IN WHICH The Girl Hides from Ghosts

Happy Halloween everyone! Many people would see Halloween as the time to break into the horror movies. I, however, have never been able to deal with scary movies. The stress is just too much for me. I also jump out of my chair whenever something pops out of nowhere, even when I know it's coming. What's a girl to do in October then?

Since I actually do love supernatural and science fiction stories with suspense and a little bit (but not too much) scare, I watch those instead of Saw. I've spent the last couple weeks catching up on a large variety of both good and bad shows about not-too-frightening things that go bump in the night.

I re-watched the 7th season of Buffy, which instead of making me hide under my covers is like a nice bowl of chicken noodle soup on a cold night. I know not everyone thinks highly of Buffy's final season, but I actually like it a lot. I will say that "Conversations with Dead People" does still gives me the heebie jeebies though, so that's a good episode for Halloween watching.

Next was part of The Secret Circle. I will admit that this show is awful and it only got one season on the CW. But it's about a circle of teen witches and demon possessions, so it works for Halloween.

Yesterday, I went with part of the first season of the British teen show, Wolfblood. Despite it's ridiculousness, I kind of love this series about a family of wolfbloods - similar to werewolves - living in this tiny village in Britain. It's the type of show that would be on ABC Family in America, but it's hilarious and cute. I made my friend watch a few episodes though, and she totally judged me for my life choices.

I did finally go outside of the teenland to watch Fringe today as well. Fringe is one of my favorites, but it's been awhile since I went back and watched the beginning. I forgot how gross some of the cases they investigate are, which does actually work well for Halloween. I think what's most frightening about Fringe, at least at the beginning before it gets super crazy, is that the idea of some crazy scientists doing all sorts of experiments for the military back in the 70s that are now reeking havoc on the world is just slightly plausible. I also enjoy the highly evolving mythology of the show, and I'm a sucker for anything with parallel universes. Plus, Joshua Jackson. And the amazing antics of John Noble's character, Walter.

What do you watch for Halloween?

Anyways, now I need to go put on my utterly not scary costume of Madeline, the little French girl from the children's books.

IN WHICH The Girl Returns to College

If you saw my post about Buffy, you might have guessed that I have a not-so-secret obsession with teen dramas. Oddly enough, my interest does not stem from the most obvious reason: nostalgia for watching these shows as an actual teen. I only sporadically watched the popular shows of my teenage years when the WB aired them, such as Dawson’s Creek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 7^th Heaven, and Felicity. For the entirety of my teen years, I danced until nine o-clock every weeknight, right smack through prime time television. I made a couple attempts at taping shows on my VCR, but I didn't have the time, energy, or ability to tape every episode of a show. Man, do I appreciate the emergence of the DVR. However, my interest in these shows today still has its roots in nostalgia – nostalgia for the nineties, the music, the clothing, high school, and the drama of being a teen that while entertaining I only want to experience vicariously at this point in my life.

A few weeks ago I started re-watching Felicity and it tapped into a specific type of nostalgia for the college experience. The first season of Felicity really revolves around all the firsts of college, which brings back a lot of memories. Watching it, I realized that there are few shows that revolve primarily around college instead of high school. Many shows start in high school and move unsuccessfully to college. Felicity started in college so it didn't have to split up it's main cast or pretend everyone from high school ended up at exactly the same college. The show more effectively portrays the college experience than most teen shows.

In addition, most teen dramas today portray high school students as independent (few parental influences and the ability to essentially do what they want), sexually experienced, jaded towards the ways of the world, and fairly confident, at least by the time the kids graduate school. Felicity does not portray any of these things. I appreciate that here is an 18 year old girl who is totally clueless; she’s naïve, innocent, nerdy, neurotic, impulsive, and unsure of herself. It reminds me of me at that age. She exemplifies the excitement and fear of that freshman year of college perfectly.

Not only is the character of Felicity relatable (for some), the series provides many great examples of the college lifestyle. I read an article that said Felicity’s University of New York "doesn't nail exactly how college is so much as how it seems like it should feel." I agree that it includes many ridiculous elements (have you seen the size of her dorm room), but there are enough recognizable characteristics to make me squeal, “Oh my God, I remember that,” multiple times throughout the show.

Most Collegy College Moments in Felicity

1. Welcome to College

In the show, we see the college first of the firsts, meaning all those things you do the very first week of school. Felicity gets her student ID picture taken, decides what courses to take, sees her dorm room for the first time, and meets her roommate (sort of). All huge moments.

When she's getting her college ID photo, Felicity explains that she wants a good one because she'll have to live with it for the next four years. On that first day, four years of college seems like forever. You can't imagine how fast that time will go. The image catches you at the moment when everything looks bright and hopeful. Well, only for a moment in Felicity's case. While getting the picture taken, she sees the boy from her high school that she actually followed to college. Oh, did I not mention that Felicity is crazy? Her high school crush, whom she's never talked to, writes a nice letter in her yearbook and she up and changes her college plans from Stanford to New York to be near him. Granted, have you seen Scott Speedman's goofy grin? I'd probably follow him too.

