This... probably qualifies me as slightly crazy.

[deird_lj]

I've been cross-stitching lately, which generally involves me putting TV shows I know well on in the background, so that I have something to keep me from getting bored with the cross-stitchiness.

Anyway...

Lately, my Cross-Stitching Background TV has been Lois & Clark, season 3. All very fun and entertainingly nutty.

Now, though, I've reached an episode I absolutely HATE. Not because it's actually all that bad - but the emotional stuff the characters are going through is just painful, and unnecessarily painful, and I don't want to watch that episode again.

Except...

I was kind of watching them all in order...

So, instead of SKIPPING the episode, and putting the NEXT one on for me to cross-stitch to, like a sensible person would, I have put the episode on, left the room, and retreated to my computer, where I am frantically reading websites and playing solitaire until the episode GOES AWAY.

...because, then, I won't have watched them out of order. But I'll still get to not watch this unwatchable episode.



Yes, I am indeed a loon.

*continues to avoid my living room for another 20 minutes*

Comments

[immer-am-lesen.livejournal.com]

Um, yes, slightly crazy perhaps.
But I can kinda understand- the need to know you've watched things in order, even the terrible ones you don't want to, is very very strong...
I must say though, I've sat through un-favourite eps, trying to get something out of them anyway; never have I ignored the episode and gone away to leave it playing to an empty room... :-p

[deird1]

But I can kinda understand- the need to know you've watched things in order, even the terrible ones you don't want to, is very very strong...

Well, exactly. Because if you don't watch them all in order, you're just not doing it right.

[draconin.livejournal.com]

[deird1]

:D

[taiba.livejournal.com]

You are officially and THOROUGHLY insane :-p

[deird1]

Why, thank you.

[shapinglight]

I almost went to those lengths recently during my B5 rewatch. I find the season 1 ep Believers horribly upsetting and didn't want to watch it again.

In the end, I made myself, because I am an anal retentive completist and had to.

[deird1]

Anal retentive completists unite! *cheers*

From Laney

[(Anonymous)]

Well.



I hope you at least have the sound on. Given that you can't see the TV, at least you could say that you've experienced it by vaguely hearing it in the background. That counts as 'in order'.

Otherwise, if you couldn't see OR hear the episode,
I'm afraid I would have to point out
that the one in your house
who could truly claim to have 'done' them, in order,
would not be you,
but your TV.

I don't think I'd want a household item to be officially one-up on me in the Lois-and-Clark stakes.

[deird1]

I did have the sound on. And sat there wincing whenever I heard it reach a bit I didn't like...

[debris4spike]

Oh - you have made me feel guilty - I am so far behing with X-stitching ... I must get organised again.

Yes, I like Lois and Clark as well! Although will admit my least favourite season is 3!

[deird1]

I've just got back to cross-stitching after stopping in the middle of one for about six months. Took me quite a while to figure out what colour I was up to...


Yay L&C! (Season 3 is rather annoying in places, isn't it?)

[lavastar.livejournal.com]

Oh, Deird. What would I do all day if I wasn't laughing at your little loonatic compulsions? :P


...and, um, what the heck is cross-stitching?

[deird1]

Glad I could amuse you!


Cross-stitching:
- Similar to tapestry, kind of, except not with wool, and with double the amount of stitching.

Um...

- Picture a piece of fabric, laid out in a grid of teeny little squares.
- Okay?
- Now, imagine that, at the end of this whole affair, we're going to have a picture, put together by filling each square with a slightly different colour.
- So, sort of vaguely paint-by-numbers.
- Now, the way we do this is by getting lots of very thin, colourful bits of thread, and stitching them into the fabric.
- So, for a single teeny square, we do a stitch in, say, light blue from the bottom left corner to the top right corner...
- And then another stitch (also in light blue) from the bottom right corner to the top left corner.
- So it ends up looking like a tiny diagonal cross.
- And you have one of those in each of the teeny squares, right across the whole fabric, until you end up with a very pretty picture.

Got it?


...or maybe I should just post some photos.

[lavastar.livejournal.com]

OHHHHH I totally remember doing that once in, like, Girl Scouts. I was very bad at it, I seem to recall.

You should still post photos, though!

& why exactly are you doing this if you find it so boring? LOL.

[deird1]

Oh, I totally will post photos. When I remember...



