Weeds (the show) broke my heart. We had a great courtship, season one was terrific, and I thought we were going to be compatible for all time. I introduced Weeds to my friends, contemplated adding it to my “Favorite Shows” list on Facebook, and even mentioned it on my blog.

I thought we were real. I thought we were forever.

Then, after I had made my commitment and declared my true love for it, it dumped me. Season two was a right bastard and made me regret every minute I’d spent with the show. What had begun as an entertaining, slightly irrelevant, yet overwhelmingly hilarious show soured into an upsetting, disturbing, convoluted mess of a dysfunctional relationship and as of right now I’m cutting the cord.

That’s it, Weeds. I’ve had it with you. We’re done. Lose my number.

Luckily, this breakup happens to coincide with the weekend so I have plenty of time to nurse my wounds. Maybe I’ll even pick up a rebound show, like Numb3rs, in order to give me the space I need to lick my wounds. That’s not to say that there won’t be booze, though. And brownies. After all, I’m only human and what is a breakup if not an excuse to stuff your face with chocolate and cosmos?

Wes and I have set up this newfangled system with Netflix wherein we can watch movies instantly using our Xbox. It’s a handy-dandy little system that all but guarantees that we constantly have new movies to watch when our mailed DVDs are slow to arrive.

As a result, we’re always combing through Netflix, adding new movies to our “Watch Instantly” queue. Wes and I were hanging out the other day and scrolling through our movie choices. When he got to one of them, he stopped and asked me who had put Dante’s Peak in our Netflix cue.

I quickly confessed and was met with jeering and mockery. Apparently, Dante’s Peak is a bad movie. This was news to me, so I promptly asked Wes, Now, what about a questionable relationship between a divorced mother and laughably hard-core geologist, imminent destruction, and stilted dialogue doesn’t sound like a good time to you?

He just laughed and refused to watch it. Never one to be foiled, I merely watched it by myself while Wes had to work late last night. Even though I haven’t seen it since I was really young, and the dialogue is admittedly not the best, I still had a good time watching it.

I have an embarrassing affinity for natural-disaster movies. If it has a terrible naturally-occurring calamity and ham-handed special effects, chances are good that I’ll enjoy watching it. If it has a brawny male lead who knows the truth but can never seem to just get anyone to believe him, with the exception of his ravishing yet unassuming female lead, even better.

The Day After Tomorrow? Loved it. Armageddon? Sign me up. Twister? I’m along for the ride. Volcano? In the middle of LA, why not?

You see, it’s an embarrassing plight to be sure. Do you have cinema skeletons hiding in your closet? If you tear up every time Drew Barrymore finds out she loves herself just the way she is, or if you’ll watch any movie Hugh Grant slaps together just because you’re a sucker for his British accent, let me know. It can’t get any worse than voluntarily watching Tommy Lee Jones try to hook up with Anne Heche, can it?

Wes and I started a new show last night and, while I like it, I’m not sure I enjoy it. It’s called Mad Men. While it’s well-done and the dialogue and acting are flawless, it’s altogether a bit upsetting to watch. Not upsetting in a Chuck Palahniuk I-need-to-wash-my-brain-out-with-bleach kind of way, it’s more upsetting in an unsettling way.

The show centers around successful ad executives during the 1950′s. The writers have done a flawless job of directing a spotlight into a time not so long ago, when men drank whisky at work and women went to work as secretaries in the vain hopes of landing a rich husband to support them.

The costumes are probably my favorite part (I do love me some red lipstick and pin-curled hair!) but I like the psychology of advertising just as well. Like I said, the show itself is solid.

What upsets me is the rampant adultery. The main character of the show is a war veteran (I’m assuming WWII) and, in front of his wife and kids, is a paragon of wholesomeness and light. Behind his wife’s back, however, he’s hooking up with women left and right.

We’re only three episodes in and we’ve already witnessed three men cheating on their wives without even the tiniest ounce of scruples or remorse. Between the adultery and the working hours, it’s a wonder any of them have time to sleep!

The women on the show, for their part, are hilarious in an unintentional way. One lady was teaching the ropes to an office newbie and, after showing her to her desk, admonished her not to be overwhelmed by all the technology because they “made it simple enough for even a woman to use.”

Need I say more?

What a shift in perspectives! In fifty short years, women have gone from a very defined and limited place in the professional world to being respected as equals (Sure, there are still preconceptions out there, but there always will be. The human mind is built to think in terms of patterns and groupings, so the world will never be free from preconceptions and assumptions).

