veronica_rich | Da yin and da yang

With real life so very stressful these last several years (at least for me and it seems, for lots of people I know), good entertainment has become important. Not in the sense of replacing the real world or news, but in easing stress and providing opportunity to stretch one's brain and meet new people for a few hours of an evening. It seems like so much of the quality entertainment people have enjoyed is ending - "Gilmore Girls," "Veronica Mars," and of course, the POTC trilogy. (To me, "quality" doesn't mean it's all been good - IMO, all three have been brought down by questionable writing/plotting/characterization at some point - but that it's not mindless sitcom pap you can forget in fifteen minutes after airing.)

Life commencement and entertainment endings always seem to clash in my life, no kidding. When I graduated high school, the third "Back to the Future" movie went out with me. College was the end of "Trek: Next Gen." And now that I have a new job, new state, new home, new people (not for the first time, but it's always a big change), all this other stuff is going out. I'll find a new, shiny fandom, hopefully one that's just getting started and free of wank and hate for a good while again like POTC was for so long, but that in-between from the old to smacking face-first into a new is always hard.

I was telling

hippediva POTC's like college, or has at least lasted as long, it seems - and really, when you look at the first movie's release date and this one's coming up, it IS four years. (I love Orlando's quote about feeling like he's spent half his adult life in a pirate movie.) You start freshman year all excited and hopeful. In your sophomore and junior years you run into conflicts, politics, assholes - the works that make the whole process difficult to finish. And in the end months, you take a flying run at the finish line and hurriedly cross, only to turn around and look back when graduation's over, and think *Will I ever get to do that again, in another format?*