once or twice, I can’t be sure anymore), the Kate Howard character has remained the same.  She still wants to help Sonny, which is ever-so-slightly different from wanting to save him the way that Brenda, Carly, Alexis, et al do.  Sullivan has good chemistry (including making flirty eyes) with Maurice Benard, which is important, and her Kate Howard seems like she might be able to have a good relationship with Olivia, if female relationships are going to be allowed these days.

However, putting aside the few scenes she and Olivia have had so far, Kate still exists in the trap that the character fell into the last time around: Sonny, Sonny, Sonny.  Despite her magazine and her employee(s), Kate’s world is very much centered around Sonny.  No one else on the show has such limited interactions.  Even Dante-obsessed Lulu sees and talks about her family every now and then.  Also, it is worth mentioning that Lulu has the benefit of being an established character with a rich GH history whereas Kate is brand new by comparison.  TPTB will have to work harder to convince me that Kate has something other than Sonny to do.

So you can see that GH is setting me up for another disappointment.  What is even more tragic and pathetic is that it’s the exact same disappointment I already endured when Kate Howard dwindled and then disappeared altogether in 2009 and 2010.

Here in the waning days of this crummy year, I am having a pretty good time, and I thought maybe it would be hard for me to remember what was so bad about 2011.

No dice.  It turns out that 2011 was so epically horrible that it will take more than a handful of good days to erase the pall it put over my existence.  I’ve tried not to be melodramatic about it.  This approach has left me with more half-written posts than I can count, and here at the end of this stupid year, I’ve decided to give in.  I’m going to indulge the impulse to linger over the pain and just brood.  Giving in might be the only way to clear the cloud from my mind and clean the slate for 2012.

I don’t usually put much stock in the new year’s ability to give people fresh starts, but this year, I have to grab what I can.  I’ll believe in whatever superstition will get me out of this funk.  Most of the crap this year dumped on me happened in the first half of the year.  By September, we could see that maybe we would make it after all (Mary Richards style), but I am just now starting to realize how those months of bad stuff coming at me from all directions wore down my soul until it is just this raw, tender thing that can barely handle it if someone raises his or her voice in my presence.

In September, when things started to look up a little bit, I started writing a lot again.  I dug into something I’d started before Fluid and abandoned after two chapters.  This new project carried me through some dark moments.  When bad stuff stopped happening, I had time to dwell on everything that had happened at the beginning of the year, and those days of dwelling were almost harder to get through than the days of grieving (for people and dreams alike).  I tried to channel my renewed writing drive into this blog, but I stumbled more than I succeeded.  I read some great books (Blue Nights by Joan Didion most recently) and watched some great TV (Downton Abbey most recently), but I couldn’t seem to write about the good stuff.  I mean, I managed a post in April about the most perfect niece in the world, but I haven’t written about her since.  (She’s still perfect, by the way.)

Because I tend toward darkness in that I like gloomy days, sad songs, and depressing movies, I actually found comfort in the notion that there was turmoil all over the world, not just in my soul, in 2011.  I opened myself and let the dismal news stories come inside, which is a bit like poking at a bruise and relishing the pain.  I read Blue Nights, for crying out loud.  And that stuff made me feel better—or at least different, which is all I am asking for at this point.

Even with all the dead people, dead cats, sad friends, and broken dreams that 2011 handed me, I can recognize that my life is pretty much the sort of life I always thought I’d have.  I have friends who work in public radio, at the library, and at universities.  I live in a neat, old house with the most wonderful guy in the world and the best cat I could imagine.  I have a job that is very close to my dream job.  I’m still here, and that has to be a good thing.

Since it’s Friday night…

In October, during the Ear Infection Crisis of 2011, I spent a lot of time on the couch.  You would think that not being able to hear very well out of either of my ears would deter me from watching TV but you would be wrong.  That’s what the volume button is for.

At first, I wanted to watch Damages, and I did make it through the first episode, during which a dog gets murdered.  Pet murder is not for me so I went looking for lighter, less intense fare.  Enter Friday Night Lights.  Many of my TV-watching compatriots had recommended the show so I decided to give it a try.

Because I follow television the way other people follow sports and politics, I already knew FNL‘s Cinderella story: how it got dumped by NBC and rescued by DirectTV.  It seemed to be one of those shows everybody loved but nobody watched.