& why exactly are you doing this if you find it so boring?

Welcome to the wonderful world of ADD!

No, seriously...

You see, I find it almost impossible to concentrate on only one thing at a time.

Right now, at work, I have my iPod playing lots of music at me, so that I can concentrate on work. Whereas, if it's totally silent, my mind will wander.

Similarly, if I'm reading a book, I'll probably be walking round and round in circles at the same time.

And if I'm cooking, I have the tv on in the background (or sometimes music playing instead).

If I'm watching TV, I'll be playing cards, or patting my cat, or cross-stitching.

If I'm needing to think about something, I'll probably start a game of minesweeper, or walk around talking loudly to myself, or take notes on my own thoughts.

Otherwise, I just won't stay on track. For pretty much anything.

So, while watching TV is something to do while I'm cross-stitching, cross-stitching is also something to do while I'm watching TV. I need to keep my hands busy.

...and at the end of it, I end up with a pretty picture to hang up in my house. Hooray!

[lavastar.livejournal.com]

Hee! Yeah, I mean, I know lots of people like that, but I seem to have missed the whole 'ADD generation' thing. Pretty much the only multi-task-y thing I can do is listen to music and be on the computer. But even then, I'll start singing along or something and get distracted. I'm the weird person who puts like all of my attention into something.

Like, if I've got work to do? I'm the anal person who sits right down the second I can and does it all at once with no breaks and doing absolutely nothing else until it's done. I actually can't do the work if it's not like completely silent.

Which is why I hardly ever use IM, because I can't do stuff on the computer and talk to someone at the same time. XD

The other exception I guess is when I'm eating. I love eating, but it's rather boring for me to just sit and eat, so unless I'm eating with, you know, other people, I always read the paper or a book or something at the same time.

But otherwise? I'm weirdly focus-y and completely inadept at multitasking.


Anyways. Sounds like fun, to have pretty pictures! What kind of things are you making?

YOU SHOULD MAKE ONE OF A DINOSAUR I THINK YESYESYES.

When I get into capslock mode, I get fierce. :P

[deird1]

*envies you*

It really would be so nice to be able to concentrate on something occasionally.

On the other hand, it makes me rather ridiculously good at multitasking...

[snickfic]

You are fabulous and crack me up, and just so you know, I do the same thing sometimes. My Buffy S5 rewatch got derailed for six months because I just couldn't bear to watch "The Body" again. I finally said, "Hah, it's been so long since I watched the last ep, that it's not really a season rewatch anymore, so I can skip." And I did. And now I'm stuck not watching "The Gift"...

[deird1]

Heh. *pets you* It's not that bad, really...

[lavastar.livejournal.com]

Also? You guys are so silly about sad episodes, Deird and all you commenters! I love sad episodes! I usually watch them in rows so I can sit around crying like a silly person. I'm like not avoidy about them at all. YOU PEOPLE ARE WIMPS, I SAY.

[deird1]

Oh, don't get me wrong, I love sad episodes. The Body? Awesome. Becoming? Even better.

But this episode isn't so much sad, as painful, in a really...

...I'm going to have to explain the entire thing, aren't I?

*sighs*



You see, Lois&Clark goes something like this:

Season 1
- Clark is Superman! Hurrah! Lois has no idea, and much amusement is derived from her cluelessness.
- Clark begins to fall in love with Lois. How sweet.
- Lois runs off with Lex Luthor (who is EVIL, but secretly), and almost gets married to him. Thankfully, Clark saves the day, Lex (apparently) dies, and Lois decides she probably loves Clark instead. But she doesn't actually tell him, or anything silly like that...

Season 2
- Mostly lots and lots of Clark being in love with Lois, and Lois being in love with Clark.
- But she doesn't actually know that he's Superman, and he keeps running off to save the world, which annoys her, and makes her think he doesn't care about her.
- ...and she almost goes off with another man instead.

Season 2 ends with Lois figuring out that Clark is Superman.

Season 3
- Lois and Clark are in love, and almost get engaged.
- But there are lots of "You Are Superman" issues to work through, so they don't, for a while.

