How I Annoyed the Audience

I’ve been watching How I Met Your Mother and I’ve come to a conclusion: I really don’t like Lily. Spoiler alert for the forthcoming rant if you haven’t seen the series. It’s really quite funny until some point in season 4 when it jumps the shark.

First, she was having world class doubts about her impending marriage to her sweetheart since freshman year of college. She ignored those doubts until she tried for a scholarship to study art and didn’t tell her fiancée. If she got the scholarship, she would have to cancel her wedding. At first she just wanted to know if she could do it and then it became.

When given a choice of staying and marrying the man she was in love with, her “soulmate,” and spending a summer in San Francisco to try and be an artist, she left him. She destroyed him. When things didn’t go her way, she came back to New York and expected pick up where she left off. She barely even apologized.

I’ve never forgiven her for this because if the roles were reversed, I would never have taken her back. I don’t think she deserved to get Marshall back because she lied to him, didn’t talk to him about her doubts, and wasn’t honest with him or herself about how she needed some time on her own to figure out who she was without him. Instead, she went ahead with planning a wedding only to bail out. I get her needing to figure out who she is. What I don’t get is how selfishly she went about it. If she didn’t get into her program, her “soulmate” was her back-up plan.

When Marshall doesn’t take her back and decides he has to know who he is without her, she’s dejected. How could he not want her back? When he finally has a date with another woman, Lily mildly stalks the woman and breaks into Marshall’s apartment to spy on them. Does Marshall call the cops? Nope. This motivates him to finally take her back. No accounting for taste or gullibility.

Secondly, we find out in a later season she has been deliberately sabotaging Ted’s relationships if she didn’t like the girl or think it would work out. Her reason? “I don’t see all of us sitting on a porch together in our 80s.” WTF are you on woman?

When it comes to a relationship you’re not in, your opinion doesn’t matter. Pulling other people’s strings and orchestrating other peoples’ lives to they turn out how you want is incredibly selfish and manipulative. It borders on a personality disorder. But does Ted disown her as a friend? Nope.

All Lily has to do is one gesture and all of her years of lying and puppet-mastery are forgotten. Suddenly, she’s trustworthy again. Are you effing kidding me? If I found out one of my closest friends was deliberately sabotaging my relationships with guys she didn’t like, we wouldn’t be friends anymore. She doesn’t respect my feelings or my right to make up my own mind romantically.

Thirdly, when Robin and Barney are in the midst of their messed up pseudo-relationship, Lily decides they’re not really happy because they don’t have a label on it. These are two grown, independent adults who don’t need anyone’s permission to have or not have a relationship. But the Supreme Ruler of the Ultimate Couple decides they must label it. She even locks them in a room to make sure they do it. If she’s not satisfied with the label they assign, they won’t be released.

Again, these are two consenting adults with more issues than National Geographic. If they want to be in a fucked up wannabe relationship, that’s their choice and their right. It’s your right as a friend to be a broken record or just enjoy the show. If one person wants a label and the other doesn’t then work that into your monologue.

It is not your right to lock them in a room because they’re not doing what you want or think all couples should do. This is seriously not right and there is something diagnosably wrong with a person who pulls this and thinks it’s OK.

She also browbeats her husband. Didn’t like his browser history? Silent treatment. Didn’t like the way he was coaching kindergarten basketball? Silent treatment and threats. Rack up a huge amount of credit card debt? Lie to your husband about it, make him take a soul-sucking corporate job to pay for your mistake, and refuse to sell your designer clothes to pay for necessary repairs to the apartment you can barely afford.

It just elaborates what I already knew: What makes for good TV/Movies makes for a miserable reality. Would you want a wife who lies to you about how she feels and racks up a ton of credit card debt? Would you want a friend who sabotages your relationships because they don’t like the guy/girl? Me either but some of it makes for a decent sitcom.

Current Music: Insomnia - The Veronicas

Alphabet Challenge Round 8

W is for White Girl Problems by Babe Walker. This book was incredibly funny. Babe is an over-the-top, spoiled rotten, raging narcissist. Some of the things are almost too ridiculous to believed like the birthday parties, very effective personal trainer, Babette, and her day as a lawyer.

