House

Okay – so I love House.  Well, let me amend that.  I love it in its earliest version.  I can’t really say I like the new interns that are on the show currently.  But when Chase and Foreman and Cameron were the interns, the show was at its best.   I watch the reruns on USA, and I love that they show so many episodes back to back, and I can’t believe just how many episodes I still actually haven’t seen.  That’s basically how I spent my evening—watching probably 4 episodes (I think I started at 6, but who can be sure about these things?).  Anyway, back to why I love the show.  It’s because House is this tortured character and Wilson is really the only one who understands him.  House doesn’t really enjoy miserable, as Wilson so succinctly stated in the last episode of my TV watching binge tonight.  No, I don’t think he enjoys being miserable.  I think it’s more that he just doesn’t know how to be happy.  He can't have the woman he loves because she’s married to another man, and seriously, letting her go was the best thing he could have ever done for her.  That doesn’t mean he likes being miserable.  It just means that he doesn’t want to hurt her again and yes, selfishly, that he doesn’t want to be hurt again.  I can understand that.  Well, I can understand the motivating behavior behind that choice.  The thing about House that no one else on the show seems to get, is that House knows who he is.  He’s one of the most painfully self-aware characters on TV today.  That’s one of the reasons why so many people love his character even though he’s a total ass.  He deludes himself, but he knows that he's deluding himself.  I've been having this ongoing conversation with a friend (yes, you know who you are!) about characters that you feel conflicted about, or characters who are conflicted.  House is one of the great examples of this kind of character when it's done correctly.  He's conflicted, and we're often conflicted because we know he's an ass, but he's an ass with good intentions.  So we forgive him, even though we may not want to, and even though possibly, deep down inside, we think we could never ever be like him but thankfully there are people like him.  (Otherwise, none of these people would ever get cured and who would watch the show then?).  

But here's the thing that has me on this blogging rampage.  A few days ago there was an episode where the patient told House that he had one thing—one thing that he knew he could always rely on, one thing that defined who he was, one thing that he was better at than most other people, and because of that one thing, he was alone in life—not married, no children and probably not many friends.  For House that one thing is medicine.  Ever since I saw that episode I wonder if I have that—one thing that makes me who I am and that I am more dedicated to than anything else, one thing that takes precedence over everything else in life.  You’d think I’d be able to say that I do, considering that I'm not married with kids and have no current prospects on the horizon.  But I don’t think I can say that, and I wonder what that means, if it means anything at all that is.  I’m driven, yes.  I have priorities, yes.  But I don’t have that one thing that makes me lose sleep at night or that gets me out of bed in the morning.  I just have a seemingly never-ending list of tasks to complete.  I just move from one task to the next, one day to the next, looking forward to the next vacation period.  Sure I have goals and things I want to accomplish, but I don’t think I go after them single-mindedly.  Knowing that, realizing that makes me wonder what the hell I’m doing with my life and what am I doing it for?  Should I be looking for that one thing?  Because truly, I don’t want to be miserable like House.  But at least House has his work and it means something to him.  And even though he's just a made up character who only gets 22 new episodes a year, I still envy him for that.