Putting-the-house-in-order has made a couple of good steps forward. I did, as predicted, find a tenable starting point for painting the den, which now has one coat of white primer on the formerly orange walls, through which you can see just enough tint to indicate that a second coat of primer is probably in order. The important aspect is that it has gone from project-stalled to project-in-progress and that is all to the good. This weekend I’ll pick up more primer and soon we’ll acquire the actual interior color the room will end up with. I wouldn’t say that qualifies as putting the end in sight, but it has at a minimum reaffirmed my faith in the existence of an end.
I also finally got the pirate bar down into the basement, which in turn freed up enough space in the garage that with a little judicious rearranging my wife and I were finally able to park both cars side by side in the garage overnight last night. Huzzah. Again, still more to do, but also again, a much-needed sense of progress.
The Buffy/Angel Project kicked off on schedule as my wife and I watched the first two episodes of BTVS Season One last night, which works out well because the first episode ends with a cliffhanger that resolves in the second, and the whole 90 minutes or so of both together feels very much like a made-for-tv movie (a charmingly low-budget one, at that), almost to the point of being an entire prototypical BTVS season in microcosm. There is a Big Bad and a Big Plan, every character gets their moments, and in the end the day is saved but the never-ending struggle goes on. I was also amused by how well the beginning of the tv series works as a follow-on to the Kristy Swanson/Luke Perry/Donald Sutherland/Rutger Hauer/Paul Reubens movie. On the one hand you can go into the BTVS show never having seen the movie (that would in fact be the case for my wife, for example) and not feel lost at all (any more than in any other long serialized narrative where the author implies a nebulous backstory) but if you have seen the movie there are some provocative echoes (Cordelia is to Sunnydale what movie-Buffy was to her original high school, to name my favorite) while at the same time it truly does move the Buffy saga forward without recycling all the same theatrical-release beats.
One thing that really draws me to Joss Whedon’s work is that he loves subverting tropes, which never fails to pleasantly tickle my brain. There’s an oft-repeated line from an apocryphal Whedon interview in which he says the idea for BTVS came to him when he imagined the stereotypical scene from a horror movie of a little blond girl stalked by a monster, except the scene ends with the little blond girl kicking the monster’s ass. Which is a great notion, but it’s one that I don’t think he ever quite managed to literally translate to the screen. The first-ever sequence of the BTVS tv series subverts that cliché, except in a completely different way: the little blond girl (Darla) turns out to BE the monster. Then later in the episode, when Buffy first meets Angel, the subversion comes close to being realized, as Angel stalks Buffy but she turns the tables on him. However, Angel isn’t really a monster, as it turns out (except he really is, but we won’t find that out until many episodes later) and Buffy doesn’t kick his ass so much as get in one good shot to make him back off before they start verbally sparring and flirting.
Arguably, though, the best subversion in the whole introductory storyline of the BTVS show is when Xander is forced into the agonizing decision of whether or not to stake and kill the vampire his best friend Jesse has become, only to have the point become moot as someone in the fleeing crowd jostles Jesse and Jesse falls on the stake, accidentally killing himself. Kinda goofy and dumb, but effective.
At any rate, Buffy/Angel is underway and we should hit the end of Season 2 by Labor Day if we continue watching two episodes per week through the summer. Which means it won’t quite have become Buffy/Angel by then, either, just Buffy/Buffy, but that’s all right.
The second pop culture project, 50 Books a Year, remains constant, progressing slowly and steadily. In ruminating on Beach Books on a Bus at length, though, I did seriously begin to consider investigating the bus route options between home and work once again. 66 certainly isn’t getting any better on its own. Even the HOV lane which buses use on 66 gets backed up for miles sometimes, but as I’ve said often enough in the past, any amount of traffic is more tolerable when I’m not the one actually driving in it. So maybe BBB won’t be so grossly misnomered this summer after all. And if I bus (and read) most of the way into work, instead of driving halfway and Metroing the rest, my daily page rate will in theory go up and that will make me happy, too. So, further updates forthcoming.
There actually is a third pop culture project I wanted to talk about, which involves inventorying my semi-ludicrously large comic book collection, now that it’s completely reunited under the same roof I sleep beneath, and doing some thinning of the four-color herd once it’s been assessed front-to-back … but, it’s slightly more complicated than that, so I’m not going to get into that right now. Soon, though, soon enough. The entire project-oriented framework of life remains in place, but these days it’s something I’m feeling better and better about.
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