Happiness is a warm pupper

I always appreciate the way that Noel tries to make Mother's Day both special for me, and not actively annoying to me. He gets the kids to pick out cards and little treats. He asks if I'd like him to make anything special for dinner, but if I don't have any ideas, he comes up with his own (delicious) ones. Otherwise he knows that I want what Frankie Heck wants: a Not-Mother's Day. No pressure, no pomp, and for God's sake, no brunch.

That's exactly what I had on Sunday, and darned if it wasn't one of the happiest days I've had (in the midst of a very happy season of a very happy year). I laughed and played games with the kids, I ate delicious food, I took a long walk with my podcasts, and I watched television with my husband. The exact definition of good times.

And the next day the A.V. Club published a list Noel and I put together of the most useful shorthand quotes from Charles Schulz's Peanuts, a comic that definitively shaped both of our childhoods and helped to bring us together. It was so wonderful to collaborate with him and to enjoy the reaction of those who shared it and commented on it.

School is out, and the living is easy. I'm working on a qualitative research task brought to me by some faculty in the physical therapy department, part of a paper about use of an outcomes assessment tool in students' clinical rotations. It needs to be done by the end of the week, so I'm working through it chunk by chunk. Once that's done, I'll start on my writing project for the summer -- a book for Fortress Press's Theology for the People series.

It's only week 2 of the summer, by even the stingiest accounting. There's much warmth and many pleasures to come.

Sundance season

Noel has been in Park City, Utah since last Wednesday, attending the Sundance Film Festival. You can read his daily dispatches here at the A.V. Club.  By all accounts, he's had a good run in the screening rooms.  And clearly, he's worked very hard, as can be seen by how many films he's logged and how many thousands of words worth of capsules he's written in the wee hours of the morning.

Here at home, we have our own "Sundance Film Festival." It consists of trying to cobble together babysitters, grandparents, and my work schedule so that the kids are delivered to and from school on time, and receive regular meals.

That's been difficult in our 2012 outing.  A combination of regularly scheduled spring events -- a freshman book discussion, a sophomore orientation -- and two faculty candidate visits back to back, meant that this is the first weekday night since Noel left home that I have not had to head out in the evening darkness for some work-related event.

I couldn't have managed without my parents coming to handle kid transport and kitchen duties while I was otherwise occupied.  They left this morning for the grueling two-day drive back to their home on the Georgia coast.

Noel's last day at the festival is tomorrow; he flies home on Thursday, arriving around the time the kids are getting into their pajamas.  I have done a decent job keeping things together (knock on wood).  But I've done a poor job communicating with my absent spouse.  Normally I post status updates and blog entries regularly, supplementing the occasional phone conversation with public information about how we're getting along.  But the faculty candidate visits have thrown any concept of "regularly" out the window.  I've had neither the time nor the energy to write, even a hundred and forty characters.

When a big push like faculty hiring coincides with the stressful and difficult conditions of half parental strength, you put your head down and power through it.  But it always surprises me how much effort, mental and physical, that it takes.  Several nights in the past week, I've sat down in my recliner an hour or so away from bedtime, finally done with everything on my plate, and have felt the bone weariness seep through my shoulders.

Noel knows that feeling well, I'm aware. No one works harder, especially through the 20-hour days of film festival madness. My parents know it, as they bunk down in some motel midway through Alabama, still a day away from their home after driving all day.  We all look forward to getting back to the normal pile of deadlines and the usual routine of too much on our plates, rather than this crazy displaced double-time version of our lives.

Finishing and starting

I've been looking forward to this weekend for a long time.  Noel's back, I'm off the clock at work (unlike last weekend), and sleeping late, crafting, and spending time with the kids are the only things on the agenda.  Bonus: Noel and I are going out to dinner and a movie tonight so we can catch up on all the news and gossip, and see a movie our critic friends are crazy about -- Drive.

