Why Some TV is Good For You: House, MD

All the stuff I feel like we should all be talking about, thinking about...or at least wondering about: it all gets covered, and profoundly.  From what I hear people say, it seems a lot of people just don't get it.  They see the surface: a grouchy, mean smartypants doctor who pops vicodin.

Holy, it is so much more.  That is merely the thinnest rice-paper wrapping of everything that matters to humans and why we're alive. Call me ridiculous; I speak the truth. This show is (was) the sickness. Ha. (get it?)

Of course I sound like a teenybopper because of my beyond-enthusiastic level. Why it is so good and why I declare this even though I'm self-conscious enough to know I most likely will be dismissed as one of many idiots (homage) raving about some show like Glee.  (It doesn't really matter, I guess, but I don't want to be put in that category.  I don't watch Glee. And I'm not talking about for-enjoyment types of shows/movies/books right now.  Distraction is a different thing.)

I must explain why House is really really just important and good and proof of what many excellent minds working together can produce.  Like, how the composite of a bunch of smart people--collective mind? communal mind?-- can sometimes produce something near mystical, or at least really awesome.  For physical examples, let's say the Great Wall, the Empire State Building, the mystery of the Pyramids.  I'm just speaking of those "things" that are accomplished by many, that cannot be done by one [wo]man.  We just don't get enough circumstances or opportunities or nights in college to really explore what's really important.  I rationalize that I re-watch episodes multiple times because it's what I crave thinking about, presented to me so beautifully, compactly, avec Hugh Laurie (and Chase--who really does play the violin in real life, you can see it [again, for real] in the "Swan Song" final show--why the f*** would really really pretty people learn the violin?? another discussion)---it's a ~43 minute chunk of your life to think about human beings, what is important to us, what we hide from others and from ourselves, what we truly think about death. And in the most witty, intelligent, of-the-world (but not cold) entertainment form. It's more spiritual and thoughtful than Deepak but cleverly addresses the Things with a bright, questioning approach---its layers seem to speak directly to the people who are sincere in their desire to understand and make their lives somehow meaningful and true, but without running to a monastery (which is an option often discussed) to do it.

When I was a few years into my job (just out of school and in the non-changing existence of having a good job that is supposed to be the fulfillment of all your life's striving so far--no big thing) I watched and re-watched the first few seasons of House compulsively.  I was so so miserable and lonely and stuck and was supposed to be lucky and happy and thriving.  It was the worst time, but I couldn't complain and unfortunately my habit became shutting down and not talking for days.  (This is a terrible confession, but most people I know..well, they define me as a flake.  I feel so bad about this.  But I couldn't do anything about it. It was a stuckness I can't even talk about.)  Anyway, the things/people I could identify with were few and it was easier to just identify with created characters.  (At the time.  I'm still sort of a shut-in, but can fool people by acting very social too.  It's confusing to me.  When I took Myers-Briggs, I was exactly half extrovert and half introvert.  I took it twice because I thought the result made me seem wishywashy.  I am still having identity-type problems. It's not luxurious at my age; I thought thinking about it was indulgent for yeeeears, but it's not, I assure you. Perhaps it comes easily to most people? To me, it is difficult to get the gist of myself.)

I am not going to go into that further; it causes me to feel terrible and let's say we'll bury the Dead Past (Wodehouse).  Incidentally, the other thing I watched until the dvds were destroyed was Jeeves and Wooster (Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry version)---but that was just enjoyment.

House, I watched, to survive.  This is not hyperbole.  One night I crafted a letter to the producers of the show thanking them for making this miracle show that allowed me to address all the scary (SCARY) aspects and layers of being alive in a sincere-to-yourself way---and making the case for living and not being careless with your life (believe me, I understand and still have problems with recklessness, and I apologize those that were affected by this--when you're depressed sometimes it's hard to care about yourself and you put yourself in potentially dangerous situations....Another discussion.) That draft of a letter was just middle-of-the-night silliness, I thought, and was embarrassed (why? who cares?) but now I think these moments of doing something you feel strongly motivated to do should be done without worrying so much about everyone/everything--I mean, it doesn't matter to those it doesn't matter to, and they can write me off, but maybe it will matter to a few people it will matter to, and that's good enough--or at least, a pretty good thing.

