I recently started watching Head Case on Netflix Instant and it’s perfect for me. Head Case was apparently on Starz for awhile, and it’s about a therapist (Alexandra Wentworth) who lives in hotels and has celebrity clients. I’ve always had sort of a thing for Alexandra Wentworth, even when she married that twee man George Stephanopoulos and started writing magazine articles about motherhood. It’s also has Steve Landesberg in it (among other roles, he was the doctor from Forgetting Sarah Marshall who told Jason Segal that he had a beautiful dick) and another celebrity in every episode (Jeff Goldblum is in the one on my TV right now, and you should know that The Val Kilmer Project could very nearly have been The Jeff Goldblum Project or, if Gene Catman had had his way, The Bea Arthur Project). One of my favorite things about Head Case is that each episode is less than 30 minutes long. I don’t have much of an attention span of late, and the weekly viewings of Deadwood are about as much length as I can handle.

Earlier today, I tried watching a philosophy documentary called Examined Life, which is a play on Plato’s statement that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Which I agree with, but I learned fairly early in my dating life that while philosophy itself is interesting, listening to philosophers talk about it is not. I managed to sit through 20 minutes of Examined Life before I got tired of listening to older white people in Tevas talk about how much more advanced their brains are, so I turned to Head Case.

Head Case is sharp and funny, but in real life, talking about therapy is about as interesting as talking about philosophy. I’ve never been to real therapy* before so I can’t really speak to its benefits, but I think that unless someone has a true psychological problem requiring a medical professional, then paying a stranger to talk about your feelings every week is kind of narcissistic. I’m not saying that I’m particularly advanced or even the portrait of mental health, but I deal with my feelings largely on my own. I have them, I think about them for awhile, and I consider it done. I mean, I suppose that a blog could be considered some type of therapy, but aside from the domain name registration, this therapy is free. I don’t have to answer bizarre questions about my sex dreams or delve into any other murky territory, and nobody gets to pretend like what I’m saying has a much deeper meaning than I intended. That’s where philosophy and therapy lose me, I think. Sometimes things just are. There doesn’t have to be a hidden meaning or buried impulse. Fucking get a blog and get over yourselves.

Besides, it’s summer! It’s time to drink entirely too much, enjoy your air-conditioning, and get woken up at 5:30am on a Saturday by a gigantic storm that the very early morning weekend weatherman (who is really cute and looks about 25, by the way) promises will be repeated the next morning, and he is so insistent about this that he will actually say “I just want to beat this into your brains” on the air!

Me and Summer Have Got a Thing For Verbally Inappropriate Weathermen

Rest, Parts & Labor
The Sun, Portugal
Go Outside, Cults
A Better Son/Daughter, Rilo Kiley
Modern Art, Black Lips
Same Streets, Same Clothes, Kentucky Knife Fight
Every Day I Love You Less and Less, Kaiser Chiefs
You Can’t Do That to Me, The Ettes
Ted Fucking Williams, The Baseball Project
Sister Jack, Spoon
Boston Gold, Point Juncture, WA
Get Away, Yuck
Only a Memory, The Smithereens
Dear Doctor, The Rolling Stones
Fish in the Jailhouse, Tom Waits
Arkansas, Damien Jurado
Un Dernier Verre (Pour la Route), Beirut
No One Does It Like You, Department of Eagles
Curs in the Weeds, Horse Feathers
Nerves of the Nevermind, Frontier Ruckus
This Will Be Our Year, The Zombies
Power Lies, The Thermals
Crack Habit, Summer Babes
Post Break-Up Sex, The Vaccines
Elizabeth My Dear, The Stone Roses
Sleeping Children Are Flying, Blue Sky Black Death

*There was a short period of time in maybe 5th grade where I had an awful, spiteful bitch of a teacher who not only called her students stupid and at least one girl fat, but out of some sick personal vendetta she had against me, convinced my parents that I needed counseling to fix a bad attitude (Lynne Nelson, you are probably still a terrible fucking person). My parents actually went through with this recommendation, forcing me through about 4 sessions before a basic sense of Catholic shame prevailed and they quit. There was also a school-mandated psychological evaluation during my senior year of high school when the principal got excited about post-Columbine zero tolerance rules and told me that she was afraid I was going to shoot up the school. Despite both of these forays into Other People Messing With My Head, I am now a completely mature and well-adjusted individual.