But on the other hand, I've been aware for a while that this weekend is the last chance to draw a deep breath before I leave for Japan next Saturday.  At work this week I'll be working frantically to get everything set up for my week-long absence; at home I will have five TV Club pieces to complete, three of which will need to be done after the shows air (the other two I can write ahead of time, although I'm not going to get the screener for one until mid-week).  It's been a while since I wrote about television "live," as it were, typing up notes immediately after the show is over and posting them without much time for reflection.  It's a different way of writing, and I'll have to get back in the groove quickly; the first two episodes of How I Met Your Mother and Modern Family air back to back on Monday and Wednesday, respectively, and I'm taking over Project Runway from the masterful John Teti on Thursday.

That means there won't be much downtime in the evenings to get my bearings.  No matter what I get done or don't get done, my departure on Saturday will come when it comes.  I have to remind myself that I can sleep on the fourteen-hour transoceanic flight ... well, except for the time I have to spend grading the freshman papers that will be turned in on Friday.  Rest may have to wait until the flight back on September 30.

Smart sports

Every once in a while, Noel gets a chance to write about sports on the A.V. Club.  And every time he does, readers who enjoy popular culture and geeky obsessions get a chance to sound off on a subject usually left to the jocks and frat guys.  They come out of the woodwork, and I wonder anew why there's so little out there for them.

Sports is a natural for people like us.  It has characters, storylines, history, taxonomy, hit points, strategy, stats, 'shippers, and endless opportunities to play "what if?"  But because it's associated with the kind of people who used to shove us into lockers -- not to mention the kind of people who despise literature and art -- we tend to turn away from it.  And if we don't, it's hard to find a community of likeminded people to discuss it with.

I'm hoping that The Classical, a new sportswriting site, will becoming such a gathering place.  It's got an impressive roster of writers lined up (if a predictable dearth of female voices), and a mission I can support.  They're looking to raise a year's budget on Kickstarter.  Every single person who commented on Noel's piece on Sunday Night Baseball should head over and kick in a few bucks.  It's just what they're looking for.

Appreciation

I was a little afraid that the last post in my four-year run of NewsRadio recaps would sink into the internet little noticed.  Season 5 of the show, after Phil Hartman's tragic death, is problematic for many fans, and I figured I would have lost some of my readers in this final summer when that was the topic of conversation. The readership for the series was never massive in the first place; certainly it was far from the most popular feature on the site, more of a niche audience at best.

But it's been an amazing week, as readers came out of the woodwork to express their appreciation.  I resolved early on to try to thank everyone who commented with a compliment or a pat on the back, and the lovefest went on for the entire week.  In addition, I've gotten a steady stream of tweets expressing sadness that the series is over.  Some people have even praised the writeups in comment sections, blogs, and columns around the web.

The comments on the article were the best, though.  Some said they had never watched Season 5 before, but gave it a try because of my writeups.  Some said they only just found the TV Club in the last week, but were now rewatching the whole series and reading along.  Some talked about how they never knew many other folks who liked the show, and had found a whole community among readers of the feature.

I know the end can't last forever.  But it's been incredible dragging it out as long as possible, and having the readers play along as if they didn't want it to end any more than I did.

No, thank YOU

It was a beautiful day today.  After a week of triple-digit temperatures and what seems like months of triple-digit heat index readings, it rained last night for hours on end.  We woke up in the morning to cool air and green everywhere.  It felt like the long summer of doom and conflict was finally over.

And then today featured the bittersweet appearance of my final writeup of NewsRadio for The A.V. Club. I received so many wonderful expressions of thanks for the series, and was able to thank many of the commenters who have shown up week after week and summer after summer for their companionship and contributions.  It was a lovefest.

Today, in other words, was the perfect remedy for plunging stock markets and general worldwide worrisomeness.  Everyone was generous and kind; the world was full of light and life.  I came home to a delicious home-cooked meal and hugs from my intelligent, happy children.  Tomorrow's troubles can wait until tomorrow.  Today was a beautiful day.

End of an era

Tomorrow morning, my very last recap of NewsRadio will post on the A.V. Club website.  I've been writing about the show, one of my all-time favorites, for four summers, encompassing five seasons.  It's been a labor of love, and a lot of wonderful people have come along for the ride, watching along with me and commenting each week.  I've learned a lot from them and made some new fans and friends.

