Time to scrub out

Well that’s it. It’s done. I have watched all 182 episodes of Scrubs. The goal has been achieved and my long, complex journey is at an end.

I have mixed feelings about that.

On the one hand, I am glad to finally be free. It is a quirk of my nature that once I start something, I focus in on it to the exclusion of everything else. So to my mind, it was effectively impossible for me to watch anything else until I finished Scrubs. I had to finish Thing A before I could even think about Thing B.

Like I have said before, I can be oddly linear for a creative person. Then again, I can be remarkably creative for a rational materialist utilitarian, so it goes both ways.

I’m so darn deep and fascinating!

And it’s not like it was torture going through all those episodes of Scrubs. I love the show. It’s like it was made for me. A wacky sense of humour (complete with cutaways), clever funny writing, extremely good performances (with a lot more depth than you would think for a show this goofy), great characters that are well-defined (without lacking depth) that you love spending time with, and the most important thing and who , a big soft sentimental heart that informed everything in the show.

Oh, and with the ability to develop a plotline over a season and the inherent drama and excitement that comes from being a medical drama.

In other words…. Scrubs is exactly the sort of show I want to make some day.

And it says something about the virtues of the show that it didn’t even start to seem like a long journey until the seventh season. Up until then, it was a delight.

For those of you unfamiliar with the show, it was a sitcom set in a hospital that followed the adventures of Doctor John Dorian (Zach Braff) as he makes the journey from medical student to doctor with the help of his best friend Doctor Christopher Turk (Donald Faison), his extremely reluctant and brutally sarcastic mentor Doctor Perry Cox (John C. McGinley), tough Latina nurse with a heart of gold Carla Espinoza (Judy Reyes), and overachieving and crazy neurotic fellow student Doctor Elliot Reid (Sarah Chalke).

Last but not least, there was his nemesis, the man known only as…. The Janitor (Neil Flynn), who was a very lonely, crazy, hateful person who was inexplicably likable.

Shows what a good show it was… it could make you like a character who delighted in messing with the main character. Always in non-serious ways, though. Well, mostly.

So while I am glad to be done, and free to watch other stuff, I am also going to miss spending time with the characters that most definitely became my friends.

And thus, I am in that inter-show zone for the first time in months. Luckily, this time, I know exactly what I am going to watch next : the new season of Ultimate Spider-Man that arrived on Netflix last week!

Nothing in my queue even comes close to out-competing my love for ol’ Webhead.

After that, I dunno. If I wanted another massive commitment so that I didn’t have to decide again for a long time, I would start in on Gilmore Girls. That had 7 seasons of high quality dramedy. I loved the show when I used to watch it with Angela.

But I think I will probably at least catch up on some movies before that. Like I have that weird Michael Keaton movie Birdman in my queue, as well as In Bruges, which I have heard good things about. Or I could finally get around to watching The Wolf Of Wall Street.

Dunno why, but I keep putting off watching it because I feel like it will upset me somehow. Maybe I am afraid it will remind me too much of the parts of the 80’s I would rather forget. Or fill me with such intense class rage that I choke on it. I don’t know.

I do know one thing : there will always be a part of me that wonders what would have happened if I had stuck to my original game plan and taken business classes when I went to university.

I am positive I would have been good at it. I have the right combination of numerical intelligence, charisma, and creativity.

Plus I am pretty sure I would be really good at bullshitting.

So if I had stuck with the plan and gone business, it’s a strong possibility that I would have done very well in that world and amassed quite the fortune. I could have been one of those financial sharks that works the system and comes out ahead no matter what happens.

But it also would have reinforced some of the worst aspects of my personality. Things like my desire to prove how clever and quick and deadly I am, and my facility for manipulating people, as well as my oral-retentive desire to sit in the center of a web of power and make the world serve my needs. Not to mention my deep well of untapped greed. I could imagine myself going pretty nuts if I was someplace where there was money just there for the taking for the person who is smart and sociopathic enough.

Maybe I would have been able to keep my soul. Certainly, I would enjoy proving that you can be a highly effective shark without becoming a total asshole.

In fact, if I could make a fortune without compromising my morals or even screwing anyone over, that would really prove how clever and capable I am.

And from the shores of wretched-ish poverty, that sounds pretty damned good.

So maybe the real reason I don’t want to watch The Wolf Of Wall Street is that part of me would be really, really jealous of those guys who got to live the 80’s dream of getting rich on Wall Street.

And that’s not a part of myself I particularly like.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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