Fall TV First Impressions: NEW COMEDY

Okay, so I'm going to try and turn my many, many opinions about television into a weekly blog item. I talk and think about shows so much, I might as well write about them too.

So introducing the first category of TV impressions...NEW COMEDY!
Now, I am a college student and do not have time to watch every show on earth, so these are just a select number of shows I chose to tune in to. I will also have a post up soon about some of my favorite returning shows, so look out for that.


Up All Night: Wednesdays, NBC

I may be alone in thinking this, but this looks like the most promising new show of the season! Following the debacle of Running Wilde, it’s nice to see Will Arnett in a role that humanizes him but allows him to make some of the same kind of goofy-yet-jerky mistakes that made GOB my favorite character in Arrested Development. I also think Christina Applegate is underrated as a comic actress—her chemistry with Maya Rudolph and Will Arnett make this whole show sparkle.
I also think there are several things about this show that are commendable on a kind of social commentary level. Reagan and Chris might be having a rough time adjusting to true adulthood and parenthood, but they aren’t the typical juvenile, incompetent types that would have populated this show perhaps five years ago. They really try hard and do their best—and the greatest part is that this couple is not constantly at each other’s throats. I don’t think the inversion of Chris being a stay-at-home dad and Reagan being a working mom is necessarily worthy of commendation, but I do think the show’s portrayal of their relationship and partnership is.

New Girl: Tuesdays, FOX
I had mixed feelings going into this. I admit I am not the biggest fan of Zooey Deschanel—I used to love her, back when she did The Good Girl and her short stint on Weeds, but since then my respect and admiration of her has pretty seriously waned. I also think Fox may have overexposed this show a bit, but I guess the tremendous ratings the premiere got will contend that it was a smart move.
Zooey as Jess was so-so…I found many of her lines/hijinks to be hit-or-miss (for instance: loved the “your boob is resting on a plate of chicken” bit, did not so much love the jeggings bit) and her comic timing is just not as good as it could be. However, I am a huge fan of Max Greenfield from his Veronica Mars days, so I might watch just to see how his “douche-jar-filling” character evolves.
My one major grevience to air, though, has to do with the first scene. Getting dumped while naked? I realize Forgetting Sarah Marshall was not exactly Judd Apatow’s most well-known piece, but I should think that seeing Jason Segal’s wang would rank pretty high in Moments of Pop Culture. Enough that this opening seems ripped off.

2 Broke Girls: Mondays, CBS
So, I have to say this is the show I was most excited about during pilot season. This has something to do with the fact that it is one of the few shows created by a lady , but is mainly due to my ongoing love affair with Kat Dennings…yes, she may play the same snarky I’m-too-self-aware-to-really-be-a-hipster character, but I think she is gorgeous and I love how genuine and awkward she was in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. She was even charming as the confused, outcast, hot-for-teacher ingénue in Daydream Nation, despite my many problems with that movie. All this to say my love of Kat Dennings knows no bounds.
Or so I thought. Because after the first two minutes of 2 Broke Girls, I started to think that maybe boring, blond Beth Behrs is the true star of this show. And I know it’s not Kat Denning’s fault that her first lines were so overwritten and cringe-worthy, but she’s the one on screen delivering them. For anyone who did not see this show or somehow missed the opening, we basically open on Dennings’s character Max at work as a waitress in a dingy Brooklyn diner and suddenly—le gasp—some customer is rude and unappreciative of her! So Max goes all snarky bitch on their ass and takes them to task in a way-too-long monologue that cuts them down to size for daring to snap at her.
Okay, I agree, snapping at your waitress is a huge no-no, but a.) Max would be so used to this—and worse—that it probably would not even register at this point. And b.) one of her lines is literally “I wear knit hats because it’s cold outside, you wear knit hats because of Coldplay.” This line is straight terrible, and I hope they fire whoever let it out of the first draft. Not only is it trying way, way too hard (I was frankly surprised that the offending hipsters didn’t start laughing immediately) but also because anyone who has ever met a hipster knows that Coldplay is just about the last band on Earth hipsters admit to liking. Coldplay is awesome I think they are talented and wonderful, but hipsters mainly try to deny the universal pleasantness of their sound in favor of weird sonically dissonant bands like Animal Collective, which literally frighten my cat out of the room when I put them on.
All this to say that this is a show about young, hip financially insecure ladies living in NYC that is ostensibly written by a youngish, hip lady comedian, and yet it somehow still seems like it is written by a forty-something white man who is trying to imagine what young, hip ladies might sound like based on information cobbled together from Wikipedia and the movie Juno.
This is not to say there was nothing redeeming about this pilot. In fact, I think in term of structure and plot-arc, this was one of the best pilots. It set up the situation nicely (two very dissimilar girls working and living together due to unlikely circumstances) and shows the gradual beginnings of a bond between them. I think the premise is cute, but could fall victim to too many forced sitcom-y tropes. I guess we’ll have to see!