However, as someone with a social conscience, the funny goes out the window if anything in this book is more than 40% serious. As long as this book is a joke, it’s funny. Once you realize it might be serious, it definitely loses some of the funny.

A
B
C
D - Divergent by Veronica Roth
E
F
G - The Great Fables Crossover by Bill Willingham
H - How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown
I
J
K
L
M - Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen
N - Naked City edited by Ellen Datlow
O - One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde
P
Q
R - Reality Bites Back by Jennifer L. Pozner
S
T
U - Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman
V
W - White Girl Problems by Babe Walker
X
Y
Z

Current Music: With or Without You - U2

Alphabet Challenge Round 7

D is for Divergent which is a very dangerous word in Veronica Roth’s world.

I really enjoyed this book. I love dystopian fiction. I love well-written YA fiction. When you combine the two you find incredible new voices and ideas. Roth’s idea is that in a future Chicago, people are 1 of 5 factions all known for very different and distinct ways of thought. You must conform to your faction or risk being cast out and factionless which to many is a fate worse than death.

When Beatrice is found to be divergent, she can choose to stay in her current faction or move on to a new community with new rules. This is a decision that will change her life and the lives of others because what she doesn’t know is that something much bigger than faction initiation has been set into motion.

Roth did a good job establishing her characters and looking at the harsh changes they faced while also looking at the dangers of groupthink. Some were more developed than others so I didn't get all my questions answered but that's first person narratives for you. I did not expect the major plot twist near the last third of the novel. It was like the plot was going one way and then jumped a train for a whole new direction.

I didn’t get literary whiplash but I wish Roth had set it up just a bit more. I expected her to spend more time on the different factions, rules, and history before changing direction so sharply. However, if you liked The Hunger Games, I’d give this a shot. Beatrice/Tris is a little bit of Prim and a lot of bit of Katniss. I'm very curios to see what she does next.

A
B
C
D - Divergent by Veronica Roth
E
F
G - The Great Fables Crossover by Bill Willingham
H - How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown
I
J
K
L
M - Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen
N - Naked City edited by Ellen Datlow
O - One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde
P
Q
R - Reality Bites Back by Jennifer L. Pozner
S
T
U - Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman
V
W
X
Y
Z

Current Music: Disc Wars - Daft Punk

Alphabet challenge Round 6

This one's for U. Puns are over so moving on to my review of Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman.

I read a short review for this book and was immediately curious. I have seen some performance art pieces about the problems between the races in Crown Heights back in the 90s. I have several Reform Jewish friends and have been declared an ‘honorary Jew’ by them. I was curious to learn about the more extreme aspects of this religion.

Feldman talks about growing up without her ‘goyim’ mother and her mentally stunted father. She was raised by her very devout grandparents and her judgmental family. It’s easy to see how religious devotion overshadows the warmth necessary for familial love in many instances in her young life. I loved hearing about her sneaking books.

She is very good and going back and recognizing key moments like when she lost her innocence or when she knew her marriage would be troubled. I liked that Feldman wasn’t afraid to share even the darkest secrets of her world like the father who probably murdered his son for masturbating and the community covered it up.

Like all memoirs of this kind, almost the entire book is devoted to the past that made her run. Feldman spends almost no time on what comes after entering the world of the goyim. What did she do for money? Where and how did she live? Where did her son go to school? Does he ever see his father? She admits when she watched her first movie, she didn’t understand what she was seeing. What was it like to learn about movies and TV? What about all the forms of secular music? When did her anxiety go away?

I left knowing plenty about where she came from but not a lot about where she so desperately wanted to be and eventually was. I see several people of different faiths that are extreme. I’ve always wanted to know what they think of me and my world, especially since Feldman wanted to join it. The epilogue wasn’t enough to satisfy that. On the whole, it was well written and insightful regarding Hasidic culture.

A
B
C
D
E
F
G - The Great Fables Crossover by Bill Willingham
H - How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown
I
J
K
L
M - Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen
N - Naked City edited by Ellen Datlow
O - One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde
P
Q
R - Reality Bites Back by Jennifer L. Pozner
S
T
U - Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman
V
W
X
Y
Z


Current Music: Unaware - My Favorite Highway