reruns meltdown

august 20, 2006

television for company

it has been almost three years. and to paraphrase carrie bradshaw, “their absence is palpable.” all we’ve got of both friends and sex and the city now are reruns and the dvd’s. there are no more new episodes.

as i was contemplating going to the medics a few days ago, scared to death i might fall in the wayward hill due to blurry visions and dizziness, i was thinking, i don’t have a carrie to call for my samantha. or a monica or a phoebe to lean on for my rachel. aside from being witty, ( or hilarious when it comes to friends) both shows were mostly about kinship. my friends are great. they’re amazing. some of them live across the pond, unreachable from my landscape sans for the e-mails and sporadic phone calls. the ones within a 20-mile radius would probably sit with me at the doctor’s clinic, if i was not only hesitant to give them a ring. but as observed, our colleagues are very much saddled with work and if there are any free time for some, they mostly spend it doing their chores or soak in their indulgences if they’re fortunate.

in sex and the city, the girls are wealthy, with jobs we all love to have. they can afford their chanels and manolo blahniks. they own apartments in the prized locations in manhattan. in friends, they were not as deeply absorbed into glamour as the girls of SATC but those were surely magnificent digs. yes, monica and rachel, and chandler and joey had to share space in the first four seasons, but they got along so well that there were no kitchen awkwardness and living room issues.

all in all, they were not real. carrie bradshaw couldn’t have accumulated a hundred manolos, jimmy choos and christian louboutins on a columnist’s salary. or phoebe must have bumped into a fortune to be able to afford her living quarters. in the real world, we all have to buckle down and till the soil until our hands are rough and dry. sometimes we bleed, or i bleed as i usually do. we do not sit at a coffee shop every day. or have weekly brunch with a coterie dolled-up in expensive outfits. but we surely do love watching their antics on the small screen (photos from friends-tv.org and flakmag.com).