That's all for now! Tell me what you thought about these shows, or if there are any new shows I should be checking out. And look out for my First Impressions of returning favorites, including Parks & Recreation, Glee, The Office and more!

ROW80 Check-in

Oh dear! The weeks have gotten away from me. I've been severely neglecting this blog, and A Round of Words in general for the past month. I could blame it on finals and spending time with my family and starting my new job, but really, when isn't there something happening in my life to distract me?

As for my goals, I'm about half-way to where I want to be with Zombies!!, plus today I had a bit of a plot break-through, so I may be able to pull this one out. I'm totally stalled on 101, though. Just...completely stuck. I'm going to let it sit for a while, maybe all summer, and see if I can get into it again. I still really love the idea, I'm just not sure where it wants to go.

Instead of dwelling on all the slacking I've been doing, I will share with you what I HAVE been doing in the scant amount of downtime I've had between finishing school and starting work.

I read the second book in the Hunger Games trilogy, and I might summon a blog post about that soon, but suffice to say I enjoyed it and I'm waiting for a friend of mine to finish book 3 so I can read it. I also have read Demetri Martin's new book This is a Book (and, actually, MET Demetri Martin at a book signing while I was at it). In the same vein, I'm currently reading Tina Fey's Bossypants, which is as hilarious as promised, and surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly) pointed and poignant. I just love her. I think I could write an entire blog devoted to my love of Tina Fey. I'll settle for writing up a post about her and probably Amy Poehler and Kristin Wiig and a dozen other hilarious ladies once I've seen Bridesmaids again.

Speaking of which, some good movies I've seen include the aforementioned Bridesmaids (seriously, this is a movie for all dudes and ladies who enjoy hilarity with a side of soul-crushing hopelessness topped off with a happy ending), Midnight in Paris (which is my first Woody Allen movie--for shame!), Hangover Part II (okay, yes, it is the first movie all over again, practically to a T, but damn if I didn't die laughing in the theater). I also went through most of Stanley Kubrick's stuff during reading week (because obviously, I wasn't studying, who does that?) and I have to say I absolutely loved Fullmetal Jacket and I am definitely adding that to my list of all-time favorite movies.

In other news, So You Think You Can Dance has finally started again! I honestly could not wait for this show to be back on the air and I'm so glad it is. Now if Weeds and True Blood would start again I'd be all set this summer...

ROW80 May 4 Check-in

Happy Star Wars Day everyone!

This week is "Dead Week" at school, also known as "RRR" week, which to me stands for Rest, Relaxation and Re-organize the sock drawer. It also means I have plenty of time for writing!

The downside is that I have not been utilizing that time, because I've become very invested in, erm, sleeping. Sleeping as much as humanly possible. It's actually becoming a bit of a problem. Getting up late really drastically affects both my mood and my productivity. It affects them negatively, is the thing. So, starting tomorrow I must go back to getting up before 10!

I have been writing almost every day, which is a plus, but I've only been churning out about 200-300 words a day, which is...decidedly not a plus. I figure if I just power through this rough patch, I can go back to writing up to 1200 words a day. I find trying to divide my time between three projects is a little taxing, so I'm planning to focus on Zombies!! until the semester ends.

Gahh! Even this blog post was kind of tough to crank out. I think they call it Dead Week because you just feel like a dead person. Or...dare I say it? Like the undead. End-of-the-semester zombie-ism. Hopefully I can get past it.

