Finished Girls season 1

I have finished the first season of Girls! And I have feelings, which I must share with you, or at any rate with someone, and sadly you were in the vicinity!

Which, actually, is a very Girls thing to do. The characters are forever being “So I am having an emotional crisis and LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT IT” to people who do not want to listen, sometimes because these people don’t actually know the character in question well enough for this to be appropriate, and sometimes because the characters in Girls are almost uniformly self-centered and think that time spent talking about anyone’s problems but their own is time wasted.

Actually this is an exaggeration. But there is a real sense that the characters, though they want to be able to connect with and be vulnerable to others, just can’t. They seem to see relationships, particularly but not only romantic relationships, as a competition, that they are competing to see who cares less and who can be the least emotionally vulnerable.

(I think it’s notable that the girls tell their friends that they love them much more often than they tell their boyfriend-ish people - and probably the fact that their relationships with men tend to be so indefinite contributes to that, because who wants to be vulnerable to someone who may not reciprocate at all.)

Given that attempts at emotional vulnerability tend to blow up in their faces, it is hard to think too poorly of them for that; but that just makes it sadder.

And the fact that the characters do all interact in this same passive-aggressive way gives the show a sort airless feeling. I think it would benefit amazingly from having at least one regular character who is genuine and honest, if only to add some contrast.

***

I’ve also been reading reviews of Girls, because apparently I am a glutton for punishment. If Marnie was a guy and Charlie was a girl, I don’t think anyone would find it confusing that Marnie didn’t want to date someone clingy, ridden with abandonment issues, and possessed of no apparent purpose in life other than following her around like a puppy.

But as Marnie is a girl, apparently some reviewers look at this and are like, “But Charlie is so nice to her! How dare she have standards for her boyfriends other than ‘possesses basic human decency.’ Like wanting to actually be in love with the guy she’s dating? I mean really.”

(One thing I like about nineteenth century novels, actually, is that they tend to present it as perfectly acceptable for heroines to reject decent guys, for no other reason than “because I don’t love you!” Because love is capricious and ineffable and doesn’t necessarily make sense!)

Charlie tried to be a good boyfriend, and there are doubtless girls who would love to be the center of his universe, but Marnie is not one of them. It sucks to be him, but, well, that’s life. Sometimes you give people your all and they just do not want it.

French

You can tell I’ve been studying French for too long, because I’ve started having ~feelings~ about the parts of speech. My favorite is nouns, because they tend to be like English, except pronounced with extra fervor and drama. Or - let's get the genealogy right here - English nouns tend to be like French, because they are the remains of our erstwhile Norman chains.

I am also fond of verbs, also they tend to be cognate with Spanish rather than English, which makes things trickier. HOWEVER, conjugation, which bedeviled my soul in Spanish, is basically a non-issue here because this is a readings class, and therefore I only need to be able to recognize conjugations, not produce them, which makes it one hundred times easier. Except when you have words that conjugate into things that look nothing like their original selves, but there aren’t very many of those.

Not a big fan of prepositions. Because it turns out that, at least in Indo-European languages, there are a lot of prepositions that are attached to verbs, which seems perfectly reasonable in one’s own language but becomes absolutely maddening when you start to learn other languages, because there is no logic behind it.

But my least favorite part of speech EVER? Conjunctions. I hate conjunctions with a fiery burning passion because they are completely impossible to memorize. And moreover, the French looooove conjunctions. It is like they think that no sentence is complete unless it is festooned with a “nevertheless” and an “in order that” and also a couple of particles that don’t, as far as I can tell, actually mean anything, but are only there to sound pretty.

Which, let's be real, they totally do. It is a lot easier to study languages when you aren't expected to be able to produce or pronounce anything - but it also means that I can't pronounce anything, and I totally want to. Everything just sounds so much more dramatic and exciting in French!