personal

How I Met Your Wednesday

Last night, I decided to marathon my way through the last nine episodes of How I Met Your Mother‘s final season. I first discovered the show on DVD, and I’ve often felt, particularly in the last couple of not-quite-as-good seasons, that the show holds up a lot better, at least for me, in larger block viewing. There’s a certain momentum to watching it like that, and while it can sometimes throw a harsher than usual light on the show’s flaws — like, for instance, that this last season had surprisingly very little momentum of its own — it can also underline the show’s strengths and build up my investment in the characters. I’d watched most of this last season already, but I’d decided some two-thirds of the way through to take a break and let the remaining episodes pile up for one long, final watch.

And then I started hearing over Twitter about terrible the series finale was.

I should probably say that this post is going to contain some spoilers. Also, that the Twitter chatter was right. It was a very disappointing way for the show to end.

Todd VanDerWerff, who is one of my favorite TV critics, wrote a long post about the show, and the episode, and he sums it up I think nicely:

The ultimate takeaway from the final season is that series creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas were at once too good and not good enough to tell the story they ultimately wanted to tell.

The problem for me was this: for the show’s creators, the title was apparently just a misdirect, another joke nested within all the others. And yet for those of us watching, those of us who cared about these characters, it was the driving force behind the show. We wanted the love story, wanted that genuine — and moreover earned — happy ending, and, yes, we wanted to know how Ted met his future children’s mother.

VanDerWerff writes:

Bays and Thomas simply looked like shitty long-term planners, unable to understand that getting the audience so invested in the Barney and Robin coupling or in Tracy as a character would make it all the harder when the series finale abruptly dissolved the former and treated the latter’s death as an aside in the narration. That the show never seemed to suggest Ted mourned her feels like a vital betrayal of his character.

So they were telling a different story than they seemed to be, and the evidence suggests that they’d been doing so all along. (A scene at the end with the kids was clearly filmed very early in the show’s run, if not in the very first season.) But it’s the story they seemed to be telling that I cared about, and this other story, the one in which “How I Met Your Mother” is just a joke, was terribly disappointing. I don’t think it’s a story that could have worked when introduced like this, and after nine years with these characters.

So I don’t know if I hated the episode, but I did kind of hate where it ended the show, and what it decided to break in its attempt to get there.

Monday

It snowed this morning, which came as something of a surprise. It’s not that it never snows here at the end of March, or even into April, but I don’t remember seeing anything but rain in the forecast. Almost all of the snow had melted by late afternoon, which makes the whole thing feel like some early, strangely elaborate April Fool’s Day prank.

Still, I’m glad I didn’t have to trudge through it to get to the office this morning.

Meanwhile, there’s a new issue of Kaleidotrope up and waiting, if you’re looking for some short stories and poems to read.

Sunday

A quiet, rainy weekend.

I spent a lot of it pulling together the next issue of Kaleidotrope, which should be more or less ready to launch later tomorrow. I’m really happy with the stories and poems in this issue, although I do hope in the Summer issue I can make a return to the fake horoscopes and advice columns that let me put a little more of my own personal spin on the zine. I mean, why else am I continuing to do it otherwise?

Oh, and I haven’t mentioned this here, but one of the poems from last Summer’s issue — “Leaving Papa” by Darrell Lindsey — was recently nominated for a Rhysling Award. That made me happy.

I spent the rest of the weekend out at dinner, it seems. Last night, I attended a surprise party for my aunt’s seventieth-something birthday, and tonight I went out for dinner with my parents to celebrate my own birthday earlier in the week.

Somewhere in there, I managed to watch several episodes of The Good Wife, and the latest Hannibal, and write this:

They come out when the sun goes down.

They don’t talk, or not often, even among themselves, for to talk would be to reveal that they don’t belong there, their accents thick like oil splashed across the water of their words. They are not worried that their meaning will be lost, but that who they are and where they’re from will be found out. The others, these so-called natives, are a superstitious lot and quick to violence, and they have seen, from weeks now of quiet study, what happens to those who are not as careful when threatened with such violence. Mannerisms and mistakes can give a man away — they have seen at least one man hanged for no more than a single gesture — and their mission is too important to jeopardize in such a careless way. They dress according to the local style, the finery and golden beads strung around their necks a sort of camouflage that would be unthinkable back home, perhaps even a kind of sacrilege. They are often glad that no priests were selected to join them on this mission; the test to their own shared faith has been difficult enough. But they also know that they must not reveal themselves, must look no different than the natives themselves. These beads are the custom, and they really are no more than baubles — hardly the sort of thing to truly anger the gods — and so they wear them in this place.