I'm not going to able to find another show to revisit that has the same combination of appealing features for me.  NewsRadio was a traditional-format sitcom I have championed for more than a decade as one of the high points of the form and of broadcast television, despite its lack of ratings success.  In many ways it sparked my interest in treating television seriously and trying to understand how it worked.  Some sitcoms aspire to be little more than competent ephemera, but anyone who tuned in with more than a passing interest could immediately see that it assembled the elements of comedy with elegance, invention, and a deep passion for the possibilities of the form.

When I come back to TV Club Classic, probably early next year, I'd like to do another show that has a similar level of cult interest and formal excitement.  NewsRadio established me as something of a multi-camera sitcom specialist (although I have no formal training to support that status), but I can't think of another show that fits the bill -- relatively short run, underappreciated, pushing some envelope.  If you have any ideas, leave 'em in the comments.

The biggest stage

Last night was the premiere of Breaking Bad's fourth season.  It's been more than a year since season three ended; an entire cycle of Emmys have come and gone, meaning that the show and its personnel are not nominated for anything this year.

For some programs, such a long break would spell danger for devoted fans.  A show might come back and find its viewership has evaporated, people having long since moved on to the next big thing, or forgotten the thread of its convoluted plot.

But the lengthy hiatus has only caused Breaking Bad's popularity to grow.  The season four premiere last night was the show's most watched episode ever, beating the previous season's first episode by thirty percent.  It appears that the show's fans spent much of the last year, and certainly all of the past month, badgering everyone they knew to start watching.

And the heightened interest and bigger audience translates into a shockingly huge comment section for my first recap of the season.  Twenty minutes after the show ended, there were 100 comments; everytime I refreshed thereafter, the number seemed to grow by leaps and bounds.  Right now, about 20 hours later, there are over 800 comments.  That's getting up into territory I associate with Noel's immensely popular writing on Lost.  It's a scale with which I am entirely unfamiliar; my writeups of How I Met Your Mother and Modern Family, two network comedies with much larger viewerships than BB (though certainly a less avid or cultish fan base) might draw a couple of hundred comments, while my "classic" writeups of NewsRadio struggle to reach half that.

I certainly can't attribute the activity to my writing; fans of the show gather to discuss it, not what I said about it.  Nevertheless, at that level of interest, there are more people reading what I'm writing, even casually and cursorily, than anywhere else my work appears on the site.  It's a daunting prospect -- to know how to do what I do best while at the same time giving such a sprawling group what they might want.

Authorship

You know that Kindle single I was writing about yesterday?  It became available today in the Amazon Kindle store.

I was in Little Rock waiting to pick up the kids from SLUFY when I saw the announcement from the A.V. Club's Twitter feed.  When I went to the single's Amazon purchase page, I was delighted to see that both Noel and I are credited as authors (Noel filled in for me at least once in each of the three seasons, and he did an interview with Breaking Bad's creator Vince Gilligan that's included in the e-book), along with editor Josh Modell and cover illustration Danny Hellman.

It occurred to me that I should make sure the single is linked to my Amazon author page, so I went to Amazon Author Central and clicked the link to add items to my bibliography.  Amazon's search engine then presents to you everything with your name on it, and you can click buttons underneath to claim the item as your book.  In a few minutes, hours, or days, after some algorithm confirms it, the items appear on your author page.

I flipped through the pages, skipping over the children's books by Donna Bowman Bratton, and not only found the Breaking Bad e-book, but also -- surprise and joy -- the upcoming volume of essays Cosmology, Theology, and the Energy of God that I co-edited with Clayton Crockett, which is due out from Fordham University Press in November.  The book has appeared in Fordham's catalog, but this is the first I've seen it available online for pre-order.

So whether you're in the mood for some great televised drama or some energetic theology, I've got you covered at Amazon!  Either or both make great gifts for a loved one -- or why not treat yourself?

