Because I wasn't much different then. I had longer hair, wore Clark's instead of Birk's Footprints (wrecked my feet covering the South Carolina legislature a few years ago -- six hours standing a day without orthotics is a bad idea for a flat-floot like me). Thought of myself as an outsider, but I always had my nose to the glass of the Inside World. Wondered what it was like feeling normal, back then. Now, I don't care. Normal is what I call it, long as I don't cheat, steal, lie, attack somebody, etc. But back then, it was something that looked like it was out on the horizon, always further away the faster I ran toward it. Phantoms are like that.
Still, that outsider feeling is not altogether a bad thing. I just bought (hardly can afford to, but ... ) the DVD set of Buffy Season Six -- the one everyone says they hate. I'm hooked solid, watching an episode almost every night. I relate to being somebody who is living a life in a world they never made, and irritated as hell about it.
My habit was to buy a season and watch one episode a week, always on Sunday night. It made a nice end to the weekend, and gave me something to look forward to at the end of the work week. Plus, it was like a defiant little "miracle" play, a story about love and belief, a counterpoint to churchly piety.
I'd never thought about the show much, before 2002. I thought it was a trendy little piece of fluff that I didn't miss not being able to watch (cable-only in my area -- and I haven't had a cable hookup in nearly 20 years). But Nine-Eleven (an assignment brought me to NYC three months after the planes hit -- saw Ground Zero, interviewed firefighters who'd lost friends, etc) and its aftermath of more plane crashes and aerosolized anthrax haunted me, and left me channel surfing blankly night after night -- just numb. Then, in January, the local Fox affiliate began airing Buffy re-runs late Sunday nights. They started, for some reason, with Season Four -- the other season nobody likes. I settled down and watched, just because something finally caught my attention. Within twenty minutes, I was hooked for life. The station ran the shows in sequence, but only the WB ones. After season five ended with Buffy swan-diving to her death, the station went back to Season One repeats the following week.
Oddly, another station declared it would broadcast part of the WB and part of the UPN schedules in early 2003. I got to see the last eight or so broadcast episodes of BtVS as they were aired on Wednesday nights, not in repeat -- and then watched the repeats of Season Two on Sunday nights. So, when I could (I'd gotten fired again by that time -- radio, don't ask), I bought all of Season Three, then all of Season Seven. Finally, I'm watching the season that had eluded me all this time. And, to me, it's better than all the others. I know I'm the only person on Earth who feels this way. Sorry -- but remember, I'm an outsider.
There is an advantage to watching the show like this. You relate to it personally, because everybody else who possibly could have cared has already seen it. You feel as though the shows are speaking directly to you. And there's no need to analyze them, because when they're personal, they are burned into your unconscious like a CD-ROM. The other advantage is that (this is a not-too-well-kept secret) the shows in repeat are often rough cuts. They have to leave in a total of 30 seconds or even a minute to compensate for less advertising, and to keep the aired version copyrighted. So, you'll see boom mic's hanging down over the actor's heads, slight miscues, and other tiny bits of stuff that actually make the shows a little more interesting (If you're watching for it, you can see things like that on Seinfeld, Friends, all the big shows running in heavy syndication). One of the better ones in Buffy re-runs is when Zander is squirting water on evil rodents chasing Cordelia out of a house. Charisma Carpenter runs out of the house, yelling "Oh, that water's cold! Stop it, Nick!" Meanwhile, Nicholas Brendan is grinning evilly, continuing to spray his co-star. Bad boy, Nick!
LJ orig.: 11/04/06
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