Sometimes TV Makes You Think

Todd went away for a cross-country skiing weekend last weekend.  (I think he had to go damn near to Canada to find snow.)  I spent the weekend recovering from three whole weeks of being gainfully employed.  Goodness me, was I tired.   So tired that by 10:00 on Friday I was yawning over my girls-night-out beer and had to come home.  Saturday I made it through girls-night-out wine until 8:00.  Yep, all the crazy cool kids are jealous of me and my wild partying ways.

Catching up on important TV is about as wild as I get these days.  Weekday evenings are so busy that I have to watch everything on the weekend, and let me tell you, it takes some serious time management skills to get it all in.  There's Switched at Birth and Glee, then there's Pretty Little Liars and The Vampire Diaries.  Not to mention Once Upon a Time, House, and The New Girl.  And I haven't even started the new season of Downton Abbey.

We have to watch Justified during the week because it's just that awesome.

This weekend, since I was already on a couch and TV binge, I watched Tombstone, because I just finished a fan-tucking-fabulous book about Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, and I can't wait until the February Reading Round-up to tell you about it.  Doc Holliday is my new obsession.  Quite a change of pace from my other literary obsessions, like vampires, and demons and ghosts and things that go bump in the night.

Speaking of demons . . . (and no, I'm not going to talk about Republicans again, at least in this post) I discovered a fan-tucking-fabulous British TV show on Netfllix called Apparitions. It was cancelled after six episodes (probably because it was so good and I liked it) but man, were those six episodes something!  It's about a priest who does exorcisms and becomes wrapped up in a war between Satan and God.  If you are a fan of scary possessed characters, you'll love it.

I'm not Catholic -- I'm perfectly happy being Presbyterian, or what my father calls "almost Catholic" -- but I was amazed by the intensity of the ritual and prayer engaged in by the priests and nuns on the show.  It was full of scenes in which one priest would dash in and out of a room, yelling "you stay here and pray!" in the same tone that an action character would say "you stay here and set that bomb!" or whatever action characters say.

It was very exciting.  There was one scene in which a priest PICKED UP an athiest doctor and, I shit you not, THREW her out of the room so he could keep up the praying.  There was praying with rosaries, and crucifixes, and praying that made people's EYES BLEED.  Several times I found myself yelling at the TV, "PRAY HARDER, PRIEST GUY!"

Man, I wish I could pray like that.  It would come in so handy.  If people made me mad I could PRAY at them.  And if some situation needed fixin', I could be all, "hold this while I pray about this right quick."  I could be like a praying superhero.  As things are, my praying is more  . . . um . . . we'll call it subtle.  I've never had to throw anyone out of the room to do it.

Subtle praying is very polite, but maybe it doesn't get the best results.  'S something for this almost-Catholic Presbyterian to think about.