On Beastiality

(How's that for an SEO title?)

Beauty and the Beast came out when I was about four years old. I don't remember seeing the movie for the first time, but my parents tell me I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

I do remember begging my parents--in that entitled, naggy way four-year-olds have--to buy in on VHS. (Side note: Remember VHS? Good times. Then again, you can't have commentary or extras on VHS, so really, I'm glad we've moved on to DVDs.) Though I didn't watch the tape to the point of destruction, it's fair to say my mom (and dad) soon came to hate "Be Our Guest," and looked forward to the start of the school year. They did, however, indulge me and buy me a really awesome Belle costume for Halloween. I looked pretty adorable:



My attraction to Beauty stemmed primarily from my love for its heroine--a love that only grew as my childhood years passed. Belle wasn't like previous Disney princesses. She loved her kooky inventor father and, most of all, books.

(Also, I totally loved the Beast. To the point where I preferred him in his Beast-ly form and lovingly treasured the plastic model of him I got at Pizza Hut. Even at that early age, I was weird. Though I think it was mostly that I didn't like Human Beast's long hair. And his fur looked soft.)

But here we have a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg situation. Did I become a bibliophile because my natural inclination toward reading was reinforced by a positive role model, or did I just pick her to model my life after?

If the latter is the case, I'd like to take this opportunity to give the entire Disney operation the finger, because I've suffered quite a bit of disillusionment and heartbreak because of them and, more specifically, this movie. Don't get me wrong: It is my second-favorite 2-D movie (Lion King represent). Hell, it got nominated for Best Picture that year. But Belle's ostracization from her peers was romantic, even a little glamorous. She didn't seem to suffer all that much from being smarter than most of the people in her town. Yeah, some old hens sang about how odd she was, but she seemed to get along pretty well in life. And--spoiler alert!--she's rewarded with an awesome life in a huge castle with a dream library and a pretty cool (if a little hirsute) dude for a husband.

Granted, this sort of thing happens in every other Disney "princess" movie. With Beauty and the Beast, though, it feels like more of a betrayal, because I'm Just Like Her. So, if we follow Five-Year-Old-Girl Logic, all those things she gets should also be mine, right?

But in the real world, the Beast is never a Prince in disguise; he's only a Beast, and no amount of wishing or loving will change that. Castles are pretty expensive, not to mention damp and drafty even in the summer. And if you read Lord of the Rings every year and love Battlestar Galactica and read books about superstring theory, people will only ever see you as a Nerd.

How I Met Battlestar Galactica

There's no denying the fact that the last...six months or so of my life have been somewhat less than awesome. In fact, the I've spent vast majority of that time either in a state of complete mania and panic or catatonia. I always knew adult life posed its own unique challenges, but this has all seemed a bit excessive. I fucking get it, Universe.

So, with the collapse of my entire life plan (boyfriend, career, housing, financial whatever), and without any sort of employment in which to immerse myself, I naturally returned to my first, best method of coping: TV.

I love Friday Night Lights more than most people, and it really is very relatable, but for some reason it was more of a Band-Aid than actual healing tissue. (I'm talking about biological tissue here, not Kleenex.) Apparently my worldview was so thrown off-kilter I needed two radically different four-season-long shows to get it back on track. It took Battlestar Galactica to put my problems into context, but it was How I Met Your Mother that taught me how to solve them.

I started out with my beloved Battlestar Galactica. [SPOILER ALERT for the next paragraph, if you haven't watched the show all the way through.] The concept of having your home eradicated, your species' entire future in doubt, spoke to my melodramatic streak, and I adopted that feeling. I wallowed in it. And the episode after they discover "Earth" is nothing more than an irradiated cinder, that their reason for living was all just a lie (4x11, "Sometimes a Great Notion")...Well, a character's death was never more poignant for me than when Anastasia Dualla--a character I didn't even like, mind you--pulled out her gun after one last happy moment and put a bullet in her brain. She worked until they wouldn't let her; she loved until her heart gave out. She fought until she couldn't. And that was the feeling I was struggling with: Once your life is blown all to hell, and everything you've ever believed has been proven a lie, how do you go on? How do you find another reason? Are there any other reasons?

Again, I wallowed in these questions for a while. It was only natural. (Gossip Girl's funeral episode also contributed to this period of deconstruction. What happens when you're measured and found wanting, but you never get another chance to be measured? What happens when you're just not enough?)

I didn't intend to leave my existential crisis anytime soon, but thankfully the TV gods intervened and sent me the first three seasons of How I Met Your Mother on DVD. (Well, they sent my roommate the first three seasons. It amounts to the same thing.)

Of course, I blew through those three seasons (and SurftheChannel'd the fourth) in no time and loved every hilarious, sweet, realistic second. Granted, these characters are a good six to ten years older than me, but they're wrestling with the exact same issues as I am.

Logically, I knew the odds of staying together with the first person you ever dated, or keeping the first job you ever have, are astronomically small, but for some reason I always had this horrific sense of shame that accompanied thoughts of that not happening. HIMYM finally got it through my thick head that it is okay for you to be unlucky on the first try. That it does happen with some (Lily and Marshall), but that even those who seem really well-suited for each other don't make it (Ted and Robin). Oh, and [SPOILER ALERT if you haven't gotten through season three] that sometimes what you really wanted was in front of you all along (Barney and Robin, which, by the way, I am such a fucking fangirl 'shipper for them it is ridiculous: "But with you, the trouble doesn't seem so...troubling." God bless you, NPH).

The fourth season continued drilling those ideas into my head, but one of my favorite moments in the entire show came in the finale:

Ted: This is a disaster. How am I going to come back from this?
Lily: Okay, I'm just going to ask this. Do you really want to come back from this?
Ted: What's that supposed to mean?
Lily: Architecture is killing you, Ted. And it's killing us to watch it killing you. You're like that goat with the washcloth. You want it so bad, and every time the world tries to take it away from you, you keep grabbing it. But, you know what? It's just a washcloth. Why do you even want it?
Ted: Because I have to be an architect! That's the plan.
Lily: Screw the plan! [...] Look, you can't design your life like a building. It doesn't work that way; you just have to live it and it'll design itself.
Ted: So I should just do nothing?
Lily: No. Listen to what the world is telling you to do...And take the leap.

What my leap is remains to be seen, but at least I'm not holding on to that washcloth anymore.

Oh My God, This Is My Life

Post Grad.

Except I don't look like Alexis Bledel, and I haven't so completely run out of options that I've moved back to Florida. But still. There but for the grace of God...