EDIT: After writing this post, and after a brief English final review with my favorite professor, I sat down and wrote...drumroll...1300 words! Here's to breaking through rough patches through sheer willpower. And lots and lots of iced tea.

ROW80 May 1 Check-in

Oh man oh man I missed the last check-in! That was only because I was enjoying delicious food and wine in San Francisco though, so I figure it's okay.

My semester is wrapping up so I've been ostensibly busy with writing papers and studying for finals and things, but I've done pretty well this week. If I can write another thousand words by the end of today I'll have met my word goal (5,000 words a week.)

Zombies!! has been going, but at a more plodding pace than before. It turns out I am really, really rusty writing action scenes, and I've basically had to slog through like two and half chapters of action the past few weeks. Pretty much done with that chunk though.

I haven't made any progress on 101 this week, but I do have a new project to work on! It's another short story, and I am writing it for the recently announced Machine of Death volume 2! Hurrah! If you aren't familiar with the original Machine of Death anthology, I suggest you get familiar. It's a collection of short stories all based on a concept that spawned from one of my absolute favorite webcomics. I am definitely not missing a chance to submit to volume 2! I hope to be done with the first draft of the story by the end of the month so I will be ready to submit it by the deadline, which is July 15. It means I'm adding a little to my RoW80 goals, but I think I can manage.

Well, until next time, go check out some of the other RoW80 people or go take a look at my A Picture a Day project on tumblr.

ROW80 April 24 Check-in

Holy smokes, it's nearly been a month of this crazy ROW80 life!

Since I don't particularly feel like complaining how I've only written 200 words this week, I would like to take this opportunity to talk about all the wonderful things I feel ROW80 has brought me. Even if this particular week wasn't particularly productive in terms of the actual challenge, I do think it's a good example of how ROW80 has extended its influence into all parts of my life.

Truthfully folks, and this is brings me a bit of shame to admit, I haven't really Been a Writer in a number of years. That is to say, I haven't regularly written/revised/brainstormed/etc. for any period longer than a couple of weeks since I was about fourteen. I guess I can blame this on high school or something, but there are plenty of people out there who maintain full-time jobs and write routinely, so I think it's a failing of my own character for the past few years.

So now that I'm starting the process of writing routinely again, I've noticed a few things. The first of which is that it makes me happy. Really, truly happy. I don't just limit this to good days of writing, either. Obviously a day where I can sit down and mash out 2,000 words in two hours is going to be a good day. But there's a much more long-term effect going on. I feel productive. I feel like a person who is contributing to the world in some way, even though so far I'm the only one reading the crazy things I write. I feel like an interesting person. I feel more engaged with other people. All of these "side-effects" may not come as a surprise to you, but they did surprise me.

So, while my ROW80 goals may have fallen by the wayside this week, I do not feel that I have failed myself in any way. I'm finishing up my semester. I'm making awesome plans for the summer (see post below on how I scored a paid internship in LA!) I feel like I've got a handle on life in a way that I haven't before. I'm attributing this, in part, to ROW80 for encouraging me to have goals and make plans and stop just waiting around for things to happen. When I'm writing, I'm making things happen and asserting my control in this weird, fictional universe, but I think it's bleeding over into my actual universe. In the best possible way.

The Search for an Internship 2011

Well as some of you may know, I'm finishing up my freshman year of college at the best public university in the WORLD (yup, University of California Berkeley, that's us!) so I've been frantically trying to iron out some plans for summer.

Usually my summers go like this:
1) Hang out with my family (10%)
2) Sit around and watch TV. Usually go through one or two seasons of some show each week. (30%)
3) Sleep (20%)
3) Occasionally see my friends. Usually in the capacity of going to see a movie or eating some kind of delicious food. (5%)
4) Hang out with my cats (20%)
5) Babysit for a couple of weeks in order to keep up with my astronomical spending on Starbucks coffee and tea as well as my insatiable desire to buy clothes (10%)
6) Write/do other productive things (5%)

So, awesome in terms of my laziness/relaxation, not so awesome in terms of like, my future and general contribution to society. This summer, I decided, would be different. I was going to do something. I was going to get a job. I was going to have a PLAN.