I am not yet finished with the show.  While I was sick, I watched the first two seasons and the first episode of season three.  Although I’ve committed to seeing it through to the end, I remain underwhelmed at this point.  This means that I’m breaking my rules a little by writing about something I’m not sure I like for this project, but the project wasn’t finishing itself so I decided to get it done before 2012 by any means necessary.  I wanted to write about FNL anyway, and if I’m really going to get to 52 shows in the next month, I can’t afford to waste any TV writing on non-52 Shows posts right now.

Even though I was familiar with FNL‘s small town Texas football premise, I was surprised by how much football and Jesus the show contains.  These are not qualities I look for in a TV show.  I thought maybe it would fade after the first few episodes but then in season two, Lyla goes to work at that Christian radio station with Logan Huntzberger Matt Czuchry in a role I just could not buy, and it just got worse.  I did eventually get to a point where I either got used to it or I could just ignore it.  It does seem to fit with the culture the show is portraying, and this is when I first wondered if maybe I just wasn’t part of FNL‘s target demographic.

The thing that really irritates me about the show is how hyper-sexualized the characters are.  Every time a situation can turn into sex, it does.  Matt’s grandmother’s home healthcare worker is attractive?  They’ll have sex.  A hot chick from Melrose Place moves in next door to Tim?  They’ll have sex.  Count on it, especially if Tim is involved.  His over-sexed bad-boy-with-a-heart-of-gold charm is quite effective, but every time I find myself falling for it, I remember that he is in high school.  Then it’s all frowning and eye-rolling.

Because there is so much sex on FNL, it doesn’t matter that Matt and Tim think they are in love with these women.  They’re in high school!  They’re sixteen-year-olds in relationships with adult women, and these relationships are not presented through a critical lens.  I know feminists can sound like double standard broken records, but it is worth pointing out that when there was even a hint of a high school girl/adult man relationship with Julie and her journalism teacher, Tami put a stop to it before it was anything.  This difference clearly demonstrates that in this universe, girls’ sexuality is more precious than boys’.  Since Tami kind of functions as the moral center of the show, we can use her to determine what kind of a portrayal the show meant to present.

Now I am no prude when it comes to what I’ll watch on TV.  In its time, I watched and enjoyed Melrose Place, though I have since tired of shows that use ubiquitous sex as a stand-in for quality, complicated adult relationships.  I don’t think that FNL is using sex to be edgy; I’m afraid that it doesn’t use sex consciously at all.  It is difficult for a TV show to portray a meaningful romantic relationship that doesn’t revolve around sex because sex has become the standard way relationships play out on TV.  Even the relationships that happen between teenagers on FNL end up being about sex.  These kids enact adult decisions and adult behaviors about sex, but they are not adults so there is a falseness that troubles me, especially because I know teenagers watch this show.  Maybe I’m being too picky about age-appropriate representation.  I mean, don’t even get me started on Tim’s drinking.

I’m complaining a lot, but I don’t hate this show.  I had very high expectations for it, and I do feel let down.  I think my expectations were misplaced.  I didn’t let myself acknowledge that it would be so football-heavy, though I do appreciate the frequency with which the characters remind each other that it’s just a football game.  The truth is that FNL clearly isn’t designed for me.  None of its elements—Texas, high school, football, tons of boy characters, Jesus, teenager sex—appeal to me on their own, let alone together.  Given all the ways the show and I are predestined not to get along, we’re really doing all right.  I even like some of the characters some of the time.

The first character I really liked was Matt.  I am a sucker for earnestness, and he oozes it in the first season.  After awhile, though, that earnestness started to feel like deliberate obtuseness.  Tami is another favorite, of course.  Despite its abruptness, I dig her out-of-nowhere promotion from guidance counselor to principal.  You know how I like a woman in charge.  I also like that Tami isn’t afraid to say what she thinks and that much of what she thinks has nothing to do with sex.

