Tuesday, May 12, 2009

How can you run out of bait on a fishing boat?

My goal of writing an interesting take on the speeches that all graduates are forced to sit through (inspired by the recently released David Foster Wallace speech “This is Water”) will have to be postponed for yet another night. Due to a lack of sleep, lack of creativity and a new episode of Deadliest Catch my mind just wasn’t in the right frame of mind to write what I needed to so hopefully you will have that to look forward to tomorrow.

Instead I’ll just write about television including the strange addiction that is Deadliest Catch. On the surface I’m not sure you could ever think of a more boring show in existence. Let’s show a bunch of guys in a boat throwing steel pot after steel pot over the side and then retrieving the pots and unloading the crab. That is the show, week after week just more footage of guys crab fishing. Yet it is some of the most amazing television you ever see. All of these guys out there on the open ocean in the middle of the Arctic, just suffering like mad and occasionally nearly dying. You really can’t take your eyes off of it. Plus, I now firmly believe that every workplace should be required to have a fifty year old Hungarian who barely speaks English on staff. It just makes the world a more interesting place.

The Big Bang Theory ended its season last night on a rather odd note. They brought back the Penny and Leonard relationship with Penny seeming to fall for Leonard as he goes off with the guys to the North Pole to search for sub-atomic particles. Sounds like a perfectly logical summer vacation to me. (Personally I loved the line “we’ll be able to drink for free at any bar in a college town with a strong science program.”) What this show did portray correctly is the fact that guys like Leonard just cannot take subtlety. We (and I mean that in less than the royal sense) are just unable to read between the lines. Despite the fact that we are brilliant when it comes to relationships we are dumb as a box of hammers that went to school in Arkansas. But we really mean well.

As for How I Met Your Mother at least we can rest assured that Stella is not the mom. However, I am completely confused as to where the series goes from here. Robin isn’t the mom, Stella isn’t the mom, we were just told that Ted is finally on the path to meeting the mom yet there is no one left for it to be. Meaning that there is no logical character that we know about who could potentially be the mother. Though I still hope that the last scene of this season will be a knock on the door and Ted opens it to see Victoria standing in the hallway. That would be a great ending to the season.

(Sorry, I’m just a hopeless romantic at heart and think it would make a great ending to the story.)

I know that part of the story (of the show and of life) is that the journey is what is important. That everything we do until we meet the one is what makes it possible for us to find that certain someone. But it is interesting that we as the viewer are beginning to feel Ted’s frustration. We want to get to the ending or at least a new beginning. But that is kind of the point. Life doesn’t work on our own timelines. Forcing something just makes it go pear shaped. I haven’t learned much in my life (at least in terms of things that don’t involve differential equations) but I’m beginning to realize that at some points you just have to let the universe be. Things will come around much better than if you try to force reality to match your own visions.

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