I will stop, even though I just said all that stuff, because I might stray into future-regret material.  People (me) are hypocrites.  Rationale is: it's hard to really do what you want/ think is good/ share what you feel --without worrying about those other people or pesky future me's (they are the worst) who will judge and ridicule.  Here's another I will regret tomorrow:

I think "twee" is the funniest word....

 *Intermission*

I ate some barely stir-fried vegetables and watched a scary movie (bad for digestion) since I wrote the above.
"Twee"--that had nothing to do with anything, sorry.  The word that House likes is "PITHY." House says it about every 10 episodes...

Maybe it's not good to have the world of the House character be the world you like to hang out in.  I have to admit I was born on the saddish side.  My grandma said I had a sad face.  Because my mom made me practice too much.

I keep hoping I'm snapping out of it. Apparently, I'm "languishing"---but that's way too romantic to describe it.  I'm in pain pretty much all the time.  I guess you can see how I can identify.  (with House).
So, identifying so well with a miserable person who somehow helps people reconcile with death...makes you maybe feel less lonely? But then, it's so comforting to be alone sometimes--or just not talking is safer, or easier, or less likely to cause me emotional-type pain, which you often can't see coming, because I can't handle emotional pain on top of physical pain.  Isolation is more like Insulation, at least for me.  I hope you understand.  I truly care about most all of my friends on FB, honestly and sincerely, I just can't reach out and apologize and explain (talk about it all) to everyone, or even a certain few individuals I almost CRAVE, wish to see...very very badly...because I miss them so much.  My shoulder hurts and it's caused me to be such an unbearable flake.  I can't talk about it ! (do you see the problem?  if you do, what do I do?)

lovelovelove

i cried during Swan Song! 

i couldn't help it.

i bet i can do a lumbar puncture.

no more house !

i think i think of hugh laurie as 4 distinct different people-- bertie wooster, dr. house, his normal britishy self, and the jaded-but-good grumps from sense and sensibility.. did i forget anyone? (never watched blackadder)

season 6 ----SO GOOD

i love mad men, 30Rock, loved arrested development, prison break....

but HOUSE IS BEST.

happy belated birthday, sir!

hugh laurie's birthday was june 11th!

top referring location: LONDON

and not ontario (no offense!).

this week's searches are funny too.  (i'm really sorry, kinda, because my blog probably didn't help you at all!)
"sneakers hugh laurie"
"hugh laurie and shakira"
"hugh spanx" [?!??!?!]
"i had a dream about the king of sweden" (what IS that song?)
"hugh laurie amy winehouse"
(oh, is that why...london?)

i was thinking about quitting...

bangkok, brisbane, and MILANO ...   my internets haven't been working lately and i thought i lost that blogging feeling, was going to say an official sayonara (my keyboard also creates inadvertent italics which is annoying) but then i got my weekly stats today and i am weak to their exotic influence...so...

