Blog in the Round: Gilmore Girls

I don’t know a lot about much anything in this world. I try really hard to learn. I want to be able to make smart decisions and have intelligent conversations with people. I read books and listen to people speak on things. I watch educational television programs such as Home Improvement and Temptation Island. You know, TV shows about real life. In conversation I sometimes try to drop a quote from one of these shows. I secretly know that nothing gets a crowd going like a well-timed, “Does everybody know what time it is? Tool Time!” reference. And I confess I didn’t know anything about real love until I saw an episode of Temptation Island where a girl left her so-called “husband” after a passionate and romantic afternoon with some tanned, blonde dude she just met.

But every now and then, as hard as I try, I miss out on something. There is always some tiny bit of pop culture knowledge that slips through my tangled little net of understanding. This is true for the show Gilmore Girls.

I didn’t believe it at first. I mean I really thought that somewhere underneath the wrinkles in my brain was a memory of an episode of this show that I might have watched. So I searched for it. I sat down and made an extensive, detailed list of everything I knew about Gilmore Girls. This is what I came up with:

1. Gilmore Girls is a TV show
2. Gilmore Girls has girls in it and (possibly) a boy, but I don’t think so.

Deeply disappointed about my lackluster knowledge of the subject, I went to work. I believe in knowing and understanding a subject thoroughly before sitting down to write about it. Let’s face it, you can’t write what you don’t know. You basically just have to make stuff up. Ask Jose Canseco if you don’t believe me.

So I put my college research skills to work and made a visit to the critically acclaimed and university-certified research site youtube.com to gather a little information. I looked up Gilmore Girls and absorbed it like a sponge. I watched all the “best scenes from season __” clips, which were all set to Lifehouse music. I also noticed that a particular movie I watched 13 consecutive times highlighted all the kissing scenes in the show, which, since the girls of Gilmore are straight means there are, in fact, boys on the show. But still it’s probably just the same guy in a different costume every show.

I watched one clip which was about 10 minutes long of some person’s favorite scene of all time from Gilmore Girls. I just knew that it was going to give me all the information and knowledge I needed about this show, so I clicked. This scene showed the girls talking about something that, to me, didn’t seem all that important at all. In fact, I already knew all I needed to know at that point: girls talk a lot. Nothing revolutionary about that. I fast-forwarded the scene and they just kept talking, and they talk fast which means there was a lot to listen for in that scene. I didn’t pay attention to any of it. In fact, I started forming a conspiracy theory in my mind about how Rory is really a communist spy and she is just being nice because she wants to discover plans to some top-secret, American cold war weapon. I’m sure if I watched the entire show to the end I would have found out I was right, but I stopped the clip about 3 minutes in, frustrated because I hadn’t seen any explosions or car chase scenes yet.

I think that to watch and be a fan of a show like Gilmore Girls, you have to have something really special that some people just don’t have. Kinda like how Chinese people are the only ones who actually believe dragons are real. They believe it because they are born with it, and while the rest of us may think dragons are cool and a great idea, we will never truly understand. In the same way, the rest of us don’t understand why Gilmore Girls is a popular show. But I offer the explanation that we just don’t have the one, special, God-given ingredient that makes people sit through episode after episode of girls talking to each other. That ingredient is estrogen.