Weekend Getaway

The summer has begun in earnest, and we are down at my dad’s beach house, a wonderful place where the family comes together in a completely dust-free environment.  It’s fun, though Manfrengensen says it’s like Gattica. If you shed an eyelash, they’ll find it.  If you leave a glass unattended on the counter, when you come back from the bathroom it will be gone.  Stepmom is cool, but very fastidious, and it’s her place, so them’s the rules.  Saturday night I left my sweater and jacket downstairs, and her first words to me Sunday morning were about all my “jazz,” which I immediately took upstairs, feeling sorry and somewhat criminal.  It’s nothing personal, it’s just her thing, and sometimes I wonder if her thing might be borderline OCD.  But she’s got other things too, and some of them are actually good.

My brother and I watched The Pursuit of Happyness Saturday night, which I have to say was pretty good in a way that brought about the appropriate emotional responses in me at the appropriate moments.  I cried at the end, though I thought it was too abrupt.  They spend almost two hours bringing you down into this guy’s spiral, and then in the end, hooray he makes it, hugs his kid, and the credits roll.

Saturday night Manfrengensen and I came in from our ice cream walk to a dark house.  Everyone had gone to bed, so we figured we would set the alarm for the night.  Well, of course, I pushed the wrong buttons, and the thing started beeping, beeping like the countdown on Fox’s 24,  My brother was coming down the stairs as we fiddled with the buttons, the thing beep, beep, beep, beep.  I hit the right combination and the thing stopped.  He said, without turning, in that dry, deadpan, monotone way he has, “Did you cut the red wire or the blue?”

We’ll see if this moment is any kind of harbinger to what kind of summer it’s going to be with 10 people sharing a house.

It’s great to be with my brother, who is now in his forties (as am I). He’s been sick with a cold, and the cough is lingering.  How many times this weekend did I hear that cough and assume it was my father?  My brother is a lot like him, and that is a wonderful thing.

Back to Grey’s Anatomy

(Part 2 of the series)

So, anyway, more about Grey’s Anatomy,  specifically Meredith and Derek.  First of all, Derek can do SO MUCH BETTER than Meredith.  I don’t know if it’s the way Ellen Pompeo plays her or the way she’s written, but Meredith Grey is the most whiney, annoying character ever written for prime time television. It’s been four seasons, and rather than getting her shit together, Meredith just seems to get worse and worse as far as emotional train wrecks go.

Several times over the course of this series, the writers have threatened Meredith’s life.  She had a burst appendix, she almost let herself drown, etc.  Each time, I didn’t feel like the drama was real.  I just didn’t believe they’d kill off the title character. Not in this case.  Not for this series.  But, man, did I pray that they would.

So now she’s in therapy with some doctor in the hospital who apparently has no other patients, because Meredith seems to just burst in to the woman’s office whenever she has an emotional epiphany, which apparently happens several times a day.  Are we to believe that the shrink is just sitting around waiting for Meredith to work it out and come back to her?  This doctor appears to have a lot of time, perhaps too much time on her hands for filing.  That’s no kind of shrink.  No wonder Meredith is still such a mess.

So at the end of the season, a season in which Meredith and Derek have mostly been apart, and Derek has been dating a nice, patient, understanding nurse (I liked Rose.  Rose is cool.  Rose could see the writing on the wall.  She was cautious, but she couldn’t help loving McDreamy.  Who could?  I ask you, who could? He’s the Loverboy.), Meredith shows up at the end of the episode and does this sappy romantic thing, so we can assume they are getting back together.  A lot of fans of the show are mooning over this moment, but I’ve got to tell you that it made me want to GAG.

Next, why is George such a chick magnet?….