This was all about half a month ago. Immediately after this, I got an e-mail from my old college counselor at my high school with a list of 74 PAID summer internships in the arts. WOOHOO! It was a dream come true! But -- I didn't have an up-to-date resume. I've never done anything awesome enough to get me an internship! There were probably a million more qualified, more awesome students applying to the EXACT SAME THINGS. What was I to do?

What I did was this: I made my resume. I made it super nice and awesome looking and amazing. I reminded myself of all the worthwhile, productive things I'd ever done in my life. There were more than I thought! I wrote cover letters. I wrote more cover letters. I went to see the Dodos play in Memorial Glade (wait...). I read Overqualified by Joey Comeau to remind myself that I was by far not the first person to get frustrated with the whole applying-for-jobs process.

I sent my applications. I waited. Two hours after sending them in, one organization got back to me. They wanted to have a phone interview with me. An interview! I was excited. I was nervous. I convinced myself I was one charming motherfucker and they'd be lucky to have me.

Apparently it worked, because the next thing I knew I was getting an e-mail saying that out of all the interviews they'd conducted, I was the best fit. BEST FIT! They wanted me! It took me, oh, about two seconds to accept their offer, and there you have it. I have an amazing opportunity waiting for me in LA when I return for the summer. I could not be more thrilled.

ROW80 April 20 Check-in

Well...I more or less managed to get nothing done so far this week. I've been caught up in a flurry of cover letters, resumes, phone-interviews and bouts of anxiety as I try to secure a internship in Los Angeles for the summer. A summer that is creeping up on me quicker than I expected! I honestly can't believe my freshman year of college is almost over, but I suppose that's for another post.

In any case, I can't quite get away with saying I did nothing on my ROW80 stuff this week, because I am still faithfully taking pictures every day (although I was sadly without my camera for one of the best moments of today--catching a squirrel red-handed as he snuck into the open window of a parked car!) Additionally, I got a lot done Sunday, which according to the way we Americans read the calendar, is the beginning of the week. So THERE. In fact, I wrote over 2,000 words on Sunday alone, and got some more out of 101. I'm starting to see the broader picture of that story. Maybe. I also tried out a new coffee shop to write with. I'm not sure it was an entirely positive experience, but perhaps one day I might go back.

Anyway, I realize it's been a while since I actually linked the ROW80 website, so here it is. Go give those guys some encouragement instead of this failure!

ROW80 April 17 Check-in

Good, good week! I got to see one of my favorite bands play on campus yesterday which was extremely fun and wonderful. If you've never heard them, you should definitely check out The Dodos. My favorite song is Red and Purple, but pretty much all of their songs are winners. Horny Hippies is also good. (I have gotten a lot of really good music lately and I think it's contributed somewhat to the excellent writing sessions I've been having.)

As for writing, things are still going well with Zombies!!, but can't say the same for 101, which is officially on the back-burner as of right now. I had to devote a lot of time to applying for internships in LA for the summer this week, but despite that I managed to surpass my word goal for the week!

I actually wrote the most words last night, which was a surprise in a bunch of different ways. For one thing, I'd already accomplished my word goal for the week. For another, I had not planned on writing at all, in any way. I was just sitting at my computer (welcome to the world of my exciting Saturday nights) and suddenly felt ready to write the next scene. So I did. (To the excellent soundtrack of Sleigh Bells' Treats .) And I managed to do that thing where I leave off in a place I'll be excited to pick up at next time I sit down. I rarely accomplish this because my instinct is just to keep writing until I don't have anything left. But I happened to get interrupted last night so...hooray for interruptions? I guess they can be a good thing every now and again!

ROW80 April 13 Check-in

Today is a beautiful day!

I don't know if it's ROW80, the fact that it really feels like spring (finally!) or just all the coffee I've been drinking, but I am in the best spirits I think I've been in since the beginning of the semester. I am wearing adorable outfits, waking up early (well today not included), and just generally feeling like I am kicking ass and taking names. So that's all very nice.

