Burning What?

The deeper I get into the first season of Felicity (no judgments please - bear in mind I have over three hours of travel time a day while I'm here and I can only think about the script and muddle through Thomas Friedman for so long) the more I realize - everything that could ever possibly happen to someone in four years of college happened to Felicity and her friends in the first semester.

And then some.

Won't they run out of things to deal with? MB assures me that they will not.

I love the small shifts in actual locations that allow the show to avoid product placement (did Sex and the City do that? I feel like they used actual location names.) Of course - The University of New York, with all its purple NYU sign-age, and the "New York Conservatory", and Tribeca "Food".

I just watched the first of the two sort-of-stalker-episodes. It was creepy even before he got hit by a bus. I think they should have followed through with the stalker thing, because it was a kind of interesting treatment of the subject and didn't need the complication of the bus accident.

The guy that has watched too many 80s follow-your-love-anywhere-and-it-may-just-pay-off-if-you-try-hard-enough movies and thinks that because it worked for Lloyd Dobler it will work for him. It doesn't. It only works if you are John Cusack. Just as Molly Ringwald is the only one who can gussy up a prom dress and end up taking Andrew Macarthy home even though he is several social rungs above her.

Now Felicity is deciding she doesn't want to become a doctor. What does she want to be? Of course - an artist.

And there is a part of me that wants to sit her down and say, no - stay pre-med, don't start hanging out in the studio and abandoning Noel, who right now seems like a really great guy, and chatting it up with cool art-y boy, because in ten years you'll (probably) be really poor and still falling for artsy guys who probably won't want to commit to anything until they are at least forty.

But I also want to say, go to the studio, mix your watercolors, do your charcoal, find your fellow with a goatee, and maybe you'll be happy.

And happy but poor is better than unhappy and really well set up. Right?

On a side note. The gentleman next to me at the Union Square B&N, about fifty years old, graying ponytail, flower print shirt has paused in discussing in detail a translation of some work with the woman he is sitting with and is right now explaining "Burning Man" to her. He went two years ago. She had never heard of it (also about fifty).

Is it like Woodstock? She asks.

Well, that was a very different time. He replies.

I love that this man who is almost my parent's age is more open to the whims of my generation than I am.