the soaps that bind

Blabber this, blabber that. What is a jobless one to do these days? He watches soap.

I am loving the new season of Grey's anatomy. The cast has trimmed down. Addison moved to L.A., in her own spin off series. Burke left Seattle Grace, and the actor behind him was fired from the show. He could still get back. This Cristina angst arc is not that final in tone. Negotiations could open up and get Burke back. Not that I care, except that Derek compared to Burke paints Derek to be the sensitive type, and our attention is diverted into comparing the parallel couples' lives in the show: the Meredith-Derek/ Cristina-Preston tandems. But let the record show that I like Izzy. Must be the hair. :D

Oh, and Meredith is having guilt problems with her half-sister, who will probably find out later that Meredith is part of those who sort of misdiagnosed her Dad's second wife. The only child, as Meredith calls herself now, is having a crash course in past tense sibling rivalry ("We don't have the same dad. Mine left me when I was five years old. Does that sound like your dad to you?" she asked her half-sister.). She is also keeping an arm's length relationship with Derek, because Cristina didn't get her happy ending, so how could she end up wit hers? Right? So Meredith and Derek are now having S and M. Sex and Mockery.

House. I am having trouble downloading episode two season four of House, where the old crew of Chase, Cameron, and Foreman is shown as getting on with their lives; and House is forked between admitting he missed them and wanting to not need them again. Good way to bring novelty into the series. Good scriptwriters, these two shows have: Grey's and House. Hmmm. Reminds me, House said in one episode, "So, you think Grey's anatomy was wrong?" He was alluding to both that medical book, Gray's Anatomy, and the series, "Grey's Anatomy." Nice one there. I am waiting for Grey's to poke f[p]un at House. Meredith could welcome her interns into her home, and exclaim, "Welcome to the house of Grey!" Oh I miss Cameron's moral naiveté, and the indignant looks she swings at her boss. Lovely. She has an eight-year old for a boss who can't admit to himself that he, too, has a romantic (in the chivalrous sense) motive for saving (not all, but) some patients. Download House. Download House. That's my mantra for today.

Har har. By tomorrow it will have been a full week since I quit my nightshift web content writer job at Ortigas. Been sleeping at nights now. I am eating more and sleeping more and I feel slow and bloated even though I am still pencil-thin. Day schedule living allows more time to eat, and more time to dawdle. I am cleaning the house while I stuff more paragraphs into short stories I am sending to some contest whose deadline ends when this month ends. Actually, I think I can only send one. By working on two I increase my chances of, during the writing, feeling which I want to devote time to.

One story is set in an abbey, a la Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose," and that abbey's secret is the cause of the dwindling population of the surrounding fishing villages in a pre-World War I Germany. Lots of misty, cold mornings. Lots of pitch black nights. I wish I could speak German, or write just a few lines. I'd like to invest more in building a tense atmosphere, so I'm slowing down the narrative. And I'm rereading Eco's novel, to get a layout of that Abbey, how one shivers after waking up hours before the rise of the sun, so I could render how helpless the townsfolk feel when a winged figure swoops down to snatch their babies. Could the abbey be hiding a monster in their midst?

The other story follows three days in the life of a Philosophy major during the final week of one semester of his life. He is reviewing for his exams. His roommate is preparing to go back to his home town for the sem break, having finished his exams early. Left alone in an old boarding house in a quiet, semi deserted street, our Philosophy major finds himself talking to his roommate again, who, he remembers seeing walking out the door. So who is he talking to?

Hah. Better get back to cleaning the house. Stuffing paragraphs. And overfeeding the cats. I really shouldn't eat this much food. My wife is back to her cooking since moving to day sched as well, and we suddenly find ourselves having too much food. Of course, for my cats, there is no such thing as too much.