Sports Shouting

Noel's insightful essay on ESPN, sparked by the release of a lengthy oral history of the network, appeared today on the A.V. Club and has precipitated quite a bit of thoughtful commentary.  Here in middle age we are often astounded to look back and see what pieces of media used to feel fresh, exciting, and indispensable to our lives.  Did we leave them behind, or did they leave us?

I think about this every time I see a promo for Desperate Housewives on ABC and find myself astonished that the show is still on the air.  During its first couple of seasons we watched it religiously -- everyone who wanted to be part of the cultural conversation did.  And then the cultural conversation moved on, and yet the show somehow kept going, sustained by a demographic who aren't a part of that conversation.  It feels like a coelacanth when you run across it -- a living fossil.

SportsCenter is like this, too.  Time was, youngsters, when SportsCenter was appointment television.  It was the only place on the dial where you could get the sheer volume and breadth of highlights, delivered with panache.  Now the show not only seems to be merely a parody of the genre it spawned, but also appears to be going out of its way to actively alienate me and people like me, with little effort expended to actually comment on the highlights and as many tired catchphrases and empty panels of experts spouting meaningless opinion as they can pack into their hour.

Have these shows and their networks changed, or have I?  Is my distaste for their style a function of getting older and leaving the target demo, or are the shows the ones that survived too long, drew the wrong lessons from the prevailing trends, got complacent and synergistic, and stopped caring about the people who forgot them or grew to despise them -- people like me?

It's time

The A.V. Club's sister publication The Onion has been trying to prove its worthiness to the venerable Pulitzer committee -- unfortunately without success.  They fought a good fight, though.  Check out videos from supporters of the cause like Tom Hanks and Glenn Beck; read some of the reasons the Onion is deserving (as well as their thinly veiled efforts at committee persuasion).  Oh, and if you're not familiar with the Onion, please remember -- it's an adult publication, complete with adult language.

One more time we're gonna celebrate

As the clock started edging closer to 10 am, I got more and more nervous.  You only get one shot at this, and I was hoping I hadn't muffed it.  What if no one read, or commented?  What if everyone read and hated it?  What if I'd made a terrible error or missed something obvious?

When you write for a site with a million viewers a month, even if you are one of dozens and contribute only occasionally to obscure parts of the site, there can be a lot riding on your work.  Triple that when you are reviving a feature that has become important to a loyal group of readers.  When it's time for that first post, you can't help but experience some anxiety.  What happens today might determine whether people come back next week.  It might determine whether people remember the feature with fondness and give the site credit for its excellence, or whether they consider it a joke or a lost opportunity, or whether it fades quickly back into the morass of the internet.

Today the first post for the last summer of TV Club Classic reappraisals of NewsRadio, my favorite television show of all time and a true cult classic, appeared at 10 am Central time precisely.  And to my great relief, for the rest of the day the comments rolled steadily in, both from readers who have been following along since the summer of 2008 when I began writing about it and from those just discovering that somebody out there is talking about NewsRadio.


One of the magical things that can happen in Web 2.0 is the creation of an unintentional community.  People gather around something they care about, sometimes in an unlikely place that wasn't exactly built for their obsession, like the comments section of a publication.  Norms and mores develop, enforced by the community.  Vigorous discussion is encouraged, but questioning of core values may be squelched.  The location, shifting forward in time week by week and season by season as the host publication marches on with its mission, becomes like an online meetup, an event that community members look forward to for its own sake.  Friendships and antagonisms develop, members gain and lose reputation, personalities manifest themselves in greater detail, and a kind of gratitude for the little miracle of this accidental gathering can hover around it like a halo.

There are times when we can take possession of something -- treasure it, value it, make it ours by virtue of the fact that no one has laid claim to it.  I think some of the folks in these scattered TV Club communities feel that way about not only their shows, but the discussion to which they return week in and week out.  It's even stronger when the show has been neglected, or has lain fallow for a while, or isn't currently in the mainstream of the cultural conversation, but it can happen on a show as overexposed and obsessively, ubiquitously analyzed as Lost, where Noel's recaps gained a devoted and idiosyncratic cult following of their own.