This week in Zombies!!
I have already written a combined 4,000 words on Zombies!! and it's only Wednesday. I even took yesterday off from writing so I could trek out to SF to visit my cousin. Although I guess I didn't technically take the day off entirely because I did scribble out a skeleton of a scene while I was on BART. That then became the scene I'm currently entrenched in today. I'm hoping after I take care of a few dumb school things I can finish off that scene and maybe even reach my weekly word goal today!

Does that mean I'll be taking off the rest of the week? No, but I might have to take it easy with writing because I do have two papers due next week, so I imagine a big chunk of my weekend will have to be devoted for that, so it's just wonderful luck that I'm doing so well on word goals this week. I didn't even plan it or anything.

There is still no new progress on 101. I'm reading The Road right now though (as well as Their Eyes Were Watching God -- for the second time this year -- for English) and I'm hoping this will spark something for me for my short story. The Road doesn't have too much in common with my short story, but somehow they seem linked in my mind so we'll see.

I am hoping to post something on this blog that is not just ROW80 check-in business. Might not happen this week (because of aforementioned papers) but we'll see.

ROW80 April 10 Check-in

Official Round of Words in 80 Days site.

So not a lot has happened since the last check-in, except I decided to re-orient how I do these check-in things. Rather than go day by day, which invariably results in some pretty boring commentary about my day-to-day life, I'd rather just talk about how each of my projects is going between check-ins. Cool? Cool.

To recap, these projects include:
1. Zombies!! Full-length novel. The plan is to complete 50,000 words of the manuscript by the end of ROW80
2. 101 short-story. The plan is to have this first draft finished by the end of ROW80
3. Write 5,000 words total each week, split up however I want between these two projects.
4. Take a picture every day!

Zombies!!: So, things have been progressing nicely for Zombies!! and I think the entirety of my word count total for this week came from that (which says something about how short-story writing is going for my perennially short-story-phobic brain, but more on that later). I am currently 9,000 words into the manuscript, although I should provide a little bit of a caveat to that number and say that around half of that was written before ROW80 even started, and that most of these 9,000 words are essentially 2nd, 3rd or even 4th drafts of things I have already written in the past. There are a few areas where I have literally just lifted passages of texts that existed in earlier incarnations of this project. So the numbers for this first section are a bit misleading, but even taking that into account, this is going smoothly. Since last check-in, I have added a total of 3,100 words to the manuscript, although like I mentioned before some of that was technically written before. I am just getting to the point where I can move beyond where previous “drafts” of this have left off, so that’s quite exciting.

101: Now that this project is no longer a shiny new idea, I have started to realize that, oh, okay, I need to actually be getting at something with this, and so far I just haven’t hit upon what that is. So this project has been a little stagnant this week, but I haven’t lost hope or interest. I feel like I just need to wait and be patient to figure out what is tying this thing together. So far it stands at a loopy, disjointed 1,500 words.

Pic-A-Day: My picture-diary project is going swimmingly. I have held true this week and taken (at least) one picture every day, including a bunch of this nice drive I took with some friends last Sunday (technically before ROW80 started I guess but oh well!) Pictures can be perused on my Tumblr. They’re kind of mixed in with some other silly things, most of which have very little to do with my actual life, so there’s an interesting juxtaposition there.

Before I go try to tackle today’s writing session, I just want to quickly thank any and all of you fellow-ROWers (and any non ROWers) who have stumbled onto this little blog. Thanks for giving me a read, and thanks to everyone who has popped in to give me words of encouragement! I am trying to be a little more open about reaching out to people in this crazy world, and that includes internet-people too! So I may be stopping by some other ROW blogs and I might just leave a comment or two.

ROW80 April 6 check-in

Well, the time has arrived for my first official Round of Words in 80 Days check in!

I actually slightly changed my goals since my first post on Thursday. I got a little more ambitious, what can I say?

So to recap, my goals are:
1. Work on short-story (working title: "101")
2. Write first 50,000* words of full length novel Zombies!!
3. Write at least 5,000** words per week
4. Take a picture every day!

