TiVo Lady

Hallmark Hall of (Migraine) Fame

On a migraine day--which today is--I get nothing done.  And my brain doesn't really function.  I couldn't work at all today, so I vegetated in front of a barely acceptable TiVo offering.  Today:  Hallmark Hall of Fame, The Russell Girl, which I TiVoed only because it starred Amber Tamblyn, the former Joan of Arcadia, a wonderful, prematurely cancelled show on CBS about a girl who talks to God. 

Holding a hot compress to my head, I watched this morality tale about a young girl, just diagnosed with leukemia, who has a dark secret having to do with the neighbor lady across the street from where she grew up.  This neighbor lady, played by Jennifer Ehle, a non-Boomer, looks exactly like a slightly younger Meryl Streep.  Separated at birth, maybe.  Oh, and she gets migraines.  So I'm watching a lady with migraines with a migraine, as I am busy changing hot compresses.  I'm annoyed, though, by little, illogical details.  Like, how come after the baseball game, the family with the secret drives home in one car (the two sons and the dad), but in the morning the dad gave the kids the car keys.  So, wouldn't they have had two cars at the game?  Picky, picky:  Me in Migraine Mode.

Also, the secret is that Amber's character was babysitting when the baby fell down the stairs and died.  Ooops.  At the beginning of the show, I thought it was a teenage daughter who died, having something to do with poor, terminal Amber.  That would have made more sense, maybe.  Also, even though she has leukemia, she looks healthy.  Except for: a day of fever, check;  a nosebleed, check;  loss of appetite, check.  Then at the end, she gets better, probably.  Along the way, lots of tear-jerking.  Not good to cry when you have a migraine--makes it worse.  Damn these Hallmarkers, with their sappy cards and their even sappier TV specials...

Moral of this story:  I can't really think when I have a migraine.  Over and out.

The Tyranny of TiVo

This is about the compulsion to finish what you start, no matter how much, how desperately, you may want to quit.  Take this book I just finished, Thirteen Moons, by Charles Frazier.  I loved the sappy splendor of his other work, Cold Mountain, so I dove into his latest, figuring that I was in for a treat.  Wrong.  It's the story of a white guy who becomes an honorary Cherokee, and falls in bad love as a teenager with a woman he pines for his entire life.  That's a long time, too, since he lives to be almost 100.  But I have no idea what she felt for him, or why she left him to marry the other guy.  Halfway through the book, I realized that I didn't really care, either.  But I felt a compulsion to finish the thing anyway, as if it were homework and it was somehow required.

I feel the same about my TiVo's Now Playing list:  that I have to watch everything on it, or else.   Or else what?  Is there going to be a TiVo test???  Will I end up missing something that will change my life if I don't watch???  Hardly.  Still, I feel I simply must watch.  Whacky, huh?  Maybe this is a Boomer thing.  We are compelled to live up to our responsibility, even if it is 100% invented--by us, no less.  This could explain why I have felt slightly liberated this last week, since I had nothing on my TiVo List and therefore no TiVo-nsibility.  Of course, this ends this weekend, with the start of a new season of 24 and Rome and everything else.

There is tyranny in TiVo;  but with great TiVo comes great responsibility.