Hooked on the tube

Laurie and I have been watching a lot of TV recently – on DVD :p In addition to "Lost" which I mentioned before, we’re also watching "Mind Your Language" (the first two seasons I believe – I thought there were only two seasons but have just learnt that there was a third), "The X-Files" (we’ve got seasons 1-5 at the moment) and "The 4400". In fact, we just finished watching the second season of "The 4400" just yesterday and I still have the show running through my mind 🙂 In a sense, the show has elements of other shows which preceded it. You get glimpses of "Taken" (of course that might just be because Joel Gretsch was in both shows :p) and "The X-Files" and sometimes the storylines seem way too familiar.

And yet, "The 4400" has an air of optimism, of hope running through it that "The X-Files" lacked. If you watch "The X-Files" again from the beginning (which we are in the process of doing at the moment :p) you will note that the second and third seasons were different from the first season. The show became much more darker and almost moved into the horror territory from second season onwards. There’s a lot of blood and gore around and a lot of people end up killing themselves. "The 4400" on the other hand, is much more cheerful and hopeful. When "The X-Files" influence makes you think that a tragic event is about to take place, the show somehow finds a happier and lighter resolution. In most respects, I like "The 4400" much better. Of course, that doesn’t mean that I’ll stop watching the rest of "The X-Files" (and even buy the rest of the seasons on DVD) … but I’m also waiting for the unfolding of "The 4400" in the coming seasons 🙂

Fresh territory

We’ve been watching "Lost" for a couple of days now. When we first bought the DVD set for the first season, I wasn’t sure what I was expecting. All I knew was that the series was about plane crash survivors and that it was created by J. J. Abrams, who also created "Alias". Now I’m a major "Alias" fan (at least of the first two seasons) and that was probably the main reason for getting "Lost" since I am not particularly fond of survivor stories and while there seemed to be a lot of fans of the show, as far as I knew, there was nothing more to the series than it being about plane crash survivors.

Now that I’ve seen the first 6-8 episodes, my opinion has changed drastically :p While the story is indeed about plane crash survivors, it is not merely about them. It is also about the mysteries of the island they find themselves on, the past histories of each of the survivors, their day-to-day decisions and how their decisions are affected by their past. In fact, I personally think that some of the characters are extremely well-written and that some of the episodes are actually brilliant 🙂

One of the best episodes so far, again in my opinion, is "The Moth". The writers take the analogy of a moth coming out of the cocoon in so many brilliant ways and tie it all together into the storyline that I just loved it. It was the tones, the nuances, the subtleties about the stories that get me 🙂

But "The Moth" does not stand alone. There are so many other stories, so many other characters. The characters are not one-dimensional, they are not black or white. Most of them have different facets that you get to see as the season progresses and sometimes you root for them and sometimes you find yourself hating them. That is good television!

Memories are made of wisps

I have always (well, almost always :p) believed in the infallibility of my memory. I remember when I was 10 to 15 years old, how my parents would marvel at how much I could remember from my childhood. I still can remember things from when I was 2-5 years old even today. However, as I grew older, I discovered that there are certain blind-spots in your memory. There would be incidents that I’d completely forget and then remember one day for no apparent reason. I could then for the life of me figure out how I could have forgotten the incident in the first place. It’s kind of disillusioning to find that you can’t rely on your memory after all :p

Then I married Laurie. Now I had another person to verify the events of day to day life and my memory against. Now I didn’t have to rely on just what I believed had happened. But here is where it got even more confusing – sometimes Lauries account of events did not gel with mine and how do we figure out who had the right version? Or did either of us have the right version at all? :p

If you think of your memory as a hard disk (or even a floppy) and you basically operated on the assumption that what was on the disk was the true and correct picture of the world around you, what would happen if somebody could alter the contents of the disk without you being aware? Scary, huh? (Or maybe not, maybe I’m just conjuring up paranoid dreams :p) Because how would you ever be certain that you could trust anything you knew about yourself or the world around you?

