My Life in TV

“This show is my life”

 

Every six months or so, I become obsessed with a new TV show. It started with Friends (and will, to some degree, always be Friends **head bowed, fist in the air**), then it moved to Sex in the City, Dexter, How I Met Your Mother, and now it is 30 Rock.

Though I’ll refrain from doing so, I have it in mind to include “A moment brought to you by 30 Rock” in each upcoming blog until my obsession runs out because it is clear that Tina Fey, as Liz Lemon, is me. I know I’ve said I’m other television show characters before (relationship-Ross, relationship-Ted, relationship-Loser from any show), but this time I’m serious: I am Liz Lemon. Behold the basic facts:

1. She’s single
2. She often makes bad decisions and gets caught in them
3. She dances in several episodes (which is just funny, and sort of awkward)
4. She’s kind of a nerd
5. She makes up excuses to not hang out with people so she can eat take-out at home and watch tivo’d television shows
6. She’s a writer
7. She bosses around a bunch of weird people who don’t take her seriously
8. She LOVES food, especially unhealthy things, and she is always eating
9. She cannot cook
10. She has terrible luck with men and dating

Here are some highlights from this past week’s viewing (Season 3’s Valentine’s Day episode)

Scene: Liz has accidently asked her hot neighbor (whose mail she illegally read) to go out with her on Valentine’s Day without realizing her mistake. She freaks out about it being “too much pressure” and consults her boss, Jack (Alec Baldwin).

Jack: Well, instead of going out to dinner, why don’t you cook him a nice meal at home.

Liz: You mean, like, stew?

Jack: I absolutely do not mean stew.

Jack segues into his problem of not being able to take his girlfriend out to dinner because instead, they will be sitting through a Catholic Mass.

Jack: All I want to do on Valentine’s Day is go to Plunder’s and eat the lover’s delight.

Liz: That sounds filthy, Jack.

Jack: It is. Imagine a dessert for two: Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream in a pool of cognac, drizzled in the world’s most expensive chocolate [named in Italian], covered with shaved white, black, and clear truffles, and topped with an edible 25 karat gold leaf. Can you imagine anything better?

Liz: I don’t know…have you ever put a donut in the microwave?

(several scenes later)

Drew (the hot neighbor): Wow, that was great stew. Thanks, Liz.

The Murtaugh List

There’s an episode of How I Met Your Mother in which Barney gives himself the challenge to complete every item of the Murtaugh list. This is a list Ted created of things he should no longer do because of his advanced age, which he named in honor of Richard Murtaugh’s whose catchphrase in Lethal Weapon was that “I’m too old for this [Brad*].”

*See Cockney Slang

On my Murtaugh list I must add “going to bed after midnight and waking up at 5:30 a.m. for work.”

Back in the day, I was dubbed a vampire (I ❤ Edward) because it appeared I never slept: I’d stay up late reading or writing or circumnavigating Facebook, and I’d be awake by 6:30 a.m. the next day.

‘Tis no more.

The past two nights I have been up late working on, what I’ll describe as, “personal projects” (fear not; there is nothing explosive built in my garage), and I am WIPED OUT. My eyes won’t open and my head is wobbly and I feel like my movements are hallucinations made in some weird fifth dimension.

On the positive side, I’m too tired to stress out about my lack of preparation for the following day. I just show up to work, cry without tears (too much energy is needed to create them), and sludge into my classroom with an air of accepted defeat. I wasn’t even bother by the fact that when I zombie marched into my last class of the day one minute before it began, I found a stranger in my room ready to observe it as part of an evaluation for the school.

And I was only slightly bothered when my students, in front of said stranger, repeatedly called out that an element necessary for a great story was bacon, and I didn’t react like a charging bull when it became obvious only two of fourteen students did their reading the night before. I politely filled them in as though it were no big deal, and I only made one or two sarcastic comments that came out sounding almost sincere thanks to my lack of ability to inflect: “It’s wonderful that you’ve used the movie as a substitute for reading”; “As much as I’d like you to read aloud the indecipherable comment that’s making you giggle and say, ‘It’d be better with bacon,’ let’s skip that element.”

Perhaps I am too old for this [Brad].