Today I draw your eyes, readers, to the light hearted land of television where trials and tribulations happen but in the end the internal goodness and long term bonds between the characters mean more than the fact that one has shagged the other's boyfriend.
Even the houses of students, the clinically depressed and alcoholics are humble, but empty of clutter, always tidy and clean.During those hilarious sub plots where everyone refuses to do the washing up for a month, TV can't capture the way that it is when you walk on the floor without shoes on your feet and your socks turn black, or worse, stick to something unidentifiable but quite definitely brown. It can't transmit the smell of rotting food, can't hear the buzzing of little flies about the place, and in reality, it isn't all dealt with and forgotten by the next episode. Someone get pissed off and cleans the place, but everyone feels persecuted, wonders about the stuff that they actually do and why it is that no one notices, and the tension is always there under the surface between people bubbling away until the next time someone makes a load of mess and doesn't clean up afterwards. (just so everyone know, my house isn't as bad as all that)
Life isn't like TV where all of the stuff that people do like cleaning the house, cooking food, taking a crap, studying, working miraculously happens without any time and effort. Life doesn't revolve around work and study and bodily functions and sleeping, oh no. (I wonder if that's a dangerous ideal of things to put about...another time perhaps) If they do these things it's for the love of them or for the sake of furthering the plot. Take awful Monica from friends she luurrrrves the cleaning and the organising and the cooking she loves it! She loves it so much, that no one else needs to worry about the cleaning, they can get on with all the things they do with their lives, she just goes around cleaning everyone else's apartments too, presumably because all Joey ever does is sit around drinking beer and eating pizza (yet he doesn't get fat, what's going on with that? I bet he takes laxatives.) Anyway, that's her function. She's a perfectly formed piece in the puzzle. In real life, everyone likes to have a clean house, but only mad people really really like to do cleaning and those people are the kinds of people who leave little post it notes around the place telling their flatmates that the speck of dust on the shelf in their own room is completely unacceptable, that one is a true relation. On TV, Monica loves cleaning. She's a bit of a control freak, but that's alright because she's a loveable control freak and she has a flaw, because she used to be a fat chick, oh I see, everything is explained. Haha ha ha ha.
The problem with TV...the problem? Tv is stressful. During all that time when TV people are busy
not doing real life things, they are going about having awkward and predictably catastrophic situations, better climb out the window to escape, only the window is broken so it falls down on you as you're trying to slip out furtively and you get stuck, then your wife's twin sister who you've just been making out with by accident thinks your constipated and comes in, so you have to come up with a crayzay lie to get yourself out of the situation, only to find yourself in another...but it will all work out ok and some kind of weird lesson will be learned at the end of it. Sounds appalling D: I'll take TV land without the lulz please.
The truth is that people don't slot in together nicely, there isn't an implicit understanding between brothers and sisters and friends that suggests that it's happened before and it'll happen again but that's all ok. People have incompatible wants and needs, different ideas about what and who they are and where they should be in their lives and whether it's said or not, everyone wants everyone else to fit nicely into their ideal of living and not want or expect anything in return. Everyone just wants to live I guess. No one wants to be lonely, but the alternative is problematic too D:
We should hire a homeless guy and get him to deal with all this stuff and then it would all be ok, I would be a bearable flatmate and we'd all be tolerant of our differences and get along merrily. It's not like we'd only find other stuff to bitch and moan about each other about...no, it's not like that at all...it's not like we bitch and moan about everyone, even our closest friends. It's not like I make a big deal about everything I don't really care all that much about, and then end up upsetting and being upset by people I actually do care about very much. Very much indeed. It's not like that at all :(.
