I've been mediacating big time these days.  Mediacating. Not medicating.  I hope people catch that.  Medicating through media, basically.

Most of us do it, but how many of us can hold onto the buzz, can summon up the anticipation of visual or narrative balm in an evocative frame of film or a few pleasing lines of prose on a daily basis?  I can and do, and I've decided to embrace this pathology and call it what it is-- an addiction that is, so far, manageable, a jonesing for a drug that, aside from the occassional ups and downs in book banning or film boycotting, will always be available and legal.

When things are just a little more than irritating or hard these days (being awakened again by the diurnal slams of the shower door in the townhome next door, or parsing out the subtext of my two-year-old's characteristically random fit of morning rage, or struggling to stuff both my children into their winter coats and shoes without knocking them down by the bulky heft of my own jacket and then clicking these rugrats with my chapped fingers  into their carseats while they howl about their fallen "toys"--chewed up straws from the illicit fast food runs my husband makes with them--, or realizing that my coffee has gone cold for the third time while I was lotioning up those dry little noses and I now no longer have the energy to get up and reheat it in the microwave) these are the times when I think about some exemplary media bites and consider sampling them in my off-time later on in the long day. Here are just a few examples: 1) the passage towards the beginning of Nick Hornby's 1998 novel, About a Boy, which sets up the "date" between Marcus's mother and Will, wherein Will is musing about the state of individual attractiveness and how it probably correlates with how much an individual thinks about sex (and how Albert Einstein, under this logic, probably didn't think about it too much); 2) the moment in the film Almost Famous where the sister (played by Zooey Deschanel) leans down to her little runt of a brother and her face takes up the whole frame as she tells him, "Someday, you will be cool."; 3) the winter shot of Elizabeth reading a letter from Jane in  A & E 's Pride and Prejudice (I know, I know) as she sits in a windowseat alone while the snow comes down outside. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112130/trivia These passages or shots have lingered in my mind and draw me back to these texts through the promise and nourishment of good (and, yes, maybe wholesome, but certainly rich and comforting) stories. (Skeptics, please note that I did not bring up Colin Firth and the copper bathtub.)     

In my former life as an English professor, we would have called this a passion for narrative.  But that sounds dull, doesn't it?  No nonacademic wants to talk about "narrative," no matter how convincing of an argument one can make about its power over our individual and collective consciousness.  No matter how shrilly one might point to our compromised understanding of history as stemming from badly written elementary school textbooks, no matter how emphatically one might make the case that all of us zoning out to CNN newsfeeds contributes to reductive national and cultural narratives-- not even then.

So, I will be focusing instead on "plot," or "plots," one  common element between the world of books (my former professional life) and old films and television series on DVD (my current life of escapist-based consumption).  But, I want to clarify that I'm not one of those readers or viewers who cares too much about plot in general.  I didn't really understand the movie The Sting, and no matter how many times I've seen it, I still don't understand how the boys get the money out of the Andy Garcia-character's vault in Ocean's 11.  I don't like to read mysteries, and I've never read Michael Crichton. Plot-fixation can be relative. Strong character change or atmosphere details can be central to plot, and petty motivations such as the oneupsmanship in a Seinfield rerun, can be masterfully fleshed and plotted out. (I'll never forget the way my father, not a big reader, waxed rhapsodic about an Everybody Loves Raymond episode involving a suitcase left out on the stairs, for example).

Before I get carried away with the temptation to get geeky and academic about pop-culture, I should say a simple word about my current life, which is not glamorous, nor even technically inspiring in terms of "plot."
My current situation in fact may be most responsible for my recent hyper-dosage in media, this need to shut everything down and get lost in a good and often absorbing story.  I am now a stay-at-home mother/generally unpublished writer of two children under the age of five. But I should add that quitting academia and volunteering to stay home with my kids for awhile was my idea, one which I find myself still foaming at the mouth to defend to people who ask what on earth could have possessed me.  It might also help you to know, for context, that this winter will be the third time I've found myself in this position of not having foresightfully or successfully secured backup help from preschool or nannies, that the Holiday-high has worn off and fizzled out into the torpor of being trapped indoors with artificial heating, that my husband and I are frustratedly and unsuccessfully trying to relocate to a new school district in order to have a do-over in this enterprise called The American Dream, and this month I will be sitting down and excising 200 pages out of a 550 paged novel I wrote over the past two years, an exercise whose larger potential for rejection and futility (as you might imagine would be true for anyone who decides to write a story about a bunch of Indian American kids in this economy) threatens to be punishment enough.  It is for all these reasons and many more that simply watching or reading something for the fun of it is no longer possible. Like a doctor with a prescription pad, an apothecary with his pill drawers, I struggle to get my remedies just right.  The dose has to draw the most noticeably positive impact on my mood in the quickest amount of time. Sometimes I miscalculate and the effect is anesthetization or too much self-pity (like if I watch too many episodes of The Gilmore Girls in a row). To top it all off, as any parent knows, I now have the most meagre reserves of free time that I have ever had in my entire life. 

But I will persist, nevertheless. Tonight I will finish watching the 1965 film, Ship of Fools, (based on Katherine Anne Porter's novel of the same name) and stop kicking myself for no longer being able to remember what else Katherine Anne Porter published and was known for.  I will focus on other, more simple observations, like the performance of Vivien Leigh, and how much her work as an embittered middle-aged woman might have been instrumental in Shirley MacLaine's portrayal of "Ouiser" in Steel Magnolias. http://www.imdb.com/media/rm404262400/tt0098384 What do you think? Am I way off base here or what?