ok, i know full FULL well that people stumble upon my scrawlings by mistake, or by googling the words and persons (and things and countries) that i am possesssive of (don't touch!) --but i'm not too proud to admit that i enjoy feeling globally minimally exposed.  one of my loyal readers, i'll call her um, Tom, gave me some shocks about how potentially dangerous and mortifying it is to be known to other people that don't know me and thus will undoubtedly make false (or true) judgments about me and my life will be ruined.  well, what i don't really now (yet) may never hurt me!  i will take the risk, Tom!  i don't think i matter that much--see, i'm shockingly humble for an only child. 
i do feel strange about the possessiveness i DO feel about my (ha, "MY"--i'm not delusioned at all) blog topics, or blog interests, or whatever.  i noticed this embarrassing reaction in myself at various holiday and non-holiday parties in the last few weeks.  it is SO stupid and irrational and utterly uncontrollable... i purposely put a figurative fist in my mouth so i don't react verbally, giving my stupid inner self away, but though i bite my tongue i think i still reveal myself, even if i don't talk... someone mentions "hugh laurie" or "hey that show House" or god even "blogging"---what the * is wrong with me?--and i get all uptight or defensive or...anyway, i start bracing myself, for some reason.  oh--also, "north korea", "korea" even, or ha!..i can't even tell you.
maybe it shows i'm invested or something, and that's sort of impressive.  it's like if someone starts talking about one of your bestest friends, not knowing that they are one of your bestest friends, at a party and you brace yourself...?  is that a good comparison?   puts it in a more reasonable light, anyway.  my reaction, my discomfort, that is.
but wouldn't it be more normal, sorry, LIKELY that one's heart would leap with joy to be led to one of their topics of interest?  so silly but i think i can't--CAN-NOT-- (ok, i hit upon it finally) i  CANNOT handle something/someone that/who i think about so much, so deeply (for me), to be glibly, carelessly discussed as if it were not the Most Important Thing in The World.  but wait, don't i enjoy conversations about stuff i feel are very cool?  maybe only caffeinated conversations, not semi-drunken... 
anyway, somehow it matters to me that these things be treated with some kind of deference.  that's all i can come up with. 
this is a good example of how i waste use up a lot of time thinking about stuff, lose track of huge amounts of time, am consequently late for everything.  
but not anymore of course: 2010 so far is spotless.  shut up that it's only the 4th. 
did you read this nytimes article on aging brains?  apparently all the stuff i thought i forgot about in college might still be stored somewhere.
also, a poet/writer died around xmas.  Rachel Wetzsteon committed suicide. the poem the times printed in her obit ("Sakura Park") seems to really, vividly capture a moment in her life.  i found it very affecting, maybe more personally so because that is where my friends amy and neil live, the park where i've been with their 3-year old daughter.

oh yeah

i never stop thinking about u

fifth season is unbelievable (i'm always a season behind; i prefer viewing marathon-style on dvd, then re-watch ad infinitum for all layers/nuance/ties to overarching themes and general obsession)

season 5 highlights:  "Social Contract" (disc 4)--frontal lobe disinhibition (omg, discuss)

"Both Sides Now"  (disc 5)--left/right brain non-communication (holy, discuss)    

even watched out of context (which i am making a friend do as i type) they are incredible.  and i need people to discuss with! (selfish!!)

"she had a dream about the king of sweden.."

please watch MINNIE THE MOOCHER excerpt:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwgS1ctxglw

"sweden..needin'.."

ode to wode..house

Daily Telegraph on Thursday 27 May 1999

WODEHOUSE SAVED MY LIFE (hugh laurie)

TO be able to write about P. G. Wodehouse is the sort of honour that comes rarely in any man's life, let alone mine. This is rarity of a rare order. Halley's comet seems like a blasted nuisance in comparison.

If you'd knocked on my head 20 years ago and told me that a time would come when I, Hugh Laurie - scraper-through of O-levels, mover of lips (own) while reading, loafer, scrounger, pettifogger and general berk of this parish - would be able to carve my initials in the broad bark of the Master's oak, I'm pretty certain that I would have said "garn", or something like it.

I was, in truth, a horrible child. Not much given to things of a bookery nature, I spent a large part of my youth smoking Number Six and cheating in French vocabulary tests. I wore platform boots with a brass skull and crossbones over the ankle, my hair was disgraceful, and I somehow contrived to pull off the gruesome trick of being both fat and thin at the same time. If you had passed me in the street during those pimply years, I am confident that you would, at the very least, have quickened your pace.

You think I exaggerate? I do not. Glancing over my school reports from the year 1972, I observe that the words "ghastly" and "desperate" feature strongly, while "no", "not", "never" and "again" also crop up more often than one would expect in a random sample. My history teacher's report actually took the form of a postcard from Vancouver.