Visiting your dorm room and meeting your roommate for the first time is probably the most monumental moments of arriving at college. Even if you have talked to your roommate on the phone, it's a little scary to meet this new person you will spend an entire year with for the first time. You desperately hope he or she will be your new best friend. Sometimes this works out; I luckily had a great roommate and stuck with her throughout all of college. Sometimes it doesn't. Felicity ends up with a crazyass goth chick who thinks she's a wiccan and hides a very mysterious box under her bed. However, Meghan ends up having the most interesting character development throughout the series and provides endless entertainment. She'd be terrifying at first, nonetheless.

2. Dorm Living

Felicity shows a lot of the ups and downs of living in a dorm during the first couple seasons. You really only spend a few hours in class a week; therefore, your main experiences at the beginning of college occur in the dorm. You meet your first friends there, you eat there, you sleep there, and you attempt to study there. In the show, we see lots of floor meetings, resident advisers, students attempting to do laundry and turning everything pink, dorm parties, and the cafeteria, most of which I remember well from college. I never turned anything pink though (and I'm not entirely convinced this happens in real life and not just on television). On Felicity, they even play the assassins game - you get a card with the name of another dorm member and hunt them down with a Nerf gun to obtain their card, continuing until one radiant survivor is left standing - that we definitely played my first semester at school.

The dorm item that cracks me up the most in Felicity is the mini-fridge. The mini-fridge comes up again and again during the first two years. On the show there's a lottery for mini-fridges, meaning not everyone gets one, and this causes tension and conspiracy theories among the dorm residents. I remember how exciting those little fridges were. For some reason, being able to store your own food, and not very much of it, caused all sorts of grown-up feelings. A symbol of independence! I also love Felicity's excitement at putting the first thing in her fridge: an apple. I'm fairly sure our mini-fridge in college mainly contained contraband alcohol. 

I had a very odd freshman dorm experience, living in a Radison Hotel (RadHo!) because there was an overflow of new students without enough dorm rooms. The Radison held five floors of college freshman among the regular hotel guests. God, they must have hated us. While they did move dorm beds and desks into our rooms, we still had the individual bathrooms, the televisions with cable, and maid service every once in awhile. So spoiled. After the first semester, BU moved us onto the regular campus, though we mainly ended up in upper classman housing because those rooms opened up faster due to students studying abroad and graduating early. Overall, I got very lucky in my dorm rooms.

3. It's Nice to Meet You

Now, if you go to a state school near your home, then you would have a bevy of friends from high school to start the year off with. However, Felicity went across the country to school and only knew one person there from high school - as did I. Therefore, the dorm, should you live in one, becomes the meeting ground for most of your friendships. Most of Felicity's long term friendships start that first semester in the dorm: Julie (though they technically met in class, they do live across the hall from each other as well), Elena, Noel, Meghan, and Richard (should you want to call him her friend). Proximity plays a big role in forming friendships, and these people live right next door. Plus, those first few weeks of college are slightly terrifying, so finding a few people to help you through the process is key.

For at least Felicity and me, these freshman year meetings form the core of your friendships throughout college. For me, living in the hotel really bonded our group of students because we were farther away from the main campus and not only lived together but traveled back and forth to classes and dining together. Most of my friends throughout college lived in that same dorm with me the first semester of school, and that goes for the friends I have today as well. I still see two of my college best friends regularly (I'm actually going to hang out with them this afternoon), and we're all RadHo alumni.

What about the romance? College provides an onslaught of potential mates, plus you are still dealing with all those annoying teenage hormones so every crush feels ginormous. Felicity obsesses over her Ben crush to a stalkerish degree, hopefully more than the normal girl, but it's easy to remember how big those feelings seemed. However, she also experiences all of the dating firsts with Noel, which is very entertaining to watch. The Ben vs. Noel dilemma creates much of the show's drama. For me, it really depends on which episodes I'm watching and at what point in my life. In the first season, Noel definitely wins the contest, but later he becomes annoying and clingy and Ben gains character. You can still find plenty of articles arguing for one beau over the other, so clearly the triangle gained a passionate response from the audience.

Lastly, parents can play a big role in your college experience. One of the hardest things to do when starting school is figure out how to mix your past relationships - parents, friends, significant others - with your new relationships. For Felicity, she has the hardest time doing this with her parents. They are understandably worried when she changes her college plans a couple months before school starts. However, they take this too far, trying over and over again to drag her back to California to focus on medicine instead of art (the girl is still going to a good college - chill). We quickly learn that Felicity's decision to move to New York has less to do with Ben and more to do with making a move towards independence from her parents. Breaking away from your parents and trying to determine your own identity away from past influences can be extremely difficult, but it is a necessary part of growing up.

