Remember when I said that after a long day of work, I enjoy plopping down and doing something mindless? Well, this summer my pursuit of mindless activity led me to the series Supernatural. And oh how I have binged!
The show follows two brothers who travel around the country fighting and destroying the evil things that go bump in the night. Werewolves, vampires, spirits, possessed objects, ancient gods, demons, and even angels (who, according to the show, have really horrible people skills). Every episode follows essentially the same pattern: some random person dies in a bizarre and inexplicable way, the brothers read about it in a newspaper or online, they travel to the scene disguised as FBI agents or insurance adjusters, then they spend the rest of the episode figuring out what they're up against and how to kill it, then doing so. Each episode features at least one grotesque and totally inaccurate blood spatter, lots of punching sounds (still trying to figure out how Sam and Dean have retained their beautiful faces and haven't died of excessive concussions), some broken furniture or walls, and ends with someone getting stabbed in the heart, decapitated, or burned alive (though, really, that last one is for ghosts and their remains have to get burned to destroy them so really they're...burned dead?). Occasionally one or the other of the brothers dies and is inevitably resurrected to keep fighting the good fight, and if I've learned anything from the show it's that whenever a person is stabbed to death, they will definitely bleed out of their mouth. Always.
Man, I love this show.
I wouldn't say I'm obsessed with Supernatural, but I am using it as a way to pass time. Lots of time. The supremely sad moments, while touching, have yet to make me cry, and my favorite episode is still the one anomaly that featured slapstick comedy. I am not a squealing fangirl who posts and reposts Supernatural pictures and GIFs on Facebook, nor do I peruse Tumblr in search of every Supernatural tag I can find. I enjoy the show, I enjoy the references, and I want to see where it goes while I have the time to waste.
And frankly, it's better than reality sometimes.
I have started to wonder if I should limit my time on Facebook, not because I'm wasting so much of it but because most of the time I spend on the site leaves me depressed and concerned for the future of our world. For months on end it's been nothing but
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| Word cloud made at Tagxedo.com |
At first, I tried to keep up with the news articles, blog posts, op-eds, and reports on the issues. It didn't take long to realize, though, that the vast majority of what I was reading was highly biased, poorly informed, inflammatory, judgmental, or just plain wrong. I started having to weed through my news feed based on who was posting and the source which they were sharing. Was it an impassioned acquaintance who was sharing something with LOTS OF CAPITALIZATION? Was it a Huffpost op-ed written specifically for their readership? Was it a blog post disguised as an article, or an article written like a blog post? I tried to avoid reading only what I agreed with and pushed myself to read the opposing viewpoint until both sides made me so sick that I stopped reading that altogether. Then I made a rule for myself that I would only read published articles by reputable news sources and avoid anything that suggested opinion. The result? I had nothing to read, and a lot more free time.
Adults of my parents' generation sometimes ask me how I can even hope to remain informed without a subscription to a newspaper or a television to watch. I wonder how they can hope to remain informed with those things. I am a frustrated consumer of current events, and much like my distaste for sucralose in my soda, I'm not terribly interested in someone else's opinions dressing up in an article and calling itself news. But because I want to remain informed, I generally have to muddle through at least a few of those sources to find out what's going on. At some point though, it becomes too much to handle, and as the realization of my white, privileged, American middle-class existence sets in I tune out and turn on a show that occupies my brain for an hour or two. (Or five on a Sunday when Tomm is on call.)
There isn't much I can really do about most of what's going on. My opinions on the Middle East aren't going to change the minds of the ones doing the killing, I don't feel I can affect the police force in Missouri, and the anti-Semites in Europe aren't going to stop harassing Jews and destroying their property because I say so. It's a defeatist attitude, I know. I did make a sizable donation to the ALS Association as part of the Ice Bucket Challenge, so at least that was one good thing to come out of a sad circumstance. Still, unlike Sam and Dean Winchester, we can't summon and destroy the demon in charge and we can't burn the bones of the offending evil spirit responsible for the deaths. As Dean says in one episode when confronted not by monsters but by sick and twisted human killers, "Demons I get. People are crazy." And these are crazy times in which we live.
So, at a time and in a world where I feel so frustrated by the news I hear and so unable to do anything about it, can you really blame me for wanting to see this instead?
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