Tonight I went with a friend of mine and learned the Salsa (specifically the on-the-line style, as opposed to the Cuban or Puerto Rican variety)! High school buddies, next time I see you, we will be doing the Salsa! And we will celebrate with salsa. And nachos. Mmmmm.
I told a girl from Spain my vaquero joke. :P
For dinner, I ate some tacos at the local Mission Burrito to set the mood for the evening. Learning the Salsa, I had few problems with the dancing itself, having done much harder choreography in Knightshine, but the instructor gave the weirdest names to each of the moves that I could never remember, so when he called out for us to do the "camelon" or the "meeugenfloogen" I had no idea what to do. It was very, very fun, but I realized that it was also the first time I've actually done something exercisey since I've come to England (unless you count a panicked fifteen-minute sprint around Oxford on the day of matriculation exercise).
I've been eating so much food ever since I got to England, and I've assumed for awhile that I've picked up a ton of weight, but I finally got a scale and weighed myself, and to my astonishment, I've lost three pounds! For those of you who use the metric system, that's like 87 kilos!!
I performed my now-regular evening ritual of playing a round of Brawl before bed to ease the pain of my sore brain. I was halfway to beating the meta out of Metaknight with large, spotted, green-and-white eggs when a huge crowd of people came into the JCR and hijacked the TV to watch the new episode of a British TV program called "Made in Chelsea." I had nothing else I could do that night (my brain was fried by then), so I watched along.
It seemed just like a bad soap opera. A large ensemble of girls with dyed hair and men with what I refer to as "Angel hair." You know the style:
Every single guy on that show had this exact hairstyle, I swear. All the English students there took it so seriously, though. As I watched the show, a handful of odd things stood out to me in particular. For one, the hair. For two, the actors seemed to be extremely in character (not that any of the characters were very likable or original) and so I assumed they must be either top-notch actors or just have static characters that they've gotten really used to playing. I decided it couldn't be the first one, because while each of them gave some excellent realism to their roles, giving an actual sense of realism to the show, their delivery of many lines were extremely awkward.
Another thing was that the characters were all pretty much the same character. It seemed that everyone on the show had slept with everyone else multiple times. With such a large ensemble, I think the characters should really be more diverse personality-wise, but the writers seemed to really pull it off and make each character seem kind of distinct. Huh.
Speaking of which, the writers were phenomenal. I mean, I'm excellent at writing comedy, but writing serious stuff for me is really difficult. I've tried before, and to give a sense of realism to a piece with any characters, you have to ask a million questions before you even begin. Who is each character? How does he/she relate to every single other person in the room? What's their job? What are they doing recently? What's their personality like? How did it get to that way? What was their childhood/young adulthood like? Where's their personality going to go? How will it get there? Does that really make sense? And if you want to make them take a different path organically, you have to reanswer a lot of those questions in your head to make them say exactly the right thing organically. And yet here was a group of writers who apparently do this regularly and seemed to answer these questions bang on the money! I was kind of impressed. To do that requires an understanding of people I haven't seen since Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, or F. Scott Fitzgerald.
I was also very impressed with the incredibly philosophical/characterizing/allegorical power of this one scene, which reminded me a lot of a scene from The Great Gatsby. Although in another scene, there was an extremely awkward moment where the man and woman just "gaze into each others' eyes" for like fifteen uncomfortable seconds. It was the weirdest-looking thing ever, but apparently the director kept it in and told the techies, "Add some super-romantic music into the background so the audience knows it's real love this week."
Anyhow.
By the way, you know basically everything I just said, about the writing, the amazing characterization, and masterful ensemble? Forget that. It turns out that it's a structured reality TV series. No wonder they were so in character.
Those wacky Brits.
Sleepily,
John Khouri, Confused American
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