4. Major? What Major?

Art or medicine? Psychology or English? Dance? Some people go to college knowing exactly what they want to study. Most of us don't. Felicity can't decide between pre-med, her parents choice that she also enjoys, and art, a passion she's had for a long time but hasn't seriously studied before. She's even further along than many students, who don't even have two options picked out. One of the best things about college is the array of classes available. You can take anything from The Social Life of Paper to Costumes of Czarist Russia. On the other hand, the number of options might overwhelm students and make it hard to focus. In the end, it often doesn't matter exactly what you studied, as long as you actually studied. Felicity eventually decides on art, but ends up going back to school for medicine after she graduates. I majored in psychology and then went back and got my master's in English later. Things never really go how you think they will.

Felicity does, however, show the craziness of signing up for classes, taking college level courses, and studying. As the article mentioned earlier says, this show, oddly enough, has the students going to class and studying fairly often. This is college after all, and while it does have a lot of fun elements, you still need to attend class and do your homework every once in awhile. Some of the funniest episodes take place during finals. We see Felicity and her friends camped out in the library, freaking out about topics they don't understand, and taking things like smart powder to stay awake. I certainly remember spending hours in the library during finals week and how much stuff people would bring with them. I mean some people had provisions for several days: food, pillows, alarm clocks, insanity. Dorky me today is like, oooh that looks fun.

5. A Brand New City

Lastly, Felicity portrays the shock and joy of moving to a new city at a young age. Now, this element will highly depend on where you went to school. However, even if you stayed close to home, you probably moved to a new town for school. This move involves learning how to get around and all that the new town has to offer (aka the bars). Felicity moves from Palo Alto to New York City, so she needs to readjust to the big city. We often see her out in the city as she tries to figure out the subway system, finds a neighborhood bar to attend regularly, goes on dates to fancy restaurants, and visits museums for class. She finds it overwhelming at first but adjusts quickly.

While Boston isn't nearly the size of New York, when I moved there from Kansas, it still seemed huge. BU, like Felicity's version of NYU, doesn't have a traditional campus, so the city becomes your campus in a way. BU's buildings run along a very long street by the Charles River. Due to laziness, we often took the T train from one end of campus to the other, integrating city and campus life regularly. In addition, Boston includes like 400 colleges, so you can travel from campus to campus for parties and meet college students practically anywhere in the city. It's like one gigantic college party across the city, or at least that's how it appeared at that age. Working adults probably have a different vision of the city.

People claim that the ratings dropped in the second season due to Felicity chopping off all her hair (I definitely do remember that moment from the original airing: everyone freaked out!). While probably somewhat true, the second and further seasons also involve less of Felicity stumbling through the college firsts. She inevitable becomes more comfortable with herself and her life in New York, switching the focus of the show to the relationships rather than the college experiences. I still enjoy the later seasons, but they are never quite as fun as the first season. Felicity vicariously takes me back to college from a slightly more idealized and dramatic viewpoint. Television nostalgia gets me every time.

IN WHICH The Girl Remembers a Hero

It’s Thursday, and that means throwback pictures of childhood adventures are circulating social media by the dozen. I have decided to take a slightly different track: throwback television. Today, we will discuss Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Everyone has comfort foods. Well, my television comfort food is Buffy. She’s a kick-ass girly-girl fighting Big Bads with an odd assortment of friends. Love it.

The focus today, however, will be on Buffy’s heroic journey. You may have studied the hero’s journey, developed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1973), back in grade school. Campbell developed a monomyth of the hero – the idea that heroes from every era and culture share similar characteristics and develop their greatness though a series of parallel stages. The usual class will follow the path of Moses or Prometheus (or even Star Wars), but I always choose Buffy. I have done this presentation in class before with varied results (heavily influenced by this article). Most of my students are too young to really remember Buffy (“Wasn’t that on in like the 90’s??”), but there are always a few who have watched it on Netflix and enjoy it. They ALL think I’m a dork, and it’s true. But she's a hero, you see.

Stage 1: Separation/Departure

      The hero starts in an ordinary world, say a nice normal high school. The hero is called to become a hero, but he or she usually resists the call at first. Buffy’s first call actually happens in the 1992 movie with Luke Perry (I thought he was so dreamy as a child). 

Let’s focus on the television show though. Buffy receives the call again when she arrives in Sunnydale. She's just as unhappy about it the second time around.

Eventually the chosen one gives in, and receives some form of aid from a mentor. Buffy has a Watcher, named Giles, who serves as her mentor throughout the series. He’s part of the Watcher’s Council, a group that has trained and assisted slayers throughout history, though both him and Buffy eventually break away from the stuffy old council. He’s a lovable British dude who tries to keep Buffy and her Scooby Gang - her other helpers Xander and Willow - focused on the task at hand.