This last season of NewsRadio is divisive; some feel it's a sad downhill slide, some feel it's underrated. I don't know if folks will keep showing up for the next three months to talk about it.  But I'm glad they came back for this first post, if only to say goodbye once again to Phil Hartman.  In a way, I know that I don't have to do much for this to happen -- just provide the space and a few conversation starters.  I aim to do much more, of course.  But the pressure isn't what I made it out to be.  The community of commenters isn't responding to me but to each other -- to what they've built, and what meaning it bestows on each of us who claim it.

Final voyage

Summer at the A.V. Club means TV Club Classic.  During the year we focus on covering current shows week to week, but in the summer when new episodes are thinner on the ground, many of us turn to writing about shows from the past, reconsidering them in light of history or sometimes experiencing them for the first time.

I've been writing about NewsRadio since June 2008, taking on two seasons that first summer, then a single season every summer thereafter.  It's been one of my all-time favorite shows since the mid-nineties when it started airing, and has attained a cult following since then as one of the most underappreciated comedies the television medium has ever produced.  The response to its reconsideration in TV Club Classic has been most gratifying.

And now we're at the final season.  That would be bittersweet enough, but it's also a post-tragedy season for the show; in between the last episode of Season 4 and the first of Season 5, Phil Hartman -- a mainstay of the cast, and the man behind one of its most popular characters -- was murdered.  Jon Lovitz joined the cast in the wake of this loss.  A lot of fans of the show find this final season problematic.  They feel like it's not the same without Hartman, that Lovitz didn't fit in, that the show lost its way and should have ended on an earlier high note, that the whole thing is just too sad to contemplate.

So my job of writing about this season is difficult.  I haven't seen this season since it aired, and don't have vivid memories of much of it.  I hope that I'll be able to argue that the season is better than its reputation, but until I get farther into it, I can't be sure.

It's also an opportunity to approach the show in a different way, though.  Over the past few years the critical reputation of the show has grown tremendously, and my job has become a dissection of why it is brilliant.  That's a gratifying role, and readers have been very complimentary, by and large, of my performance.  But it might be interesting to make an argument whose outcome isn't already a matter of cultural consensus.

I have the best readers in the business -- they really know their stuff.  And they may disagree with my assessment of this season, as has sporadically happened with episodes with controversial reputations.  I'm looking forward to working through this season with them; maybe we'll both discover something we didn't know before.  That would be a great ending to four years and five seasons that have already changed the way I approach watching and writing about television.

Classic

Noel and I have the enviable job of revisiting old television series, episode by episode, and writing about what made them work or whiff.  I only take up this job during the summer, when the current shows I write about regularly (How I Met Your Mother, Modern Family, Breaking Bad) are in reruns.  But Noel has extended his TV Club Classic shows -- Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff Angel -- throughout the year.

One of the joys of this particular task is anticipating great episodes to come.  When writing about current weekly series, we discover the show along with America, as it airs.  (Well, sometimes we get advance screeners and see the episodes a few days ahead of their air date.  In the case of our favorite shows that are really on a roll, that peek ahead of the world can be so sweet.)  But when we're writing about shows that our readership, in many cases, has already seen, we get the fun of hearing from them about what's coming up -- their favorites and not-so-favorites.  In the comments to our reviews, week to week, our readers let us know their opinions ranging over the whole run of the show.  They look forward, they look back, they make comparisons within the show's seasons and episodes.  In some cases we're familiar with the show before going back to write about it, which means we can participate in the game of what's coming up and how it rates; in other cases, we're going into as a newbies, trying to avoid the spoilers that the commenters might be posting.

I tell students all the time that they are living in a golden age of information and media.  More of the history of entertainment and communications is available to them -- easily, often freely, or on the consumer market -- than at any other time that humans have been on the planet.  Revisiting part of that history in public, step by step, along with readers who look forward to each installment and play along at home, is quite an experience.