When they first arrived, they were shocked by the sight of the moon in the evening sky, a harvest moon larger than any they had ever seen before. Back home each of them had seen slivers of the moon in the sky, and they are not as ignorant of basic astronomy as some might think, but they have only seen it against a backdrop of blue sky and cloud. To be outside after dark, for hours after the moon has stolen that sky from the brighter sun, that too would have unthinkable. And yet it is a sin that each of them knows is required. If they are damned for it, then they are damned. The natives — or rather those who have taken this valley and now call themselves natives — these people do not come out except after dark. It is their way, the peculiar nature of what these people are, have allowed themselves to become in turning away from the old gods. And they, the dayrunners, have learned that they must mimic this to stay alive.

I’m thirty-seven! I’m not old!

We didn’t get the snow that was forecast last night, unless you count a weird, light dusting I noticed around the car windows this morning, but the weather has definitely put the lie to the idea that we’ve finally entered spring. I suspect I’ll finally be able to stop wearing my winter coat by late April, but late March seems to be pretty much off the table.

It’s been an interesting week, albeit not always interesting in ways that I’d like. One of the editors I work with told me the other day that he’d had an anxiety dream about this one book, and I’m close to having a few myself. There’s some small comfort in knowing the big issues that are keeping a couple of projects from moving forward aren’t of my making, but…well, not a whole lot. Still, I think we’re further along today than we were yesterday, so there’s that at least.

Meanwhile, I had one of them birthday-type things again. It seems like I had the last one only a year ago. It’s been mostly uneventful, although I received some very nice gifts — almost exclusively books — and well-wishes, and it was a good day.

I even did some writing, which I’ve managed to do most every day for the past week and a half. And while it’s still very scatter-shot and meandering — very first-draft-y — some good ideas and forward momentum may have snuck in while I wasn’t paying attention. (They’re not wrong when they say a big part of writing is just showing up.) Today’s few pages didn’t bring any great eureka moments, and showing up isn’t always fun, but I never regret writing, only when I don’t.

Anyway, it’s been an odd sort of week, but not a bad one, even kind of good in its way.

Sunday

A quiet day. I wrote this in my free-writing group:

When he put the beast in gear, it purred like a kitten, roared into life, then just as quickly sputtered, coughed a cloud of black smoke, and died.

“I think it’s busted,” Frank said.

Bill grunted, twisting the key in the ignition. “Might’ve flooded it,” he said.

“Might have done,” Frank said. “You check the tank?”

“When the hell was I s’pposed to do that?” asked Bill. “Barely had time to roll the damn thing off the street. ’sides, you see a gas tank?”

“So you didn’t drive it?” said Frank.

“What?” said Bill. “Nah. Took the boys an hour just to crack the door open, dupe this key. No, we used the truck.”

“So you don’t know if it drives at all.”

“What? ’course it drives. That dumb bastard drives the thing all over town, doesn’t he? When he’s not using that, whadyacallit, Bat-plane or something.”

“And you’re sure it’s his?”

“Of course I’m sure. Him and the Commissioner were standing right next to it not ten minutes before we rolled up.”

“How’d you know it was the Commissioner?”

“What? Dude’s got that big mustache, got shot at during the last city parade. What d’ya mean how’d I know it was him? Next you’re gonna be asking how I knew it was the Bats.”

“He was wearing the costume.”

“Dude’s always wearin’ the costume. That’s how we knew it was his car.” Bill tried the key again. “Though it’s not like there are lots of other cars look like this.”

“You check for booby traps?” asked Frank.

“I’m gonna pretend you didn’t ask that,” Bill said. “Like this is some kind of amateur hour.”

“I’m just saying. The last guy who tried lifting these wheels, that Cobblepot guy? That guy’s got billions, big operation, and the explosion still took out half a city block.”

“Dude calls himself the Penguin,” said Bill. “Like I said, amateur hour.”

“So fine, you checked for booby traps. You’re the one said you couldn’t find the gas tank.”

“Look,” Bill said, “this beast is streamlined, custom-made. They don’t roll Batmobiles off the assembly line. They don’t include any user’s manual.”

“You check the glove compartment?” Frank asked.

Bill just stared at him, mystified.

“You did check the glove compartment, didn’t you?” Frank asked. He reached in front of him and opened it up. The user’s manual was right there. “Yeah, you’re real professionals.”

“Hey, it’s an honest mistake,” said Bill. “It’s just — um, hey, what’s it say about flashing red lights? On the dashboard? If there are flashing red lights on the dashboard, kind of a — I dunno, a countdown or something?”

Frank sighed. He undid his seatbelt and opened the car door. “I think it means we’re gonna lose this city block, too,” he said.

“Goddamn booby traps,” said Bill. “I knew we shouldn’t have out-sourced that key duping to the Joker.”

It’s admittedly silly, but I had fun writing it.

That was Sunday.