But this, you will be nauseated to learn, is a tale of redemption. In about my 13th year, it so happened that a copy of Galahad at Blandings by P. G. Wodehouse entered my squalid universe, and things quickly began to change. From the very first sentence of my very first Wodehouse story, life appeared to grow somehow larger. There had always been height, depth, width and time, and in these prosaic dimensions I had hitherto snarled, cursed, and not washed my hair. But now, suddenly, there was Wodehouse, and the discovery seemed to make me gentler every day. By the middle of the fifth chapter I was able to use a knife and fork, and I like to think that I have made reasonable strides since.

I spent the following couple of years meandering happily back and forth through Blandings Castle and its environs - learning how often the trains ran, at what times the post was collected, how one could tell if the Empress was off-colour, why the Emsworth Arms was preferable to the Blue Boar - until the time came for me to roll up the map of adolescence and set forth into my first Jeeves novel. It was The Code of the Woosters, and things, as they used to say, would never be the same again.

The facts in this case, ladies and gentlemen, are simple. The first thing you should know, and probably the last, too, is that P. G. Wodehouse is still the funniest writer ever to have put words on paper. Fact number two: with the Jeeves stories, Wodehouse created the best of the best. I speak as one whose first love was Blandings, and who later took immense pleasure from Psmith, but Jeeves is the jewel, and anyone who tries to tell you different can be shown the door, the mini-cab, the train station, and Terminal 4 at Heathrow with a clear conscience. The world of Jeeves is complete and integral, every bit as structured, layered, ordered, complex and self-contained as King Lear, and considerably funnier.

Now let the pages of the calendar tumble as autumn leaves, until 10 years are understood to have passed. A man came to us - to me and to my comedy partner, Stephen Fry - with a proposition. He asked me if I would like to play Bertram W. Wooster in 23 hours of televised drama, opposite the internationally tall Fry in the role of Jeeves.

"Fiddle," one of us said. I forget which.

"Sticks," said the other. "Wodehouse on television? It's lunacy. A disaster in kit form. Get a grip, man."

The man, a television producer, pressed home his argument with skill and determination.

"All right," he said, shrugging on his coat. "I'll ask someone else."

"Whoa, hold up," said one of us, shooting a startled look at the other.

"Steady," said the other, returning the S. L. with top-spin.

There was a pause.

"You'll never get a cab in this weather," we said, in unison.

And so it was that, a few months later, I found myself slipping into a double-breasted suit in a Prince of Wales check while my colleague made himself at home inside an enormous bowler hat, and the two of us embarked on our separate disciplines. Him for the noiseless opening of decanters, me for the twirling of the whangee.

So the great P. G. was making his presence felt in my life once more. And I soon learnt that I still had much to learn. How to smoke plain cigarettes, how to drive a 1927 Aston Martin, how to mix a Martini with five parts water and one part water (for filming purposes only), how to attach a pair of spats in less than a day and a half, and so on.

But the thing that really worried us, that had us saying "crikey" for weeks on end, was this business of The Words. Let me give you an example. Bertie is leaving in a huff: " 'Tinkerty tonk,' I said, and I meant it to sting." I ask you: how is one to do justice of even the roughest sort to a line like that? How can any human actor, with his clumsily attached ears, and his irritating voice, and his completely misguided hair, hope to deliver a line as pure as that? It cannot be done. You begin with a diamond on the page, and you end up with a blob of Pritt, The Non-Sticky Sticky Stuff, on the screen.

Wodehouse on the page can be taken in the reader's own time; on the screen, the beautiful sentence often seems to whip by, like an attractive member of the opposite sex glimpsed from the back of a cab. You, as the viewer, try desperately to fix the image in your mind - but it is too late, because suddenly you're into a commercial break and someone is telling you how your home may be at risk if you eat the wrong breakast cereal.