I admire how FNL managed to persevere and keep its fan base throughout all the behind-the-scenes upheaval.  I appreciate it as a model for how dedicated people behind the camera, in front of it, and at home watching can affect a show’s success.  Regardless of ratings and money, FNL made a legacy for itself.  It will never be my show, but I have other shows.  Like I said earlier, I am committed to watching the rest of the series because I have heard that the finale was really well done and it’s rare to find a series finale that doesn’t disappoint fans.  That alone intrigues me as a student of TV.  I’ve also heard that season three is better than season two, which I found lacking to say the least.  The storytelling was uneven and soap-operatic, but part of that could’ve been because of all the network-switching mess so I am willing to cut the show some serious slack.  Who knows?  Maybe I’ll become a real fan before this thing is through.  I doubt it, but I’m willing to give it another try.

I’m starting to worry that there is something wrong with my attention span.  I focus on things for too long.  I have the opposite of ADD.  This is not meant to make fun of my friends who have ADD.  I know that ADD is a real thing.  I believe in it, and I support you.

What if ASD is a real thing, too?

What if I am still watching soaps when everyone else has moved on not because I am innately lame but because there is a glitch in the chemistry of my brain?  What if I just can’t refocus my attention on something else?

I’m always the one who still likes the thing everyone else is over.  I still watch How I Met Your Mother, even though I know it’s past its prime.  I’d probably still be wearing stretch pants if I could find them and if my legs still looked like they did in 1995.

Excuse my enthusiasm, but this diagnosis has the potential to explain so many things about my life.  Why did it take me six years to get my bachelor’s degree?  I was enrolled for twelve consecutive semesters, and I didn’t have to retake any classes.  It all makes sense now: I was focusing on being an undergrad for too long.

Why did I let lackluster high school relationships drag on so long?  Attention Surplus Disorder.

How is it that I once watched seven episodes of thirtysomething in one day?  Once I focused, I couldn’t un-focus.

My nearest and dearest can attest that once I get an idea in my head, whether it’s that we’re going to have sushi for dinner three weeks from Saturday or that we’re going to do an L Word podcast, I will still be thinking about it long after you’ve started thinking about something else.

Why is it that I like to sleep for long periods at a time?  Once I’ve committed to being asleep, I want to stick with it.  I want to focus on sleep for a long, long time.  (OK, now I realize I’m just looking for ways to justify my laziness.)

I’ve heard that some who suffer from ADD are able to channel their mental energy into a kind of hyper-focus.  Maybe I can learn to redirect some of my surplus of attention to things I don’t want to do, like grade 60 research papers next weekend.

Since we’re already talking about Who’s the Boss?…

First of all, the title of the show is dumb.  Of course, it is meant to invoke stereotypes of gender roles.  How can Tony be a housekeeper when he is a man?  How can Angela be a business executive when she is a woman?  In the context of the show, however, there is no question.  At the advertising agency where she works, Angela is a boss, if not the boss.  At home, Tony is her employee and she is, again, the boss.  There is no question.  The show’s title should be She’s the Boss.

Much of the show’s comedy plays on these gender stereotypes.  Angela is funny because she can’t cook, even though she is a woman.  Tony is funny because he cares about clean drapes, even though he is a man.

This stuff should feel tired, and indeed, if the show premiered this year, it would be.  But it’s an ’80s show and so we cut it some slack, even as we point out that Family Ties needs no such accommodation.

Angela Bower was one of my first role models, along with Elise Keaton and Laura Holt (we’ll get to Remington Steele—we’ve got like 24 more of these to go).  Much of the narratives played out via Barbie dolls in my childhood playroom were inspired by Angela.  I liked that she had a fancy job as an advertising executive and didn’t have time to clean her house so she hired someone to do it for her.  I liked that she didn’t care that that someone was a man and instead trusted in his abilities to clean a house.  Cleaning doesn’t require skill so much as patience and some kind of belief that it must be done.  Just because women have historically been the ones who cleaned the houses doesn’t mean that women are somehow physiologically better suited for house-cleaning.

Well, that turned into a tangent brought to you by Pat Mainardi, didn’t it?  Let’s move on, shall we?

Even Angela’s clothes got represented by my Barbies.  One of my dolls had this particular teal skirt and yellow jacket combo that she liked to wear to work, and if you could see it, you would recognize it as straight out of Angela Bower’s closet.

I suppose it isn’t surprising that I like Angela.  She manages her career much more capably than she manages her personal life and that is of course the M.O. of all of my favorite TV women.  Angela is so much a career woman that some of the show’s best moments comes when Angela loses her job in a special two-part episode.  (Check out the guy with the red belt, just because.)