*this used to be 25,000 words
**this used to be 2,100 words

Monday -- So, I have to admit I got very excited after officially signing up on Thursday. I started writing stuff before the official start date. Which was good because I didn't get a whole lot done on Monday since I had a psych test the next morning. I did manage to get some writing done in the hour I had between English and my study date (at Cafe Strada, of course. I may have to dedicate an entire blog post about Cafe Strada soon, but just trust me, it's....it's magical) so that's good! I do not have an actual word count on what I got done Monday, because I am atrociously bad at keeping track of word counts. More on that later.

Tuesday -- My amazing roommate's 19th birthday was Tuesday so I had to spend a good amount of time taking care of IMPORTANT BIRTHDAY THINGS, but in the evening she had to get some work done, so I made her go to Strada with me where I spent 90 minutes happily pounding out the end of Chapter 3 of Zombies!! I also had time to transcribe the notes I'd jotted down for 101 during lunch.

Wednesday -- This is today. I've just sat down to write in the library. Probably could have spent the afternoon being more productive, but I really want to finish Breakfast of Champions before my dad sends me my copy of The Road so I spent a moderate amount of time reading (and napping).

Total word-counts since last check-in:
1. 101: 500 words
2. Zombies!!: 685

So far so good!

A Round of Words: Goals

Hello, non-existent blog followers! It has been quite a while since I posed, but rest assured nothing monumental has happened since my last post. At least not to me.
But this coming month is the Round of Words in 80 Days challenge. I found out about this (earlier today...like an hour ago) from Claire Legrand's blog.

I do not know Claire Legrand, but I'm sure she will be thrilled to have her blog linked to and read by my multitudes of followers. Anyway that post kind of explains the whole idea about Round of Words in 80 Days (hereby referred to as ROW80) so I won't get into it in too much detail here. I will just say that I like the idea of it, because it is flexible and because it is personal. I have done NaNoWriMo in the past, and as a college student I'm just sadly not equipped with enough time to attempt it again anytime in the near future. But ROW80 is perfect, because I get to set my own goals and decide what I want to accomplish.

The only caveat to that is that I am meant to check in on my blog (here) every Wednesday and Sunday. This is good, because it means I will be utilizing this blog more often, which I should be anyway.

So, I guess now would be a good time to outline my goals for ROW80. I have done my best to keep them realistic, because I am in college and I do have about 4 more papers, not to mention finals, to contend with as well.

ROW80 Round 2 Goals:
1. Write (yet to be titled) short-story.
2. Write (at least) first 50,000 words of 1st draft of novel (also yet to be titled, affectionately referred to from here on out as Zombies!!. With two exclamation marks.
3. Not a separate goal, but to facilitate #s one and 2, I will set a weekly word goal of 5,00 words. This is just about 700 words a day (a little more), but I don't yet have to discipline to write every single day, so a weekly word count makes more sense for me. If I'm planning to write a short story of about 7,000 words (#1) and 50,000 words of novel (#2) then this works out perfectly. I have already written about 4,000 words of the novel. Just to make the parameters absolutely clear, the weekly/daily word count WILL count words written during planning/outlining stages. Mostly this just affects the short story, since I am almost nearly done with my outline for the novel.
4. Not technically a word challenge, but something I have wanted to start doing: take a picture every day. Of anything. Post said pictures to tumblr, facebook, etc.

So there you have it. My first ROW80 goals. I will be back in a week (Wednesday) to check in on how it's going. (ROW80 starts April 4 and runs until June 23.)

Facebook Drinking Game

To be played while looking at your, or your friend's, newsfeed.

Take one drink when:
+someone posts lyrics as a status
+Someone changes their relationship status
+someone bitches about love
+someone bitches about bitches
+someone posts vague and seemingly poingant observations about life
+someone posts sarcastic/ironic thing making fun of the above
+someone posts pictures of a party
+someone drunk posts/comments
+someone has a conversation on a comment to someone else's status
+someone changes their profile picutre to include a SO

Comedy Night Done Meta?

So I, along with something like 14 million other Americans, love to watch NBC's Thursday Comedy Night. I mean, honestly, this must be one of the best line-ups to grace network TV since...well, long before I was born, probably.