It just amazes me how far society has come, and in so many different ways. On the show, children tumbled around unsecured in the backseat of a car while a pregnant woman smoked and tossed back martinis. Even though I’m sure a lot of that is theatrical, I’m pretty sure that not all of it is.

If you compare that era to the one in which we live, it’s almost unfathomable to imagine it’s the same country! Driving around with unsecured children is a major no-no nowadays, drinking at work is career suicide, smoking and drinking whilst gestating a human being is likely to get you arrested, and as for the adultery…Well, I fervently hope it’s nowhere near as rampant. Perhaps people just get divorced now, instead of staying married and cheating on the side.

Does anyone know if the 1950′s were really like this, or is the whole show thriving off the shock and novelty factor?

OK. Stephenie Meyer. Twilight series. Let’s do this. I devoured the entire Twilight series in a week and half (which, once you’ve seen the heft of the books, you’ll realize this is quite an accomplishment.) I enjoyed my time with the books, but they will never make any of my favorites lists.

It’s not that they weren’t enjoyable. They were fun to read, and Meyer did a good job creating a world for readers to get lost in. My issues with the series probably stem more from the vampires of her world and the length of the books more than they do with the way she wrote the books.

The vampires in Twilight borrow a bit from Anne Rice’s vampires: they’re ridiculously good looking (even more so than Derek Zoolander) and very attractive to humans. They also drink blood, they’re crazy-fast, and they’re extremely strong. That’s about where the similarities end.

Meyer’s vampires are a dash teen magazine pin-up, a tad My Little Pony sparkle, and thickened by about as much menace as a newborn kitten. She’s distilled all the horror and menace from the good-guy vampires until they’re nothing more than really awesome super-human creatures who sparkle like glitter in the sun and have great sex. For pete’s sake, they don’t even have fangs!

Really, she’s made vampirism entirely too desirable. The vampires can go out in daylight (like I said, they don’t burn in the sun. They sparkle), they don’t sleep in coffins, they can refrain from drinking human blood, and they’re ludicrously wealthy. They can perform amazing acts of strength, some have super-powers (like mind-reading and the ability to see the future), and they almost all find vampire mates and live happily ever after.

As you can see, there’s really no reason to not be a vampire (When the main character’s vampire boyfriend repeatedly tries to convince her to not become one, you as the reader have the same reaction she inevitably does: Why the heck not?!)

The only sinister characters are the bad guys, whose eyes are red because they drink human blood. These are also bestowed with unerring self-control, however, so there’s very little menace there unless they just really feel like eating you. You can’t even say they’re ruled by primordial thirst, because even when the bad guys are really thirsty, they’re still able to just say no if they have to.

In a good vampire novel, the vampires should all be sinister, if for no other reason than that they’re some bizarre undead creature who feasts on blood for sustenence. For Meyer to turn that concept into a lifestyle we should all be lucky to lead is indicative of how much liberty she’s taken with the genre.

I’m not a huge fan of the shift, honestly. I like the struggle between Louis and Lestat (In Anne Rice’s books) to discern some kind of ethical code for their kind. I love the clear conflict to reconcile morality with an existence that’s defined by a pervasive need to end lives. The vampire genre needs that struggle to balance out the immortality and physical attractiveness.

Meyer’s vampires are my main problem with the series, but my secondary reaction to the series was that it was just plain too long. I’m certain that the whole story would have been much better served were it cut in half. There were too many strange curve-balls at the end that were unwelcome and out of place, and way too many passages that existed solely to drag out the story.

This is just my personal reaction, however. There are some people who are convinced that the whole series is too short. I just am not one of them. I feel like the series would have been much more powerful as a trilogy, or maybe even as an action-packed two-part book.

There were just too many world-shattering calamities, life-changing problems, and battles-to-end-all-battles for me to take it seriously once I got to the end. It’s the same problem I had with 24: No one is that unlucky. If you throw that much calamity at one character, some of your audience is eventually going to notice and the curtain of believability will be lifted.

If the author/screen-writer spends too much effort drawing a story out to fit length parameters, I can usually be counted on to notice and it makes me too aware that I’m watching/reading a work of fiction. Once this happens, I can’t submerge into the story the way I’d like to.

Now that I’m certain you’re all bored to tears and wishing I’d stop typing about this insipid series any longer, I will stop. Please tell me what you think, though. If you disagree with me about the Twilight series, please do let me know. If you agree, share that too. If you’ve never read the series, let me know how you feel about toast. My comments section is your comments section, capisce?