This is one of my favorite episodes of Who’s the Boss? because it features Angela letting loose.  When Mona calls her “awkward,” she isn’t exaggerating.  Angela is much more comfortable at work than at play.  When she makes her joke about Bank of America (such a corporate sense of humor she has) and then gives her speech about the importance of vacations, even though she is wearing her vacation clothes (how ’80s Barbie is that dress?), she is very much in her element in that conference room among those dour, be-suited men.  When I was eight, that was the kind of life I imagined I would have, and it was very much the kind of life my Barbies had.  Of course, somewhere along the way I realized I didn’t have what they call business acumen (or interest) and I was much more suited to a career that involved reading and writing (and parenthetical asides, apparently).  Still, Angela Bower and Who’s the Boss? have a special place in my heart because they showed my Barbies and me how to kick it career-woman-style.

Guys, I just love Melissa & Joey.  There is almost nothing else to say about it.  I love it and that’s that.

What we have here is a show designed for my particular demographic: people who remember and maybe even watched Blossom, Clarissa Explains It All, and Sabrina, The Teenage Witch.  The hitch, however, is that Melissa & Joey is aimed at us as if we were still twelve.  The situation—orphaned kids living with their cool aunt and her newly-hired, also cool nanny/housekeeper—is the kind of thing twelve-year-olds really go for.  ABC Family knows this because ABC Family is a network full of shows for twelve-year-olds.

In addition to relying on the shows of yore I’ve already mentioned, Melissa & Joey borrows heavily from Who’s The Boss? not just in plot but in points of humor.  Even though it is 2011, we are still laughing about how Joe is a man but he’s a housekeeper and how Mel is a woman but she doesn’t know how to cook.  If not for the kids’ ubiquitous electronic devices, I would think the show were set in the ’80s.

All this is not explaining why I like this show.  Well, first you have to understand how much I like Who’s The Boss?  Despite the tired sexist jokes, Who’s The Boss? speaks to the part of my childhood that idolized the career woman.  Angela Bower was a big time advertising executive and she didn’t have time to cook and clean her house.  So she hired Tony Danza.  What’s not to like about that?

Now, Joey Lawrence is no Tony Danza, and Melissa & Joey will never be Who’s The Boss?  But if you knew how much I like iCarly, you wouldn’t be surprised that I like this other show that seems made for twelve-year-olds and sometimes involves wacky hijinks.  Sometimes, it’s nice just to laugh because Melissa Joan Hart said, “I’m beloved and adored.  I’m bedored.”  It isn’t complicated.  It doesn’t make my brow furrow like the use of “I Kissed a Girl” to demonstrate solidarity tonight on Glee.  That kind of shit just hurts my head, and sometimes I don’t want my head to hurt when I watch TV.  Sometimes I just want to look at something that reminds me of the ’90s and makes me laugh.

Today it has been one year since my aunt Bev died.  After her funeral, my uncle Mike and I were standing outside the church and he pulled this from the pocket of his suit.

He asked me if I knew what it was.  I said I thought it was a chip clip; that’s what it looks like, right?  It does seem like an odd item for a funeral home to put its logo on, though.  Other funeral homes have key chains and pens.  Uncle Mike couldn’t remember where or when he’d gotten the clip.  He said he had worn that suit to so many funerals that he couldn’t distinguish one from another.  I had been depressed already, but that thought really got to me, especially since I’m pretty sure my uncle Mike has more than one suit.

He gave me the clip and I put it in my purse.  I’ve cleaned out my purse a couple times since that day, but I always put the funeral home clip back into it.  It’s a memento from a funeral I didn’t attend, and even though I have other mementos from Aunt Bev’s funeral, those remind me of Aunt Bev.  This one reminds me of her funeral.

Every time I step out of the parking garage into the bright, crisp fall morning that is already lighting up the campus, I feel like I’m in the opening sequence of a movie about an optimistic, but totally unprepared, young college (you’ll still give me “young,” right?) instructor who tries hard in all the wrong ways and none of the right ones and is secretly writing a ground-breaking novel.  “Pennies on the Track” by Amy Ray is of course the song that scores the moment.