Late Bloomer

Some things I've only gotten into in the last few weeks:

• Arrested Development - best show on TV, brilliant writing, why isn't it more blah blah blah. Eh, I just never bothered with this show. By the time the hype got so insistent and unavoidable that I felt obligated to watch it, there was too much backstory and I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on. Now that I've seen the first season on DVD, I finally get it. Unfortunately, I'm two years too late to discuss the intrinsic brilliance of Gob's magic show. And the dead dove in a bag in the fridge. C'mon, remember the dove?
• The Office - the UK version. I guess if I was into the American version I wouldn't be too (too) far behind, but no, I'm just getting around to watching the original. It's going to take me a long time to see the whole thing, too, because I can hardly stand to watch an entire episode. I have a low tolerance for humiliation comedy, so it verges on physically painful for me to watch scenes limp towards their excrucriatingly embarrassing conclusions. I also have a crush on Tim and alternate between wanting to smack him and wishing he was real so I could rescue him from his life of drudgery and sarcasm. Watching him limp off after quiz night, searching for his other shoe? tragic.
  
• Sufjan Stevens - All that crap about him making an album for each of the 50 states was really annoying. And really unavoidable for pretty much all of 2005 - just when it was dying down, it all got regurgitated for the year-end lists. The only thing I had ever heard from him was a song off an O.C. soundtrack. It's a good song, but who wants to admit they've been listening to O.C. mixes? I guess I just did. Anyway. Hearing him quaver oh my god as he sings about John Wayne Gacy made me forget about a year of annoying hype. He had a kind of honesty that makes me listen to every nuance, trying to catch his meaning. Ordinarily I'd just assume that a song about a serial killer must be bullshit. I mean, the world has already had all the ANSWER Me! it ever needed. But, somehow, by the end of the song, it's like he's erased the entire serial killer fetish that permeated 90s culture.