shut up and let me see your jazz hands

1. I watched the season premiere of Community and really liked it. ( Spoilers )

Parks and Rec was also fun. ( Spoilers here, too )

2. I finished typing up the worst of the inventory stuff at work. They gave us a new form to use this year and it's easier to use, which is nice.

3. Payday today.

1. I finished two books in the past two days! Woohoo! That happened not because I was reading really fast, but because I have a bunch of partially-read books around. I've fallen a little behind schedule if I want to get fifty books read this year, but hopefully I can finish up some more of these and not fall further behind.

2. I finished watching the last couple episodes of Community and really loved them. Yay, paintball! Really, the show should just be all paintball all the time. ( spoilery )

3. Two more episodes of Parks and Rec tomorrow! :DDD I am excite!

4. I stopped at the 99 Cent Store for bread on the way home, since I was off early today and they were actually still open, and they also had really nice looking broccoli (huge things of it) and asparagus, so I got a bunch of each. Yay, cheap produce. :D

Daily Happysong:

Aoiro 7 - Aoi Sportscar no Otoko

Okay, so. I did this thing where I stopped watching Community? But everyone on my flist was still talking about it. In fact more people on my flist were talking about it than had been when I was actually watching the show! So I ended up giving in and downloading the episodes I'd missed.

This show still hurts me a lot! But it is also funny, and I was particularly squeeful about ( something Abed aka Chad had to say )

No, I haven't quite given up yet, and I'm glad I didn't, because this week was actually pretty awesome. ( Spoilers )

So the other night I caught up on a bunch of comedies I'd downloaded over the past few days. I wasn't sure I'd continue with Modern Family this season because I find it to be very high on the embarrassment squickage. But I decided to give it a try and enjoyed this episode, so I guess I'll be keeping on with it after all. I do like the show for the most part.

The Big Bang Theory was also fun. ( Spoilery )

My favorite of the returning shows was definitely Community. I was just filled with relief watching it. The season finale left me with a really bad taste in my mouth, and while this does nothing to change the tranny jokes or LOL furries parts of the finale, at least it gives me hope that this season will not be the All White Women Love Jeff Show. ( Spoilery )

I also watched a couple new shows! I had seen billboards for Running Wilde and was vaguely interested because Will Arnett! but I hadn't realised it was actually by the creators of Arrested Development until I saw someone on my flist post about it. So I had to give it a try because of that. It is definitely funny, though not quite as wacky (or good) as Arrested Development. I have hope for it, though. Though Keri Russell! As the mother of a twelve-year-old! Ack! I mean, it's within the realm of possibility, certainly, but she's my age, so it just felt really weird. I had no idea Tobias (dunno the actor's name) was on the show as well as Arnett. He seems to be playing a similar character type, just as Arnett's character is very similar to Gob. I love the supporting characters best, like Migo and Mr Lunt. The whole thing with the tribe in the rain forest was pretty cringeworthy, though. :-/

Outsourced...I don't know. I watched a preview for it and came away with the feeling that it was all about the white guy and very much LOL Indians and that's pretty much how I felt about the first episode, too. There were some funny bits and I love Rajiv, but I don't really have high hopes for it.

So having decided half-hour shows are much easier for me to keep up with than hour-long shows, I decided to check out Community and Parks and Recreation.


Community I loved immediately. I watched all twenty eps in two days (and then found to my dismay that it's on hiatus for a few weeks) and was totally hooked. I love Troy and Abed especially, but I don't think there's any characters I don't like.

The premise bugs me, because I hate the prejudice against community colleges and the whole elitism thing going on there, and this just perpetuates the idea that community colleges aren't real schools, that they have horrible teachers, that you can get a degree taking nothing but filler classes, and that even the real classes are a total breeze where you don't have to do any work.

I love that the cast has multiple women and multiple characters of color (even if the main character is a white male and the balance is overall more men than women and more whites than PoC) and that they're not just there as window dressing. It does play to stereotypes (Britta is the annoying unfun feminist, and I cringed at the plotlines involving Abed's family (also why are both Abed and his dad played by South Asians when the characters are Palestinian?), among other things), but thankfully not all the time.

Also...I totally ship Abed/Troy, but the nudge-nudge wink-wink thing with them and with Raj and Howard in Big Bang Theory really gets on my nerves. There are no openly queer characters on either show, so the only thing approaching queer representation we get is joking about how close male friends might be gay. Although in Community there's also the dean, which um...again, queerness played for laughs. :-/

Still, I really enjoyed it and am eagerly looking forward to more episodes.


Parks and Recreation I'm a little more ambivalent about. I watched the "whole" first season, which was only six episodes, and while I didn't dislike it, and I liked a lot of the supporting characters, the main character, Leslie, hits my embarrassment squick majorly, so it can be difficult to watch.

I really love Tom and Ann, though, and while at first I wasn't sure if I was going to continue watching, the fifth episode really hooked me. That is the episode where everyone thinks Ann and Leslie are a couple at a function, thanks to Leslie's very masculine haircut and suit. XD (That wasn't the only reason I loved that ep. Ron's speech, omg!)

So I'm downloading what there is of season two now and will see how that goes. :)


Overall I am really enjoying this foray into sitcoms. They were pretty much all I watched growing up (aside from some action shows like Magnum P.I.), but when I started watching TV again a few years ago after my long hiatus, it was all stuff that had big fandoms, like SGA and SPN, or that sounded interesting like Brothers & Sisters and Ugly Betty, and I find that while I can enjoy longer shows okay, I really do prefer short ones. I have trouble staying interested in a forty-minute plot, plus IMO, drama shows should have limited runs, yet networks want to draw them out forever.