Denise
Best show you're not watching.
Last night’s episode was an example of what a sitcom should be: inside jokes that play off the personalities of the characters, comforting predictability with a little twist, and even some humor based on stereotypes. Last night HIMYM even came through with its characteristic Canadian stereotype humor and with a terrific bit of ”kidding on the square.” (That’s where you’re telling the truth, but you say it sarcastically because you want the listener to think you’re joking. I do it all the time when I joke about my sex life and debt).
Since Alyson Hannigan announced her pregnancy, the show has been playing with how/if they might write in a pregnancy for her character, Lily. But now both HIMYM female lead actors are pregnant, as Canadian hottie, Colbie Smulders, recently announced her pregnancy too. Luckily, if they choose not to write hers into the show, it will be easy enough to keep her hidden in the booth at the bar, and just maybe Robin will get another news job where she can be safely hidden behind a desk.
We'll be seeing her, but not much of her.
In the year between undergrad and grad school, I had a job that I detested, and Mondays made me depressed. Not like the usual Monday blahs I get now, but severly bummed out. And I would look forward all day to watching Ally McBeal on my snowy little television in my apartment in St. Paul. This is the story: I was a long-term temp placed at an insurance company in the middle of a huge class-action law suit. Turns out, in the 80s, a bunch of crooked insurance agents realized that they could use dividends earned on one life insurance policy to pay premiums on additional policies. This put extra commission into the pockets of the agents and rendered the original policies useless so when the person died, there was little or no payout to the beneficiaries. There was indeed a paper trail on all of this, scanned in by some unfortunate soul. I used excel spreadsheets to trace the funding of these fraudulent policies, and a bunch of interest was added on and many checks were cut. It was a slight consolation to me that the harder I worked, the more the company was screwed.
It was soul-crushing work. At the time, I thought it was merely having a cubicle that destroyed my gentle spirit, but it was that job. It was a depressing conglomerate that hired temps on full time if they were male, had smoke breaks with the managers or went drinking with them after work, or went golfing with them on Saturdays (preferably all of the above).
I was not hired on, and was thrilled when the job ended and was even more ecstatic when I moved to Tallahassee, was teaching and in school again, and got cable.
Mondays aren’t nearly so miserable for me now; I sometimes dislike parts of my job, sure, but I like it overall. And with loved ones and strangers out of work not by choice, that’s a pretty good place to be.
*That reminds me of a friend I had who was one of those “I don’t like TV” people, but whenever I wanted to know what was going on on Days of our Lives, I knew she could give me the skinny. I never had the balls to call her on it and she never seemed to figure out what I was doing, even if I asked her about it right in the middle of one of her anti-TV rants. We’re all hypocrites in some ways, but that was just rich.