If you are for some reason not familiar with the comedy gold that is Thursday nights on NBC, let me break it down for you:

8pm -- Community starring Joel McHale of The Soup fame as an ex-lawyer caught cheating the system who has to go back to community college and get his degree, teaming up with a ragtag group of misfits along the way.
8:30 -- Perfect Couples. I don't watch this show so it's not really part of this post. I do like Olivia Munn though!
9pm -- The Office. I don't think I need to explain this one. It single-handedly brought back "that's what she said" as a viable joke option, but we can't fault it for that.
9:30 -- Parks and Recreation has finally returned to NBC with Amy Poehler leading an awesome cast made even more awesome with the addition of Rob Lowe (as a dedicated fan of West Wing, I have to say GENIUS) and Adam Scott (who I am currently mildly in love with after his staring role on the short-lived Party Down).
10pm -- 30 Rock. My loyalty to The Office does not quite allow me to say that this is the funniest show ever made, ever. But, um...it is. Tina Fey is everything I hope to be and probably never will because she has a kind of complete and total genius that only manifests itself once in a century. The last person with this much genius was probably Einstein, and he was not even close to being as hot as Tina Fey is.

One thing I've noticed about all these shows is how much self-referencing they all do. NBC apparently likes to order their sitcoms with extra meta-sauce. I mean, you have The Office and Parks and Rec, which are "mockumentary style" with its characters constantly self-referencing and breaking the fourth wall.

Then there's 30 Rock, which is about making a TV show (admittedly a much more lowbrow one than 30 Rock), a premise that is ripe for making meta jokes.

And even Community is not safe, because while the characters don't talk directly to the camera or talk about making shows, there's the character Abed who maybe kinda sorta thinks he lives in a television show (and yet he doesn't seem to realize he does) and is constantly hanging lampshades on everything his cohorts do. They have episodes that parody genres, which include Mafia movies, astronaut movies, and post-apocalyptic movies.

All this to say, meta is in. Meta is so in that probably it is meta to say so.
Ok well time to watch more Community...

The Hunger Games, pt. 2

The fact that this second post is coming so quickly should tell you about how quickly I finished Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. I stayed up until four am reading it, and then quickly finished it before my 2:40 flight into Berkeley today. I guess you could say that is proof that I was proved wrong about the book, but actually, I wasn't.

Like I thought, once the setting and exposition about the characters was through, the book became every bit as meaty and compelling as I wanted it to be. I devoured it. The book is divided into three parts, and the second part sizzles with action, conflict and tension. It follows classic dramatic structure to a T, a trait I appreciate in a primarily action-driven story. But I still have my problems with the first part and, to some degree, the third.

It really, I think, comes back to the use of first-person present-tense. Just no matter what gruesome death is occurring, it still feels very young-adult fiction-y. Obviously not a problem if that is what you are aiming for, but when I'm reading young adult fiction, I want to forget what genre I'm reading because I get too caught up in the story. That never happened with The Hunger Games. While I was invested in the characters and their conflicts, I never forgot that this was a book aimed at young adults.

That said, I will be continuing the series at some point in the future to see what fate awaits our heroine Katniss.

The Hunger Games

Today I went to the bookstore to spend the gift card my dad got me for my 19th birthday. I've been hearing a lot of good things about The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins, like how it has very adult themes at its core and it's well plotted and blah blah blah, the new Harry Potter, so I picked it up.

I am about a chapter and a half in and so far the book is a far cry from the "mature" and "perfectly paced" (sorry John Green) book I'd been promised, I have found myself reading, well, a young-adult fantasy book. Harry Potter defies this conventional genre classification somehow--it's a somewhat indescribable quality of JK Rowling's writing that, aside from being enthralling and compelling, the books are, quite simply, literature.

Not so with Suzanne Collins. The main ideas of the book are intriguing and very salient in this age of reality television and, let's face it, terrible economy. The whole idea of the Hunger Games, while far-fetched, is interesting enough to merit my continued reading. But so far, the writing is just not there. For one thing, Collins makes use of the first-person present-tense, which can sometimes come off gimmick-y, as it does in this book.

Mostly, though, it is the colossal info-dump that Collins deploys throughout the first two chapters that has really turned me off. I am bored and frustrated with the constant asides about everything from why the main character is nick-named Catnip (some inane story about being misheard and followed around by a bobcat) to the rules of the reaping ceremony that takes place in the first chapter.