And Noel and I get the added enjoyment of watching the shows the other is recapping.  I haven't been able to keep up with two to four hour-long shows each week, but even though the full slate was beyond me, I asked Noel to keep Buffy for our evenings together even if he had to watch Angel during the day.  At the end of his recap of the hotly anticipated Buffy musical episode "Once More, With Feeling," Noel mentions how much I was looking forward to it.  Finally experiencing an hour of television I've heard about for years ... sharing it with Noel, who was also experiencing it for the first time ... and joining the company of all the commenters who have been anticipating this moment since the recaps started a couple of years ago ... it's the kind of confluence that only the Internet (and TV series on DVD) can bring about.

The reading list

One of the tricks to a happy life, I often tell my students, is to find a way to make what you really want to do into your job.  By that I don't mean finding a career doing the thing you would do even if nobody paid you for it, but putting yourself in a position where the valuable experiences you might be too lazy or too scared to choose voluntarily are what you get assigned.

Joining a book club has that effect for a lot of people.  Faced with a choice between a slightly more difficult or serious book and the sweeter, more palatable entertainments on offer, a lot of us wouldn't read the book. But if we commit ourselves to other people to read it, we're often grateful for the push, getting an experience we wouldn't have had the discipline to choose for ourselves when there are more immediately pleasurable options for our leisure time.

I've been grateful for the A.V. Club's Wrapped Up in Books feature, which has enabled me to put several books under my belt that I now love but probably never wouldn't have gotten around to without the assignment.  The latest was David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, a formidably thick tome whose premise is about nested stories and intertextuality.  Sounds like a chore, no matter how many positive reviews you read.  But it was often stunning and frequently moving, and I didn't just admire the virtuosity -- I was delighted by it.  There have been a couple of selections for WUiB I haven't cared for, but by and large I have been so glad to be pushed into these experiences.

What assignments have enabled you to live the life you really want, but that you might not have chosen voluntarily?

Glory days

For the last couple of years, I've spent my summer writing about a sitcom that was never a big hit (and hung on for a couple of years at the bottom of its network, ratings-wise). Episode by episode, season by season, I have been working my way through NewsRadio, a NBC comedy that aired from 1995-1999. If you weren't a television aficionado, a Saturday Night Live fan, or a Kids In The Hall follower at that time, you might have no memory of it.

But for my money (and I'm not the only one), it's one of the pinnacles of the half-hour situation comedy genre. Now, granted, that's a genre I think is well worth paying attention to -- a format in which great art is genuinely possible. Not everyone would agree. Particularly in the twenty-first century, when laugh tracks seem to be on their way out among the cognoscenti.

Week after week I find it immeasurably gratifying that a loyal cadre of readers gathers to comment on my write-ups and offer their own observations about the quality of the episodes discussed. It's one of the defining primordial Internet experiences, one that we might find ourselves forgetting as we move farther way from the birth of the web: Strike out alone, and find a community. All of us were watching back in the nineties, or someone helped us out with tapes between then and now, or we've caught up on DVD or online in recent years. And we all find this semi-obscure show worth talking about and thinking about.

The season I'm writing about this summer is Season 4, the consensus best season of what we would contend is one of the best shows the network system has ever somehow fortuitously allowed on the air. If you remember the show dimly or fondly, tune in to the coverage. If you've never been initiated into the club, find yourself a box set or Hulu. We're having an amazing time celebrating TV comedy that approaches perfection more often than any of us have a right to expect. And we'd love to have you join us.

A sailor's life for me

This week the A.V. Club's Wrapped Up in Books feature focuses on one of my favorite series of all time: Patrick O'Brian's beloved Aubrey-Maturin novels, seafaring adventures set during the Napoleonic Wars.

When it was my turn to select the book (we'd been around to every staffer and also had a couple of reader picks since I kicked the book club off back in May 2009 with Geek Love), I floated a few possibilities to the group. But it was Master And Commander that got the most "I've always wanted to read that" responses. I zipped through the book for the first time since I devoured it and the other 19 books in the series back in the nineties. And to my great relief, it was just as delightful as it was the first time around. I so enjoy being in Jack Aubrey's company. And this time around I paid attention as the sailors and their captain try to educate naval novice Stephen Maturin in the rudiments of yards, sheets, masts, and portable soup.