Naturally, one hopes there were compensations in watching Wodehouse on the screen - pleasant scenery, amusing clothes, a particular actor's eyebrows - but it can never replicate the experience of reading him. If I may go slightly culinary for a moment: a dish of foie gras nestling on a bed of truffles, with a side-order of lobster and caviar may provide you with a wonderful sensation; but no matter how wonderful, you simply don't want to be spoon-fed the stuff by a perfect stranger. You need to hold the spoon, and decide for yourself when to wolf and when to nibble.

And so I am back to reading, rather than playing Jeeves. And my Wodehousian redemption is, I hope, complete. Indeed, there is nothing left for me to say, except to wish, as I fold away my penknife and gaze up at the huge oak towering overhead, that my history teacher could see me now.

i ♥ jeeves and wooster, wodehouse, hugh laurie, stephen fry, minnie the moocher. i don't know what "hoochie-coocher" means either.

like he (h.l.) has said in some other article i'm too lazy to look up, and i'm paraphrasing of course, wodehouse really cheers you up when you're depressed. he's just the most fun to read. don't you think so? even now? of course now you can be a total hedonist and watch FRY/LAURIE play jeeves and wooster on dvd (mine are all scratched from ridiculous over-use).

oh my

i just made a kinda-real, kinda-not pact with my friend not to live past 40. h.l. and i are soulmates; here's more proof:

from jan.2009 atpictures.com post:

English actor Hugh Laurie has already survived nearly a decade longer than he expected as a teen--after making a pact with his friends to take their lives before turning 40. The "House" star admits he found the age unappealing, and vowed to take his last breath before growing too old.

(of course he goes on to talk about the "arrogance of youth" and apologizes for his stupidity. i'm not a teenager so for me it's just sad and immature, boo.)

hero

i just read this old article in the u.k.daily mail about hugh laurie's hair (or, absence of) during the writers' strike last year.. like that matters. anyways, his answer to the question, what was he doing during the strike?, once again confirmed my love/obsession: "I've been at home playing piano in my underpants." (have u heard dr. house play? his bach is pure, humble, beautiful.. can he be more amazing?) i hear he has struggled with major depression. i wonder, does he medicate? therapy?

i am vulterine

dear hugh laurie, is it wrong to celebrate the end of anothers' relationship? is it bad to "wait out" (seinfeld) relationships? or can i suddenly claim belief in fate?

i never dared to hope, but now i'm a cat (ferocious, see pic) ready to pounce. my scheming brain is suddenly alive with activity. s'terrible. no, it's pro-active, and that's the word of our generation. i'm like kal penn, quitting HOUSE to work in the obama adminstration, except for me it's like quitting being a typist to go eat pizza in brooklyn. for a good cause. what?
no, it's not schadenfreude; it's survival. now's my chance to move from one cliche to another. as my dear neighbor just texted me minutes previous, "Only the strong survive." back burner to front burner, pronto!

forbidden fruit stays fresh for 2+yrs!

he comes from sheep-herders and my family are cattle people, but our twice-monthly (averaged over two years) relationship has lasted longer than most [of mine]. i'm sorry, hugh, but waiting for you was taking too long, so it's come to this. i have attitude of gratitude because it's really helped me connect with the rest of humanity like nothing else. if you care enough to judge, i'm touched genuinely, but...i beg u--don't! YOU CAN'T DESTROY OUR LOVE!*

*quote from house, i think?, 3rd season

yikes

um, you look well gay here, sir... what range!

also, am so SHOCKED: http://tvwatch.people.com/2008/03/11/house-party-hugh-laurie-experimented-with-vicodin/ well, i commend your dedication to the craft.

the hero himself

most excellent one

edible buddha, dean +deluca

who could take a bite out of the buddha? will it bring enjoyment? wisdom? and will someone buy the one remaining Jumbo Buddha?

(i wanted to start this with a kind of "huh?" tone, which i think i've achieved).

i AM obsessed with hugh laurie. the title of the blog implies i will write to him, for him, whatever..but i am way too chicken.