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I’ve set myself a challenge for my last Chapter Two of 2010. I’ll type for three hours and when time’s up, so am I. Bathroom breaks, diaper changes for Finn, staring off into space, are all part of the time allotment. I’ll stop mid-sentence if need be. It’s 9:12 p.m. the day after the Winter Solstice. The days are getting longer; my seasonal affective bullshit will soon be on the wane; I am leaving tomorrow for Christmas in Fresno with my girlfriend’s extended family; my pounding migraine of the last seven days slipped into the ether this morning, and I am staring at Amy Adams holding a Christmas ornament on the cover of the Parade newspaper insert. Things are good.

Over the course of 12 years and several girlfriends, I have seen a fair number of Sex and the City episodes. I don’t know if I would ever be inspired to go back and see the ones I haven’t, or run all six seasons through from start to finish, not when there is Lost, The Wire, Friday Night Lights, True Blood, and probably a dozen other shows that I need to even begin! But I did have some familiarity with the SATC universe before I caught the first film its opening weekend in 2008 with my best friend and the sequel this past weekend with my current girlfriend.

I am attuned enough to have my favorite character - Charlotte, which I have been told is fairly obvious, and perhaps even more so, if I mention that it was the episode where she gets hooked on using the rabbit vibrator that sealed the deal. However, I must add that Cynthia Nixon is my favorite actress of the quartet, both on the show and particularly after seeing her in early roles in Little Darlings and Prince of the City this past summer, as well as finally catching up with her wonderful supporting performances in the Robert Altman cable miniseries Tanner ’88 and Tanner on Tanner several years back. She seems like the kind of actress who would always be cast as the friend of the lead in the romantic comedy genre, if she hadn’t wound up as part of a comedy series that became a cultural phenomenon.

I have quite a weird history of watching the feature films of television shows that I didn’t watch all that much or have never seen. Generally, I like them. I could never listen to a broadcast of Howard Stern all the way through, but I quite enjoyed his Private Parts. I have never spent a full 30 minutes in South Park, but I took in the full 82 minutes of Bigger, Longer & Uncut. I have watched maybe two or three episodes each of Kids in the Hall and Mystery Science Theater 3000 but caught MST3K: The Movie and Brain Candy both on opening day. And on and on. In doing some self-analysis, I am not sure if this implies that I really don’t have much of a ken for episodic TV or, considering how many movies I saw yearly through the '90s and much of the past decade, this was simply a reflection of the Law of Averages.

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