It's not that these details themselves are boring. Some of them are actually quite crucial to the story. But due to the first-person narration, Collins can get away with using cheap info-dumps instead of letting the information come out organically, or even--gasp!--letting us figure it out for ourselves. That seems a concept which is particularly lost on Collins, because so far everything from the purpose of The Hunger Games to Katniss's feelings about her family has been way over-explained.

Here's a good example of that -- a scene where our main character Katniss is thinking about her younger sister, Prim, who is having her name put into the drawing for the Hugner Games for the first time (tesserae, as it was explained like six times, is food and oil you get in exchange for entering your name in the drawing more than the required number of times).

I hug her, because I know these next few hours will be terrible for her. Her first reaping. She's about as safe as you can get, since she's only entered once. I wouldn't let her take out any tesserae. But she's worried about me. That the unthinkable might happen.

Okay, how much of this paragraph do we really need? The first sentence, sure, that's fine. The second? Okay, a fragment for dramatic value. But the part about her being safe, well, if you'd read the long exposition on how the reaping works, you definitely already know this. The part about not letting her take out any tesserae? Definitely cut that. We already know how much Katniss cares about her sister (since it's been explained to us like ten times), I would guess this by myself. Or even a sentence about how Katniss took out extra tesserae, without saying that it was in place of her sister would be better. As for Prim being worried, I'd much rather see that in her actions that have Katniss tell me. After all, how does she know?

Another example of too much telling over showing, which occurs after Katniss volunteers to take her younger sister's place in the Hunger Games:

At first one, then another, then almost every member of the crowd touches the three middle fingers of their left hand to their lips and holds it out to me. It is an old and rarely used gesture of our district, occasionally seen at funerals. It means thanks, it means admiration, it means goodbye to someone you love.

How much more emotionally effective would that part have been if we already knew the meaning and context of that gesture? If, for instance, we had seen someone perform it at a funeral, or a ceremony honoring a district hero. Katniss's father, as it was explained a few times, died tragically in a coal mine and was given a posthumous medal of valor. Why couldn't Suzanne Collins show us this funeral/ceremony and explain the gesture in that context? It would have made the above scene much more moving.

There are tons of other examples of this clunky, over-telling type of writing. This is the type of writing I expect to see in mediocre young-adult books. I was told this book was something a bit different, but so far I feel too much like I'm reading a kids book. I never feel that way when reading Harry Potter. JK Rowling assumes her readers can figure certain things out on their own instead of spelling them out to us as if we were idiots (or, you know, children). That is the difference between crappy teen books and real literature.

I am going to continue reading this book to see if it will improve. I hope that now that we know the general workings of the world these characters inhabit, we'll get more action and less info-dump. We'll see.

Hammock Dilemma

So one of the best things to date that my sister and I have invented is something called "the Hammock Dilemma."

The idea of the Hammock Dilemma originated when my sister and I were on vacation in Fiji. It was evening, we were staying at this pretty cool place on the beach that also had a pool. It being Fiji, there were just a shit-ton of hammocks tied to palm trees. I'm not even kidding. It's not a stereotype, it's real.

My sister and I were sitting in one of these aforementioned hammocks reading an excellent book called Overthrow* when it occurred to us that it might be awesome to go for a swim. The only thing left to decide was--should we swim in the ocean or in the pool? And then there was the enticing possibility of remaining in the hammock with our book. What were we to do? We were paralyzed by our inability to chose one possibility over the other. They were all equally wonderful, and would likely all equally result in us being satisfied and happy.

This is a classic Hammock Dilemma, my friends. It's when you are rendered immobile by a choice between two (or more) awesome alternatives.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because I'm experiencing such a dilemma right now and I don't know what to do! Should I have cookies and cream ice-cream, or peppermint tea with mint Milano cookies? My inability to choose has led me to write this entirely asinine #firstworldproblems ridden blog post.

*Overthrow, by Stephen Kinzer, is a great book that I recommend to anyone who has at all, even the slightest inclination to learn about covert CIA operations that resulted in regime change in other countries. It continues to be one of my favorite non-fiction books of all time.