Goodbye to the past

The trouble with reliving your past is that , however much you want things to stay the same, they don't. Going back to a past lover, visiting an old stomping ground, doing the things you used to do when you yourself have moved on is nice but, due to it being tinged with a dewy-eyed nostalgia, is almost always a little melancholic as all that nostalgia is eroded almost immediately when confronted with the reality of now rather than being kept in a pretty little box with bows on it labeled 'The Past' in practice calligraphy script (shut up. You did for all of five minutes when you were 9 too) in your head. You remember what you used to be and know for certain that you are not that any more. However much you like yourself now you will always feel a certain affection for the person you once were - knowing that person is now dead hurts (it'd be weird if it didn't).

As such when I watch beloved tv shows (oh yeah, btw, this is all about teen tv shows - paddling in the shallow pools of pop culture is as deep as this chick gets) that spoke to me the first, or even second, time round - now? Not so much. Not in the same way. Recently E4 has gone cuckoo for the tv programming that I once had to illegally procure from our wonderful world wide interweb. Namely Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars and it's been causing me no end of heartache as the way I analyse the relationships and think about the characters now (compared to then) is so different it's like sitting there with my (pretend) grandmother and my (non existent) daughter both giving a simultaneous DVD commentary that I myself don't remember selecting when pressing play on the sky remote. These ladies may have been born from the same kind of place but their opinions on it are so diametrically opposed they may as well have brought up on different planets.

If nothing else, there's just something undeniably sad about remembering the past version of yourself watching these things and being moved by it; feelings things, thinking things, that you yourself, now, would never think or feel. Believing the sarcastic 'psychopathic jackass' Logan in Veronica Mars is the dreamiest dreamboat that ever did dream, wishing and hoping that Jess (aka Peter Petrelli) and Rory from the Gilmore Girls are meant to be when he was actually a total dick to her the entire length of their relationship. I knew I'd changed but I didn't have any way of measuring it before - it's clear I think and feel differently now (at least about tv shows). I get why all those posters at TWoP (I was a student alright! We have time on our hands when finding increasingly creative ways of not writing essays) hated these characters so much now. Because they were/are (it's difficult to define past and present tense when discussing fictional peeps) dicks. No doubt about it. Back then it was incomprehensible to me - couldn't they see that these boys were hurting and just needed the right sort of love and affection to make them right? I love and loathe the girl that saw and loved this way. She felt and thought hopelessly differently to me. It's like I've lost a friend I sort of put up with for a number of years even though I found her endlessly irritating but I know I'll never get her back. I miss her, but also, she was an idiot.

There is also, perhap, something undeniably sad about getting this melancholy about tv shows they transmit from E4 towers. I dunno, what am I? A tv scientist? (I am not a tv scientist) (But I kind of wish I was...)