October 18, 2005 - 4:04 PM

The More I Ignore You, The Older I Get

I must be getting old in my young age. For the past couple months, I've found that I have difficulty staying up past 12:15 at night, even on the weekends, and I always wake up around 8:30, even on the weekends. Why, just 6 months ago, I was staying up until 2 or 3, watching TV every night, and sleeping until noon on Saturday and Sunday. Now my internal clock is all regimented and shit. What the hell?

Not only am I running on a biological schedule like some sort of responsible person, I've been going out to shows less and less, it seems. Back in August, I saw Erin McKeown at the revamped Hotel Cafe (coincidentally enough, it was 2 years to the day that I first wrote about seeing her in this diary) and that was it. September, I saw a show with Petracovich (which is where I picked up the CD for you, Ros), Amy Cooper, and Carla Werner; played a show with Angela; caught part of an Anne Heaton/Edie Carey doublebill; and checked out Ger's friends The Sweet Hurt. And this month, I checked out half of a Terami Hirsch/Norman Kim (soph, you should look into him) gig before jogging a block and a half to see Kyler at the Hotel Cafe one Sunday night; and last Friday, Kyler took me to the El Rey theater to see Dar Williams.

One show in August, 4 in September, 2 in October. The number could have and should have been larger, but I skipped out on shows by Missy Higgins, Feist (the day before Tony and Margaret's wedding), Michael Penn, Gemma Hayes, Melissa Ferrick, and a bunch of others. No one to go with me, and no desire to leave my apartment. On the plus-side, though, is the fact that that hermit-ical mindset has allowed me to actually watch my Stories on the TEEvee instead of taping them and waiting 6 months to sift my way through them (I still have a stack of 8 VHS from last season that I've almost given up on watching).

Thus, I have jumped right back into the Gilmore Girls (and it's funny to watch after having seen the sets on the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank in August), re-picked up my Everwood habit, laughed hard at Arrested Development (one Tuesday a few weeks ago, two jokes kept popping up in my head all day from the recently aired episode: Bob Lablaw, and the Analyst/Therapist title for Tobias), and pined for Scrubs. Lost is building up a back log again on my tapes, though, since I still haven't gotten through the first season (I ended up buying the DVD set since it would be easier to watch 'em that way than to search through my tapes to find the right chronological airing order), which means I'm S.O.L. as far as Veronica Mars goes (I caught the first episode, but strangely enough, I've been out every wednesday since then).

Of the new shows this season, I've liked Kitchen Confidential and picked it over How I Met Your Mother (the acting of the two main guys who aren't Neil Patrick Harris annoys the shit out of me...the lead actor seems to be channeling David Schwimmer and Jimmy Fallon in a very irksome way; NPH's character Bernard kinda reminds me of Phil, though, which is funny); dropped Prison Break because of its implausibility; let Bones go because it's up against the Girls (and is mostly flash and not so much substance); allowed My Name is Earl to stay in my programming because it has its moments and has promise, more so than Commander in Chief which doesn't wrestle that Tuesday 9 PM slot away from Jason Lee; and booted Threshold because a good cast with crap material is only as good as the crap from whence it came.

The O.C. is no longer on my radar; the West Wing, while having a resurgence towards the end of last season, still hasn't earned my eyes back (Sorkin and Schlamme are working on a series that goes behind the scenes of a sketch-comedy series, kinda like Sports Night did with ESPN Sportscenter type shows...exciting, no?); I haven't watched the Fox Sunday cartoon block in years; Grey's Anatomy and Desperate Housewives stopped "doing it" for me after a handful of episodes; and whatever else I've tried to sit through has left me sad. I even tried the cable outlets (FX, TNT) and was surprised to hear such gratuitous use of the word "shit" in its various manifestation and see soooo much skin in place of good stories and interesting characters.

The rest of my time has been spent knocking DVDs off of my Netflix queue. Great rentals like Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior (ridiculous how off the hook the action sequences are; good
ones like Garden State (surprised at how much I didn't love the movie) and the anime series Wolf's Rain; mediocre ones like Eulogy (yes, they used one of the Adrianne songs that I mixed very prominently over a scene, but it wasn't the version that I mixed) and The Missing (Cate Blanchett is a fucking brilliant actress); and terrible ones like Get a Clue (the tv-movie version of the best book in the world The Westing Game).

Now Listening To : The Shins - off of a mix that Margaret's cousin Jean made for me
Random Thought :

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