I began thinking of this yesterday after Laurie and I had watched the season ender for the second season of "Stargate-SG1". (No, we are not totally behind the times or in a time warp :p We got the full DVD set for seasons 1-7 and have been slowly making our way through it.) There is this character who apparently miraculously (to me) is revived from the dead and I commented on it and Laurie was like, "Oh, she didn’t die. She just got up and walked away. It was in that scene we just watched." I was like, "I didn’t see her just getting up and walking away and I watched the scene with you!". So we argue back and forth as to what had really happened. I watched it today again and she does get up and walk away but there is so much smoke that you don’t actually notice it unless you are watching for it … and Laurie has probably seen that episode (and almost all other episodes of SG-1 as well) probably about 7-8 times :p So she would notice that. Whew, at least this wasn’t one of the times where memory was playing tricks on me … or Laurie :p

My Favourite Waste of Time …

Actually, what my favourite waste of time is, is a question since there are so many :p As I mentioned in the previous post, of late, the problem has been finding the time to do anything because I seem to have accumulated a lot of ways to waste time 🙂 And the funny thing is, that in the beginning I actually seemed to have the time for all of this but suddenly I find that I have so many things to do and not enough time to do it all in. I blame the Internet :p

You think that’s an exaggeration? Not at all. Just take a look at the list of my most recent wastes of time and you’ll see why I blame the Net. First there are the TV shows. I had a few shows that I loved when I was in the US but once I got back to Sri Lanka, I ever gave up hope of seeing those shows. Then came one fine day when I realized that all these shows are available on the Net for download and all I had to do was get them off the Net and I could keep up with the shows almost as soon as they were aired in the US! So now I’m busily watching 24, Gilmore Girls, Monk, Smallville and Star Gate whenever there is a new show and that keeps me busy through the week 🙂 Actually, in the case of Gilmore Girls, we actually get the fourth season (which is on air in the US as well) here in Sri Lankan television but they are a bit behind in Sri Lanka and so I prefer to get my show from online and then watch it again when it goes on TV :p

Then there were the comics. Again, something I’d had access to in abundance when I was in the US. Here, it’s hard to get your hands on comics. Then I discover that that too is available online for download :p Not only that, but I discovered that I could get hard to find collections like Marvel’s "Infinity War" or the "Infinity Gauntlet" or any of DC’s Elseworld’s titles, fairly easily online. The only problem? They seem to be either archives of JPG collections or files in the comic book reader format (CBZ or CBR), which are just renamed ZIP or RAR files. I simply hate having to go through JPG collections and reading it file by file – yeah, nothing to get so upset about but call me finicky :p So, what I do is extract all the JPG files from their archives and then use Adobe Professional to combine them all in one PDF file which I name a specific way and then add to my collection. Yes, I’m anal and I create most of my own work :p

The latest waste of time came about of course when I discovered that I could get old DOS games from the Net and better yet, get their Amiga versions which look better and even play better as long as you can configure the Amiga emulator correctly. So now, I sit at home on an evening playing Lemmings when I don’t have a comic to go through or a TV show to watch 🙂

And those are just the latest of my wastes of time 🙂 There are the existing ones like watching movies – I just bought 13 DVD’s last Saturday since the pirate DVD trade is booming in Sri Lanka and you can buy the latest Hollywood releases for something like US$ 3 :p And guess how many of those 13 movies I’ve seen so far? One! Yeah, there just is too little time in the world :p

Of rants and reasoning …

Yesterdays non-rant about people saying something and doing something else seems to have touched a few nerves since I received several responses to that in one form or another :p But it actually was that – a non-rant. I wasn’t going to let other people’s actions upset my equilibrium and I was simply stating something that was going through my mind at that particular time – so no reason for anybody to be alarmed, offended, irritated etc :p

However, reading Gordon R. Dickson’s "Way of the Pilgrim" later on during the evening, a paragraph from the book struck me as being relevant to this particular situation. In this particular situation, the earth has been conquered by aliens and the protagonist is trying to understand the alien mindset. In the process, he says that aliens and humans see each other as distorted reflections of themselves in a mirror. He goes on to explain that what he meant was that the aliens and humans can’t really understand each other since they think in totally different ways and yet, they can’t help trying to equate the other’s actions with the way they’d do something and so come up with a distorted picture of themselves to explain the actions of the other. I’m not sure that I explained that properly here but anyway, it made sense to me and what is more, I realized that this holds true even in human-human interactions.

