2 posts tagged “drama”

Some people like true crime shows because of all the delightful fact finding and craziness.  Some people like makeover shows because they like the feeling it gives them seeing people finally become happy about their own appearance.  And some people like the news because they are horrible masochists who enjoy watching stuff about all the murders, death, corruption and the occasional fluff piece about a rescued dog.  Me?  I love soap operas.   

My love for soap operas kind of started out weirdly.  I didn't like daytime soaps.  My mom lived for As The World Turns and Guiding Light.  I preferred Beverly Hills 90210 and then jumped ship to Melrose Place.  I was probably the only kid in my school who watched MP religiously and probably the only one who was watching when Dr. Kimberly Shaw took off her wig after returning from the dead.  Which was disappointing in that I didn't have anyone to talk about it with.  Because they were all watching, hell, I don't even know.  Full House, probably.

But then, I started watching Guiding Light with my mother and sister every summer and I got hooked on the Santos family.  Specifically Carmen.  She was everything I wanted to be.  Powerful, feared, bitchy and AWESOME. And ok, she was actually really evil and tried to kill her son's wife more than once, but still, AWESOME. Once she left the show, so did I. After that I stuck with whatever turgid drama I could get my hands on that wasn't daytime.

Then my best gal pal Lucy got me to start watching Days of our Lives right around the time that Marlena was revealed to be the Salem Stalker.  It took me a good week to actually understand any of what was going on, but once I did, I was hooked.  I started reading the internet soap fansites, searching for info on who was going to die next.  And that's I think the number one thing that I love about soaps: the format of soaps is so fluid anything can happen.  Literally, anyone can die, anyone can come back from the dead (for whatever stupid reason), anyone can take over the world with a weather machine, or hell, even 2 witches can cross magic beams and create an earthquake that causes a tsunami in New England.

So here's my list of reasons why I love soap operas:

• Anything can happen.  - Like I said above, plots can meander and sometimes be truly shocking.
• No matter what the crime, you can still be redeemed - It's true.  Look at One Life to Live: Todd basically raped women for ages and he's now kind of a hero on the show.  Or take Marlena on Days: She sort of killed 9 people and people in Salem still love her.  That's not something that can happen in everyday life.
• Plots move slowly - Miss an episode of Lost and well, you're kind of lost as to what's going on in the next episode.  Soaps conveniently remind you constantly of what happened in the last episode, sometimes recycling the exact same scene again.  And then flashing back to it five minutes later (this is especially true of James Reilly's days on Days).
• Plots that don't work? Re-written.  Characters that don't work? Recast or written off.  This doesn't happen in primetime because of the massive lead time needed to produce the bigger shows.  When a storyline ain't working on Grey's Anatomy, it could be 8-10 weeks before the viewers sees the episode where they change it.  Soaps don't have that problem.  They can re-write on the fly, recast seamlessly and still have the storyline work.  Sometimes (hey, I'm not blind...sometimes it just don't work).
• Self-contained storylines.  Don't like what's going on with one storyline, fast forward.  Primetime focuses on the ensemble, mostly, so all the characters tend to interact.  Not so with Daytime.

So, my original plan for this blog was for it to be about kind of whatever was going on around me and maybe that was why I didn't update for so long.  I don't think I really wanted anyone on the internet to read about what was going on around me.  I mean, I think between my last post and now (almost a whole year), a lot of things have happened.  I spent a night in jail, got rid of a few friends, changed my hair and most importantly began moving away from my old life.

After high school ended, I sort of ended up in limbo, mainly because I'm probably one of the few people who actually enjoyed every minute of high school.  The bitchiness, the cattiness, the gossip, the rumors, the vicious bitches and the overall everything that went on in high school.  I loved every minute of it.  Unfortunately, once you leave high school, everyone else kind of gets over that, because well, they hated all that stuff.  That's why I sunk into the world of soap operas, where that stuff still happens among adults.  So, college for me really sucked, because no one seemed interested in the backstabbing and rumormongering that went on in high school. So, I dropped out and went to work.  That worked until I got fired from a really good gig for being gay.  I told all my friends the reason was that they just didn't need me anymore, which was the official reason my old manager gave me.  But the real reason was that the wackadoo Christian bitch known as my supervisor found out that I was gay and couldn't deal with that, so she had me fired.  I felt just like Star Jones or Shannen Doherty.  It sucked.

Hence why I've enacted some changes in my life.  I've tried to stop inventing lies and stories to make myself seem more interesting.  It's ultimately done nothing but ruin my friendships with people I've been friends with forever.  Another part of my changes is that I'm trying to get out more from my friends from high school. I've sort of been leeching on to them in some sort of desperate attempt to keep myself in high school.  It didn't work.  So, now I've got to rethink my strategy.  I suppose honesty would be the best policy where that sort of thing is concerned.  I've also committed myself to being a better friend (mostly by not drinking so much booze when we go out).

So, the new point of this blog will be things that I stumble upon in the internets and also a few entries about my work and my personal life.  I'm trying to get out of LJ and try something new.  So here goes.