I Got Off the Couch!

I'm feeling quite a bit better today. Hooray! Of course, I had to spend today at work, so that's less of a hooray, but still. I honestly did do pretty much nothing yesterday that didn't involve lying on the couch. It was such a waste of a day off that I was thinking plaintively before I went to bed that I really deserved a "do-over" on it. Then I realized that (somewhat surprisingly) I am in fact off for the holiday tomorrow, so I guess I actually do get one.

What I mostly spent yesterday on the couch doing, by the way, was watching a six-part British miniseries from the 80's called Edge of Darkness, which was recommended to me rather highly by a couple of overseas friends. Good show, even if the science and politics, in my opinion, get a bit dodgy at the end. Lots of great twists and turns in the plot, good acting... A little slow-moving by American standards -- I'm sure Hollywood would have told the story in half with time with three times as much sex and at least four or five explosions -- but I find the low-key British method of storytelling kind of refreshing once in a while. It also strongly reminded me of the other thing I love about British television: it features normal-looking people. I don't know if it's mainly attributable to a lesser cultural obsession with youth and beauty than the US has, or if it's just that they have a smaller pool of actors, but the people on British TV look like people, the kind I might pass on the street in my ordinary far-from-Southern-California life. The world that US TV characters inhabit, by contrast, is one where humanity appears to have been genetically engineered into a race of models, with a few moderately unattractive people kept around as comic relief. Really, I'm occasionally amazed that I can suspend my disbelief enough to watch US TV at all.