Tuesday, December 09, 2008

No, Really, I'm Still Alive! I Have A Meme And Everything!

Current clothes: A blue-green sweater. Well, blue-green with a tiny bit of black. It's got... Oh, what do you call a neck that's about the height of a turtleneck, but doesn't roll up? I swear, I don't know words for clothes. Also, blue jeans, white socks, black slippers.

Current mood: OK. A little tired and distracted. I had a boring day at work, trying and failing to concentrate on stuff I should have been working on.

Current music: Random tunes on the iPod again. I think most recently some Leonard Cohen and some Jimmy Buffett.

Current annoyance: I still have a wet, hacking cough. It comes and it goes, but when it really gets going, it's annoying as hell. Plus, it's cold and damp today -- an unusual combination here -- and that's not really helping.

Current thing: So, a little while back a friend of mine started watching The Pretender -- a show from the mid-90s that I somehow never got around to checking out when it was on -- fell in love with it, and insisted I had to start watching it too so she could talk to me about it. Being the accommodating sort that I am, I did so with only a token amount of protest, and it then proceeded to completely eat my brain. When I said in the last post that I'd been marathoning this show, that's not really accurate. What I've mostly been doing is spending 45 minutes every day watching an episode, and then many hours having thoughts and conversations along the lines of, "Oooh! The way character A said thing B in scene C, it made me wonder if he meant thing D about E's relationship with F, which got me to thinking about how that reflects thematic element G and makes me feel emotion H about possibility I..." Which, okay, is a thing I do, and, to be honest, is one of my great joys in life. But this is just about the unlikeliest show to provoke that kind of obsession ever. It's basically a gimmicky, formulaic 80s-style action/crime/drama thing -- my friend described that part of it, aptly enough, as "Quantum Leap meets The A-Team" -- with a sort of X-Files type shadowy conspiracy arc thing grafted rather oddly onto it. And it works infinitely better than it has any earthly right to, even when it's doing stuff that, on almost any other show, would seem far too cheesy to bear. I'm still not sure what the hell it is about it that's plunged me firmly into obsessive-fan mode, but I'll give a lot of credit to an astonishingly talented cast, some really good directing, a tendency to push their pet thematic issues as far as they'll possibly go, and a remarkable shades-of-gray sensibility that kind of sneaks up on you.

Current desktop picture: Still Rigel and the Witch Head Nebula. Maybe I should change it back to the wreath-on-the-TARDIS one now.

Current book: A Confederation of Valor by Tanya Huff. This is actually a compilation of the first two novels in a series: Valor's Choice and The Better Part of Valor. I got this book as part of LibraryThing's Secret Santa exchange last year, and am only just now getting around to reading it. Which I feel a bit ashamed about, but a 450-book backlog will do that to ya. Anyway, I'm most of the way through the first one now, and am really enjoying it. I'd call it Military SF, but it definitely has a stronger focus on character and dialog than on action and technology. Not that it's lacking in action; I actually think it'd adapt really well as a movie.

Current song in head: "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free" by Sting has been popping up in my brain off and on for the last couple of weeks.

Current DVD in player: Most recently, disc 6 of Season 2 of The Pretender. Which is as far as I've gotten as of yet. I've got four more episodes to go in this season, and then I'm going to take a break and watch something else while my brain recovers.

Current refreshment: Just finished some lemon-ginger green tea. Which totally tasted like more, except there's a cat on my lap preventing me from getting up and making any. Woe.

Current worry: I'm mildly worried about getting enough sleep on Friday night, because I keep falling asleep at 2AM, and I've got to work at 7:45 AM on Saturday. But, eh, that's days away.

Current thought: No, sorry. My mind just went completely blank.

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