SELF ANALYSIS & LITERATURE: Yes, really.

Well I’m on the road to emotional recovery, having spent the last hour crying my eyes out over “My Big, Fat, Obnoxious Fiancé”.

My television habits are Discovery and PBS, and very few of the dramas because I tend to miss a few or they keep switching programming around. Other than that, I watch to relax, to lose myself in a fantasy world—pure escapism. Unfortunately, these things can also get you involved in someone else’s problems even while managing to help you forget your own.

But “My Big, Fat, Obnoxious Fiancé”?

Because first of all, it was a wedding, and I’ve cried at every single wedding—real or TV dramatization—except my own, and that was because my mother slipped me some kind of pill and I wore a big silly grin the entire day, even when J had to leave right after the meal because he broke a tooth and he spent most of the day at the dentist’s with a friend (I stayed and had a swell time).

Secondly, the show was emotionally charged with trickery, family upheaval, misguided intentions, and a beautiful bride. Everybody was either angry or crying and brokenhearted. So was I. I cried as the bride said “I do,” I cried when her family cried, and I cried when the groom said, “I can’t do this.” That’s all there is to the story, except that the wedding was revealed to the family as a hoax, to the bride as a double hoax, and she won one million dollars for herself and her family at which point I cried some more.

Dumb, yes. But the point I’m trying to make is that TV is similar to literature in its nature of involving the watcher/reader to a place where emotional reaction is a result. The writers of this particular show, no matter how goofy it may have been, understood the necessary elements of narrative and used them to ensure that “sensitive” viewers such as myself would turn into total marshmallow blobs of simpering sympathy and stay glued to the program through its completion. This is one of the discoveries of the new “reality” TV shows. Producers obviously became aware of the public’s hardening shell of unsympathetic disbelief developed over decades of viewing movies, television, and life itself, so actors have been replaced with “real” people we can relate to more easily. Literature is following this vein as well; contemporary fiction is more simplistic yet complex, digging deep into the soul and plinking all the nerves as it goes.

That’s it for now. I’ve forgotten where my train of thought was heading. I have been working on some artwork for Spinning, and seeking solace from books for the emptiness I’ve been feeling.

I’m half full.