We don’t really understand what drives other people and so we attribute certain things to them in order to understand their actions – only thing is, that is probably a distorted picture of that person since we can never be certain of correctly identifying what drives the other person. For example, there is the case of something that happened at my grandfather’s funeral – this incidentally, is one of the reasons I hate going for any family gathering :p I had bought a new cellular phone recently and by Sri Lankan standards it’s pretty expensive since it’s a Sony Ericsson P800 and it’s one of the latest in the market. My Dad had commented on this to one of my uncles and while my parents berated me for spending so much on the phone, I wouldn’t be surprised that when they spoke to my uncle about it if they hadn’t said it with a touch of pride – hinting that I could *afford* to spend so much money on a new phone … and of course, they would have mentioned the price of the phone.

Anyway, my uncle comes up to me later and asks me if I had my phone with me and I thought that he simply wanted to take a call and told him that I was out of range since I was. He says never mind and takes me over to his son-in-law and a few others and introduces me to them. Then he casually says that my father had told him that I bought a new phone and asks me if he can see it and then says that he doesn’t know much about this stuff and passes the phone on to his son-in-law. Naturally, the price of the phone gets discussed at this point too. I thought at that point that my uncle was simply trying to impress his son-in-law and his relatives with the fact that his nephew had such a good phone (or could afford one) – they do that kind of thing here in Sri Lanka :p But when I told my parents about the incident later, they said that it wasn’t so at all – that my uncle had simply doubted the price that my Dad had quoted (which was the price that I actually paid) and wanted to make sure that my Dad wasn’t lying by getting his son-in-law and the others to verify the price because my uncle trusted his son-in-law more than anybody else (my parents’ opinion, not mine).

My point here is that I thought of my uncle’s actions in one way and my parents looked at it a different way – each one of us basing our opinion of a person (my uncle in this instance) on how we’d interacted with him, how we thought of him and our own ways of looking at things. I really have no idea who is right about the real motives of my uncle – maybe none of us are. But I’d still prefer to think of my uncle the way I’d thought of him since to me that’s a less negative picture – there is this Disney TV movie which I forget where the central character says something along the lines of "if you look for the good in people you will find it" and I’d like to believe that. Maybe I wear rose-tinted glasses but heck, it’s better than looking at everybody and wondering what they might do to you … though sometimes it’s hard not to do that too :p

Of floods and feelings …

We’ve been having heavy rains here in Sri Lanka recently and while Sri Lanka does not have snow, earthquakes, typhoon, cyclones, tidal waves or volcanoes, we do have one problem – floods. Certain areas in Sri Lanka are currently under heavy flooding and I hear that hundreds of thousands of people are left homeless. Pictures of houses totally covered by water, cats sitting on roofttops with water all around them, TV antennas sticking out of fast flowing water and buses stopped at the edge of water with no means of going forward are common sites on TV. My heart cries out for all the people affected by the floods and their families. I hope the rains stop soon and that these people are able to go back to their homes and that no more lives are lost due to the floods. But then again, we’ll probably go back to no rain and will have a whole new set of problems when the power cuts start …

The "Gilmore Girls" have always been a favourite topic of mine here :p If you’ve been following this blog, you’d remember my ranting about Rory and her relationship with Dean, how while claiming to love Dean, she also seems to be leading Jess on and hiding things from Dean. Yesterday’s episode of the "Gilmore Girls" actually showed me a new perspective on Rory’s actions and while I still don’t approve of her actions (to me, a relationship is about commitment – total and absolute. If you have a problem with the commitment, then you tell the other person and then you decide what to do next – a combined decision, not an arbitrary act by an individual …) I was able to understand why she did what she did and that insight has also helped me with the way I look at the world. In yesterday’s episode, Rory suddenly goes to New York to see Jess (he’s been sent away from Star’s Hollow where Rory lives … long story …) and on her return her mother tells her that she must face the facts – that she’s falling for Jess.

