Lost in Lifetime

I feel as if I've been awake but adrift in my own life for the last few weeks or so. It's been an adjustment of sorts to a new maintenance migraine medicine that's working but the side affects are somewhat strong. The first weeks were tough, I couldn't focus, words on a page seemed foreign to me and I was convinced I would never play the piano again. Ah Bach!  I imagined my fingers flying over the keys only to have them stick and tingle like thousands of pins pricking me and I experienced panic attacks for the first time in my life and for the first time in my life I was taciturn. I stuck with the meds but the side effects didn't improve. I had to find a way to escape.

Dorothy had her poppy field, Alice had her looking glass and I, quite innocently stumbled onto 'LMN', the Lifetime Movie Network. One day I finished work early, curled up under a quilt on the couch and watched a movie and I enjoyed it, so I watched another. It drew me in. I slept, I watched, I watched, I slept. it was wonderful. I didn't have to think and I felt so safe with the world at bay out there somewhere. It became my haven from reality and I enjoyed every lifetimelovingminute of it.

Now the fog is starting to lift and some of the side effects are starting to disappear. Things are starting to come together and the LMN halo is starting to tarnish  for me. I've been mulling  over L.M.N in my mind and it's taken on new meaning for me, something like 'Lost My Nine-to -Five' and I'm beginning to think this is where actor's career's go to die.

Patty Duke, Martin Sheen what were you thinking? I saw you play a married couple and your acting was so over the top I buried my head in a bag of hershey's kisses and didn't come up for air for 2 and 1/2 hours. Maybe the script was at the top of a big stack of erectile dysfunction commercials and you felt you had no choice. Maybe you just couldn't take another minute of retirement. To this I say, learn to cope, take a vacation, reflect, live the good life, you did your part and when all else fails.... WWJJD. What would Janis Joplin do? Tequila my friends, tequila.

Truth be told, every so often there is a standout movie. In one shining moment Shannon Dogherty rose like a Phoenix out of the ashes in a movie about a couple falsely accused of killing their child only to fall like an over gummed Garcia Vega into the ash pit of 10 other ridiculous movies. There are so many familiar faces on LMN that it reads like a hollywood high school year book. It's unfortunate that some of those actors weren't clever enough to get a regular gig on Syfy like Bruce Boxleitner. He seems to have a cameo on just about everything and it doesn't matter if some of it's low rent, it's meant to be. It's tongue and cheek, the kind of thing that hits the spot when you need a mental health day.  Bruce could end up on any number of shows that will go Cult classic and some idiot like me will buy his action figure on ebay for $3.00. I've yet to hear of an LMN action figure and I bet if you're a regular on LMN your chances that someone has a cardboard cutout of you in their living room go down by 50%. Of course that's just one pastry girls' opinion.

LMN runs movies, 24/7  all with familiar themes, cheating spouses, abused children and lots of murder. They're formulaic as hell. The victims are always innocent, but the cops never believe it. The victims do all the leg work and always find the killers, but the cops never believe it until the very end and then they respect and even sometimes fall in love with the victims. It's a crazy maze of twists and turns and it got me through a rough couple of weeks.

I'm not saying I'll never watch LMN again. I'll admit a certain morbid fascination with True Movie Thursday which makes me sound like a complete psycho when I send my kids cryptic text messages warning them of possible fates that have befallen others. Right now it's run it's course for me and that's a good thing.

All the best, Kate