Orange is the New Mad Sons of Breaking Dexter

I've finally given in to peer pressure and started watching *Orange Is The New Black.* My *Lost* project may or may not be on hold a week due to this. Anyway.

The show began annoying me pretty early on but I wasn't quite able to finger _why_ right away. Somewhere around the third or fourth episode, I figured it out: the show had been manipulating the viewers' emotions by painting all of the prisoners with sympathetic back stories, showing and describing poor unfortunate victims of circumstance. We're watching murderers, thieves, violent criminals and white collar criminals, drug dealers. . .and are being put in the position of sympathizing for them in a vacuum where their crimes aren't a part of who they are.

I was going to write a long screed about how much I dislike this (much longer than you're reading now), about how much I've grown weary with shows that are compellingly well-written features about universally despicable people (and not that the characters here are _all_ despicable, but not one of them are angels and so far it's only been painting law enforcement personnel as despicable). And then I came to episode seven or eight, where Taylor Schilling's character Piper's mother comes for a visit and Piper has to remind her mother that everyone there is a criminal, that everyone there made a decision to commit the crime they committed and their presence in jail was deserved. Now, this wasn't a speech that threw this entire sympathy problem into check, but I give the showrunners some credit for at least addressing the issue that, yes, these are people who did bad things. These are people who belong where they currently are and what we should root for is them doing well in their prison sentences and rehabilitating back into being good members of society.

Holes

I've been feeling down more often lately. As my kids grow older, I become more and more aware of my own advancing age, of how I'm nowhere even close to where I wanted to be in life by this time, of how certain situations make any possibility of significantly changing that next to impossible at this time and that "at this time" will last at least until I'm 50.

And then I'm just romantically lonely. I'm no slouch at all when it comes to sexual gratification. If I feel needy in that regard, I've always been able to sate that need. But having sex doesn't sate all my needs and I'm growing more and more like I feel as if I'm not companionable. I really miss the intimacy of having a partner in life.

Looking these things over, as I have been incessantly for weeks now, what's really struck me is that the driving force of my feeling depressed about all of it is my feeling unable to really talk about it. If I post 99 positive, happy things online and one negative thing I get the people in my life telling me things like I'm being really emo, or that all I talk about is negativity. So reaching out over social media or other internet means (virtually my only real access to *all* of my closest friends) is something I always hold back as long as I can bear to because of the shitty-feeling backlash. And there's no one in my in-person life that I feel close to enough, that I trust enough, to talk to about the heavier emotional stuff. I had a confidante once, a remarkably handy, incredibly trusted and wholly important friend, and local even--someone I could always count on to be there for me, and whom I could be there for in return. And then my wife left me to shack up with him (Sure, the situation is significantly more complicated than that, and yet at the same time, it's also really that simple).

It's hard coming back from that level of having your trust breached. I wish I could. I think these holes in my life are killing me.