Rory vehemently denies this. She says that she loves Dean, that she is happy with Dean that she doesn’t want to hurt Dean and that she has no idea why she did what she did. I then realized that she can’t see the truth herself – that wittingly or unwittingly, she’s lying to herself. The thing is, that this is true of so many of us – we lie to ourselves when certain matters are concerned. We might say that we are totally not that kind of person about a certain way of behaviour and yet behave just the way that we said we didn’t like and yet deny to ourselves that we were doing it. This is something that I’ve never understood about other people – how they could do that and still think that they are being honest with themselves. But now I begin to ask myself whether I’m that way too? Maybe I do something which is totally against my *stated* principles and yet am justifying why I do that too by lying to myself? I hope not because I don’t like that type of behaviour in others and I’d think that other people feel the same way … All I can do is try to be true to myself and hope that I don’t fall into the same trap that Rory has fallen into …

Of men, women, moments and wonders …

This entry goes out specially for my head fan who’s been asking me how come there have not been any new entries in a while :p Why have there been no new entries in a while? That is a tale for another day – if I care to tell it :p But here is something that struck my fancy … I was out for most of the morning and came in to catch the middle of a movie on TV called "Desert Gamble". It had these three characters who ostensibly meet up by accident (I didn’t see that bit) who get to know each other and as the story progresses we see connections and threads running through the story that connects and binds them. Of the three – one is a guy named Harry who has separated from his wife, who has taken everything of his including his dog and gone off. The second is a woman named Pat (I’m not sure about the name there) who has divorced her husband who she thinks has been cheating on her but still longs to be with him. The third is a woman named Edie who is going to be married and is waiting to meet her fiance.

As the story progresses, we learn that Harry actually cheated on his wife (because he was so used to her he says) but didn’t consider it cheating since the women "were just passing through" (according to Harry). We also learn that Harry and Pat seem to have some sort of a connection after several encounters and that the man Edie is going to marry is Pat’s ex-husband. There was one moment in the movie where the three characters just walk along and talk about their lives and how certain things came to be and you wonder about human interactions and whether any of truly know where we are going and where each person we meet has been and how our paths may have crossed at some point without us even being aware of it. OK, maybe it’s just me or maybe it wasn’t that particular scene as the whole movie but it was an interesting movie in that it made me think about how we interact with all those around us and how sometimes our lives touch those of others without us even being aware of the fact.

The movie ends with Harry finding romance with Pat and Edie discovering that she is actually marrying Pat’s ex- but still deciding to go ahead with it (though she does tell Pat that her ex- has "got a bumpy ride ahead of him" :p). It left me with a warm feeling (maybe it was all that country music since I enjoy country music) but maybe it was the fact that however scarred we may be by things that went on in our lives, there is always the hope that we can find happiness again as long as we have hope 🙂

Of love and loonies …

I watched this made for TV movie called "Don’t Tell Me Secrets" (at least I think that was the title, not so sure now) a couple of days ago that that made me want to write this entry. It was about this woman who is a lawyer and has just divorced her husband who is also a lawyer (at least I think they’ve just divorced – I missed the beginning of the movie). She is involved in a case where her client has been raped and then threatened not to go to the authorities. The woman persuades her client to prosecute and her ex- becomes the attorney for the defendant, Sean. Her client ends up missing, Sean keeps on following her and making threatening remarks and she is haunted by memories of her mother with whom she had a disagreement years ago and who disappeared never to be seen again.

In the midst of it all, she finds love in the form of a shoe salesman who used to be an attorney but gave up practicing law after some harrowing incidents in his life. Her client turns up dead but she can’t prove that Sean did it due to insufficient evidence. In the meantime, she gets threatening letters and she is not sure who is doing it whether it is Sean or the new guy in her life who seems to be so mysterious in certain ways. I will not go into all the details but in the end it turns out that the orchestrator of all this drama is actually her ex- that he wanted her back and so had tried to scare her into needing him. He’d actually unleashed Sean on her knowing that he was guilty and it turns out that he had even murdered her mother because she was against their marriage.