- This intermittent period is mainly comprised of Lois deciding she wants to marry Clark, at which point he decides not to marry her...
- ...and then he decides to marry her, and she sobs "Oh Clark, you broke my heart by deciding not to marry me! It hurt so much! I can't marry you!"...
- ...and then she decides to marry him, at which point he decides that marrying her will put her in too much danger from Criminal Of The Week...
- ...and then he decides to marry her, and she says "Hah! You've got to be kidding! You bastard!"...
- ...OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

- Then they finally get engaged, and quickly plan a wedding, which will take place in a few episodes' time.

- And then the wedding happens, but actually Clark only married Lois' clone, and the real Lois has been kidnapped by Lex Luthor, who plans to take her to his evil hideaway and make her his bride, by strategic use of Stockholm Syndrome.
- And then Clark's heart is broken. Because clone!Lois (who he thinks is real!Lois) doesn't love him, and is being all weird.

- And then real!Lois escapes, but promptly gets amnesia, thinks she's a bar singer who's in love with Lex, teams up with Lex, and tells Clark she doesn't love him.
- And Clark's heart is broken again.

- And then bar-singer!Lois gets whacked on the head and gets amnesia again, and Clark is heartbroken again, because she doesn't remember him at all, falls in love with someone else entirely, and thinks the very idea of her liking Clark would be ridiculous.

...which is the episode I can't watch. Not because it's sad, but because they're putting Clark in pain in exactly the same way they've done it eight different times already, and it's complete overkill and makes me sob in teeth-grinding despair.

Whereas, if I skip that episode, I can just about manage to stay positive during the next plot-arc, which involves the rescheduled wedding being cancelled due to Clark's alien child-bride coming to Earth and taking him home to rule over New Krypton.

(Yes, I do know how weird this plot is.)

Seriously. When they finally actually got married, the episode was titled "Swear To God, This Time We're Not Kidding", they'd delayed it so many times.

From Laney

[(Anonymous)]

Was it really?

How cool.

I remember them getting married and finding out it was clone!Lois, but I'm not sure I remember the real!wedding...

...or any of those intervening episodes, actually - I think I'd given up in disgust by that point (sorry!).

[deird1]

You mean you never saw the episode where Lois and Clark kept going back in time to different periods of history, and Clark always had a Robin-Hood-like secret identity?

Or the one where they got shrunk by Lois' jealous high school friend, and run round in a dolls house, and Clark had to wear scuba gear and pretend to be a marine so that no-one figured out he was Superman?

Or the one where they were trapped in a time loop repeating Christmas Eve over and over again, by a malevolent pixie?

Or the one when a photographer got photos of Lois and Superman in bed together, and used it as proof that Lois was cheating on Clark?

Or the one where everyone was convinced that Jimmy Olsen was Superman's alter ego?

Oh, shame. You're missing out...

[lavastar.livejournal.com]

...wow. That's, um, pretty crazy.

That's the problem with having shows revolve around one thing (for example, the marriage of Clark & Lois): you can never actually have it happen, but you need to keep having it almost happen, so there's got to be lots of crazy plots. Like how on most action shows, the whole point is the main character is all cool and fighting evil a lot or whatever, but they can never actually die from all the evil they're fighting.

[deird1]

Oh yeah. It's completely mad. Which, in Lois&Clark, is half the fun.
(Seriously. Cracky plots are their speciality. And they do them so well.)

Mind you, it comes across quite differently when you're actually watching it.



(Sidenote: have you ever tried summarising Buffy plots to someone who hasn't seen it? It sounds so weird:
"And then her boyfriend - remember, the one who came back from the dead after he went evil and then good and then she killed him? yeah, him - well, he left town to be a detective, so she went off with this college guy who was a psychology student, except he wasn't really, he was actually a soldier who was on a secret mission to capture vampires (including Spike - remember him? yeah, the blond guy with the crazy girlfriend who teamed up with her to save the world). And anyway it turned out he had superstrength because the army had him on drugs, but they also had him implanted with this mindcontrol chip which he didn't know about until the half-demon cyborg activated it... Oh, and then there was this whole thing with Willow's werewolf ex-boyfriend coming back just as she'd got a new girlfriend and being captured by Buffy's new boyfriend, who then tried to help him escape and committed treason...")

[lavastar.livejournal.com]

Hee! Luckily I've never had to try - my friends who don't watch it just shake their heads at me when I talk about it and call me a geek. And then I point out that they read buckets of HP slash, and it's all good. :D

Although I have mentioned some things about Buffy in conversation, and they're always like, "...wait, WHAT?" :P