You may have read in earlier posts that my sister, who lives 1500 miles away, has an uncanny and powerful mind-altering influence over me. She makes me watch television shows that I wouldn’t normally watch. She has succeeded in making me watch such shows as Supernatural, NCIS and now Castle and White Collar. It is a humbling position to be in. I managed to deter her efforts to make me watch the Mentalist: one of my few triumphs. She has not succeeded in making me watch anything on the sci fi channel.

 She recently launched an assault and managed to sink her fangs into my brain and now I’m embarrassed to write that I’m watching Chuck. A mindless and wonderfully cast tv show set in southern California (i.e., beautiful people, beautiful scenery, beautiful apartments and beautiful nerds) about a man who “is saving the earth at $11.00 an hour”, or something like that. I succumbed last week to her barrage of hints, suggestions and threats. I watched a couple of episodes and the spell descended on me like giant wet Kleenex. I lost my will to resist and last night I OD’d. We watched 3 episodes in a row on tvgorge.com, we were linked by free wireless minutes. She made sure I got all the jokes and laughed at all the appropriate places: The agony! When we were finished I was jittery, jacked up on diet coke and consumed by a crush on one of the characters. Totally, TOTALLY out of control.

 I tried desperately to think of an anecdote to my madness. By now it was 2am and could call no one to talk me down. I needed something to counteract the forces possessing my brain. Netflix, maybe? I found a possible remedy to my condition: The Bicycle Thief. It was just what I needed: a wonderfully well-laid out plot; fully dimensional characters, fine acting, a wide range of real human emotions; beautiful black and white cinematography in post war Italy; and subtitles. Having watched that, Chuck and my sister’s grips were weakening. I wasn’t entirely myself yet so I watched The Battleship Potemkin. Silent simplicity: Mutiny!; Cinematic massacre on the steps in Odessa!; fear, panic, mayhem, rotting beef with real-live maggots, and natural beauty captured in the faces of the beleaguered Ukrainians.

 I was finally able to go to bed, feeling balance in my universe. My yin had nicely nestled back in with my yang. The sun was rising on a glorious new day as I fell asleep, to dream no dreams, to rest the rest of the truly weary.