Over the top? It seemed to me so. Why would anybody ever do all these things to somebody that they claimed to love? But then again, I guess that depends on *your* definition of love – whether it is a selfish love where you want to (or need to) *own* the person you claim to love or a selfless kind of love where you just want the other person to be happy, wherever and with whomever that they like. To *me* love should always be of that second type but unfortunately, I don’t think that kind of love is that prevalent. Everybody wants the kind of love where you have the person you love with you – sometimes even if they don’t love you. What sort of a relationship would that be? A very unhappy one is all I can say …

The movie made me sad in a way … for the woman, for her mother, for all the suffering that they had to go through – just because one person was selfish in their loving. This was just a story but I do hear of such incidents quite a lot here in Sri Lanka, where a lover will kill the object of his affection and then take his own life. What kind of a choice is that – kill what you can’t have? Isn’t that really childish? I don’t know … Sometimes I do really wonder about the human race … but then again, I guess these are the things that go into making us what we are and when we are able to overcome all these baser instincts of ours, we will become worthy of the name "human" – if we haven’t wiped ourselves off the face of the Earth before that, that is :p

Guys, girls and the Gilmores

I often talk about "The Gilmore Girls" – it’s funny, quirky and in a sneaky sort of way it satirizes humanity. All the people in Stars Hollow (that’s the village shown in the show) have some sort of a quirk and while it might seem impossible for so many idisyncratic people to be in one place at the same time, if you think about it, you will realize that most of these quirks are actually exaggerations of characteristics displayed by people all around us. Be that as may be, I’m going to talk about "The Gilmore Girls" in relation to relationships, yet once again :p

I’ve talked before about how Rory while in a relationship with her boyfriend Dean, seems to be attracted to Jess at the same time but seems to be unaware of what all this really implies. (Yes, I know I’m talking about characters in a TV show as if they are real people – bear with me … or you know where the X is, click it :p) This is the kind of attitude that I just can’t put up with though I can find explanations for Rory’s behaviour, I still get angry about it since this is the kind of thing I’d hate to have happen to me in a relationship. But first the background – Rory, is a very intelligent girl – quiet, bookish and dreaming of going to Harvard one day – who normally spends her lunch time with a book and her lunch. Dean on the other hand, is your average active teenager – into sports, cars but not really interested in books and stuff. Their relationship seemed to have nothing in common but still they seemed to like being with each other and very much in love. In to this scenario stepped Jess, dark and brooding, always in trouble but with a hidden-side because he’s actually very intelligent and widely-read.

As the last few episodes progressed, it has become more and more evident that Rory likes spending time with Jess and while Dean can see her slipping away, all he can seem to do is cling on to her even harder – which just drives Rory even further away. All this is about par for normal human relations but what I find reprehensible is the fact that Rory just won’t admit to even herself the fact that she likes Jess and that she now finds nothing in common with Dean. To me, it seems that she should simply tell Dean how she feels and move on since that does not keep Dean hanging on, hoping against hope that things will work out and will save him further heartache when she finally does tell him that it’s over – as she eventually will have to. Yes, this is a TV show and a character has to behave the way it is written but then, I think the writing is wrong – or maybe they thought that Rory would be the kind of person who would delude themselves as to the true state of affairs, but even that seems doubtful given how intelligent and mature she is in other areas. So the verdict? I’m just sorry for poor Dean – but then again, given that I’m a guy, most people would say that that is exactly how I would react :p

On the other hand, I watched a Tamil movie today where this guy and girl get married but the girl finds out after the marriage that the guy had had a child from a previous relationship and she divorces him – it’s a cultural thing, "society" in Asia expects the woman to be "pure" (their words not mine) when they get married and while it does not apply so much towards the man, there is a bit of it there too. Even after the divorce, they continue to be friends and both the guy and girl discover that they love each other – another one of those Asian things, you *usually* don’t know your spouse before marriage. Each one is on the verge of telling the other about their love but circumstances (and perhaps their own fears of being hurt) conspire to make them think that the other person loves somebody else. So the guy tries to do what he thinks is best and tries to get the woman married off to the guy he thinks that she loves and the woman tries to do the same for the guy. In the end of course, they discover the truth and get re-married.