The chosen one crosses the first threshold, which is the first task of the hero, taking him or her from the normal world to the unknown land of danger and adventure. There could be a number of first tasks for Buffy, such as first killing a vampire in the movie, but for the show her first Big Bad is the Master, a very old and gross vampire who wants to open the Hellmouth below Sunnydale and take over the world. He’s also, incidentally, prophesied to kill Buffy.

Lastly in Stage 1, the chosen one must enter the belly of the whale, in which he or she usually faces an abyss – a dark night of the soul – and then a rebirth as a full blown hero. Buffy, understandably, quails at the idea of dying at 16, her abyss. She fights the Master, who actually does kill her, but Xander brings her back to life through CPR, the first of several rebirths for Buffy. Buffy, of course, then goes on to kick the Master’s ass. After this experience, Buffy becomes a little darker but more dedicated to her mission.

Stage 2: Initiation

The hero embarks on his or her quest, enduring many trials. I.e. Buffy fights a lot of vampires, demons, robots and even other slayers to protect us poor, vulnerable humans. Hiyahh!

The male hero usually meets the goddess who fosters love and inspiration in the hero. He also faces a woman who tempts him with lust and is a dangerous shadow figure. But Joss Whedon doesn't stick with those stuffy, old archetypes and flips everything around. Angel, Buffy’s vampire-with-a-soul boyfriend, fulfills all of these roles for our hero. She falls in love with Angel, but when they have sex for the first time, he loses his soul and becomes evil. Now if that’s not a lesson to all young girls about men, then I don’t know what is. Sadly, Buffy must kill Angel, performing a hero’s sacrifice for the good of the world. Don’t worry, he comes back later though. This is a supernatural world, after all.

Next comes atonement with a father figure or powerful force of life and death. There are a few possible options here. Buffy’s mother dies during this period, forcing Buffy to make peace with both her mother and her death. Giles also feels out of place as Buffy ages, sometimes feeling unnecessary and at other times feeling like she depends on him too much. Most of this tension comes in the next stage of the story, however. My choice of “father figure” is the First Slayer, who gives birth to Buffy’s superhuman qualities. In addition, she inspires Buffy to learn about the slayer’s history and forces Buffy to re-examine her role as a hero. She explains to our weary hero that she is still capable of love: "Love is pain, and the Slayer forges strength from pain. Love, give, forgive. Risk the pain; it is your nature. Love will bring you your gift." Oh and what is that gift? “Death is your gift.” Cheery.

At the end of this stage, the hero faces his or her ultimate challenge, usually victory over death. As a result, he or she is awarded some form of apotheosis – a heroic vacation where the he or she can rest in peace - and a reward. At the end of Season 5, Buffy fights an actual god, Glory, who opens a portal to a hell dimension that will bring all sorts of beasties into the world. Only one thing will close the dimension: Summers’ blood, meaning either Buffy or her sister must die. Buffy makes the ultimate sacrifice and gives up her life for the sake of humanity – death really is her gift. As a reward, Buffy goes to heaven. Now, if only her friends knew that.

Stage 3: The Return

After a nice rest, the hero returns home from the apotheosis and vanquishes evil. Most heroes resist the return, wanting to stay in their peaceful place forever, because who wouldn't? He or she is pursued by enemies on the return who must be killed. Thinking Buffy has ended up in a hell dimension, her friends bring her back to life with magic. Obviously, she is a little confused by the circumstances and wishes to be back in heaven. A demon also hitches a ride on her return, and Buffy must defeat it in her perplexed state.

After his or her return, the hero needs help adjusting to the new world and facing reality. Knowing the Scooby Gang brought her back out of love, Buffy refuses to tell them about her sojourn into heaven. She feels isolated from her besties and some resentment as well. Therefore, Buffy turns to Spike, a previous Big Bad who has become a reluctant ally to the slayer. He helps her in all sorts of ways - boom chica wah wah – starting a fairly messed up but entertaining relationship of fighting and sex. Eventually, the hero comes to terms with the return and becomes a master of two worlds, stronger than ever. Despite Season 6’s depressing tone, Buffy does eventually adjust to reality, accepting that she’s not entirely human any more, and continues to fight the good fight.

Ultimately, the hero ends his or her quest and obtains the freedom to live a peaceful life. Buffy fights one last apocalyptic Big Bad by creating more vampire slayers. After the slayers defeat the “first evil,” Buffy is no longer solely responsible for protecting the world and can do as she pleases. The series ends with Buffy smiling as the Scooby Gang discusses all the things they don't need to do tomorrow.

For anyone who is paying attention to details, this was a simplified and not necessarily perfect version of the hero’s journey. For more accurate descriptions, try this thing called a library.