As far as I can tell from their initial posts, none of my fellow AV Clubbers participating had read any of the books before, although at least one is a fan of the excellent film adaptation from a few years back. While some have their problems with the book (I suspect we'll hear details later), I sense enthusiasm from others, and maybe even a bit of the unabashed love I myself bear them. Even better is the response from readers, many of whom are jumping in with their own deep affection for the series.

If you haven't read them, I can't recommend them enough. Yet I recognize that they push specific buttons that are very particular to me. I'm looking forward to the rest of the week -- partly to find out how widespread those buttons are among the staff and readership, and where what turns me on misses the mark for others.

Looking for Miss Golden Globes

I'll be trading quips and snark (with a smattering of real entertainment enthusiasm) at the AV Club's TV Club, as we liveblog the Golden Globe awards. It's an awards show that has very little prestige or cachet -- but it does have the advantage of coming first in the crowded awards season. And I actually enjoy the mix of movie and television stars it attracts, giving us for one night the illusion that all our moving-picture entertainment favorites live in one big happy family.

Too much typing is scheduled for tonight for me to provide a real essay of any kind here. But I'll leave you with one observation: When an actor who has no trouble getting work in the movies appears on television in a regular role, it gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. I think it's because the stepchild medium of the industry is acquiring the respect of those who in previous generations would have considered themselves too good for it. My love of television is validated by their gracious and wholehearted participation. And that means there's all the more love to spread around to everyone working long hours to entertain me. See you on the red carpet!

... Naturally

Noel took off for Chicago this morning. His colleagues at the A.V. Club have a full two days of brainstorming and planning in store for him, interspersed with cool premieres and book readings.

Luckily, I'm feeling like this week is going to be relatively easy. There are only three days of classes for me -- our fall break is Thursday and Friday. On Tuesday I've canceled my regular class meeting because we're doing an evening videoconference with a class at Creighton, featuring a guest speaker. I have a lot of writing to do (book review, four television write-ups); there's midterm grading happening, and a thousand other administrative tasks that need attention.

But all along I've considered this whole week an extension of my birthday. It might not feel like it until Noel gets home on Wednesday and I'm basking in two days with no students and no classes (and trying, as usual, to get up the motivation to accomplish something under those conditions). Things will really start hopping next week when we're back in class and it's only a few days until the double-whammy of conferences on back-to-back weekend in DC and Montreal (at both of which I have responsibilities, although it's behind the scenes only at the second).

And fortunately the kids are ridiculously easy to handle right now (knock on wood). Cady Gray is thrilled about going to the pumpkin patch tomorrow. As long as I get clothes on their backs and lunches in their hands, my work is done.

So I hope Noel enjoys himself with friends and productive work in Chi-town. I won't be playing all that much, but I also won't be stressed about the solo parenting for the next few days. Now please excuse me while I watch a TV show online ahead of time to avoid a pile up three days hence, then retire to plow through the last 100 pages of the book I'm reviewing tomorrow.

Give me one reason

In two weeks, the A.V. Club's second book will go on sale. It's called Inventory, and if you're an A.V. Club reader, you not only are familiar with the feature therein celebrated, but you're also sick of seeing the book promoted on the site already.

Like most projects like this, I have only vague memories of spending most of 2008 composing brief blurbs for crazy lists that had been proposed for the book. (It's mostly new material, with a smattering of greatest pre-existing hits. And looking through it now -- our copy arrived today -- I find it very hard to remember what I wrote and what I should have written but somehow managed to foist off on someone else.

And by "looking through it," I mean "finding myself fifteen minutes later still standing in the bedroom with a child's discarded clothing in my hand which I was on my way to put in the laundry before I decided to pick up the book for a quick looksee." I'll sound like a shill for saying it, but this is the kind of book that'd I'd get sucked into even if I didn't have a small hand in writing a small part of it.

If you're one of those people -- the kind who can't resist a good list, obscure and eclectic popular culture, disputable but persuasive opinions, and the obsessive ordering of all of existence into incredibly narrow categories -- you just might like it, too. Warning: contains far more swears than necessary. Makes a perfect gift. I don't get royalties. On sale October 13.