Now that is a state of things I can more readily identify with – maybe it’s all cultural and I can’t understand the Western viewpoint but can empathize with the Indian perspective. I really don’t know if that is the case. But I do understand how you could love somebody but yet would let them go silently – it’s because you love them and want them to be happy and while to tell them first might be wise, there is also the fear that you might put an obligation on them to return your love (well maybe obligation is too strong – just that you would be burdening them to some extent) and you don’t want that because you love them. So you remain silent and try to get them together with the one you think they love. As I said, maybe I’m conditioned but *I* certainly prefer the second story to the first …

Movies and other miscellanea

What do you do when you watch a movie and it leaves you wanting to twirl and flip around in the air like in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"? :p I’d had the "Coyote Ugly" DVD for at least a couple of years but for some reason or other, never got around to watching it. I really felt in need of some good, light-hearted entertainment today after watching a couple of intense movies – first a Tamil movie and then "Carlito’s Way" – and so gave "Coyote Ugly" a try. For some reason or other, Piper Perabo reminds me so much of Jennifer Garner of "Alias" fame and while I enjoyed the movie and the soundtrack even more, I couldn’t totally get into it … OK, Piper Perabo’s appearance had no relation to my enjoyment of the movie – pardon my sentence structure :p It did however leave me thinking about a few things.

The first thing was basically related to the story line – "Coyote Ugly" is about a songwriter who goes to New York in search of her dreams. I’d just heard a couple of days back from my friend Meraash who’s also in New York currently and following his dream – to be a film maker. He worked here with me in Sri Lanka and always wanted to make movies and now he tells me that he actually might get to work on "Spiderman 2" and I was really happy for him and proud of him since he went after his dreams and made it happen. However, watching "Coyote Ugly" and the conditions under which Violet, the protagonist in the movie, lives under, I was thinking that maybe Meraash had to live the same way and that I could never do that. That also made me realize that I could never go after my dreams the way that Meraash and Violet did – that I would always hold back either because I was too afraid, too lazy or just didn’t have a goal that I wanted to reach that bad … makes me (or rather, my life) feel so pointless all of a sudden. I’m doing what I love – I love coding and I am in computers, I love movies and do watch a lot, I love writing and do write all over the place, I enjoy music and do listen to music from time to time … but where is the big dream? The big ambition? I guess the only thing that would qualify in that category was me wanting to be a successful writer. But would I drop everything, risk failure and a life of doing part-time jobs while looking for my big break? I don’t think so. So maybe I don’t have the vision or the commitment. I don’t know …

The other thing that struck me is totally unrelated but also something I’ve been thinking for a while now – do television and movie writers write women the way they perceive them to be or are these really women as they are? The reason I wonder is more so because of a couple of my favourite TV shows than because of how women are portrayed in "Coyote Ugly" though there were a few instances even in the movie which made me wonder. The two shows I’m talking about are "Gilmore Girls" and "Nikki" – I liked both the shows and the characters in them when I originally started watching them but recently (these might not coincide with the US episodes since we get them really late – just a note :p) some of the characters have been getting on my nerves because of the way they behave and since all the characters are women, I was wondering if this is just some man’s interpretation of how a woman would behave or if this was actually written by a woman and if it’s the latter, then why are so many women being portrayed as being so bitchy all of a sudden? Yes, I know, it’s just TV shows and none of these people are real but their actions still bug me … yeah, maybe I’m weird :p

Take Lorelei Gilmore for instance – she dumps her fiance the day before she is to be married, gives the guy no explanation and takes off for parts unknown. Then she keeps on leading this other guy who obviously has feeling for her on – yes, the guy could simply tell her how he feels but just as obviously, she should be able to tell that he feels something for her out of the ordinary since he behaves completely differently with her than he normally does. Then there’s her daughter who does not seem to realize what she’s doing or her own mind since she’s got a boyfriend but also is dallying with this other guy, while claiming that it is "just a friendship" whereas some of her actions seem to indicate that it is not. Or take Nikki from "Nikki" who dumps her husband who can’t dance and gets another partner just to win a dance competition and then thinks she can make it all better by being all sweet and lovey dovey and her husband who actually falls for it. Ok, I’ll stop now :p I know all this is just make believe but the actions of each of these characters bothers me and it bothers me even more as to who conceived these particular actions and if they really think that this is how women normally behave and I do wonder if this is *actually* how a majority of women feel/act …