I’m a fan of House. I all but set aside 9-10pm on Tuesday nights in order to get my fix. I can’t say that I’ve watched every episode (most, though), nor do I claim to devote a ton of the rest of my life thinking about the show. I do have a respect and admiration for the character that I have a hard time articulating, however.

There’s only one time a year when I’ll spend a few minutes looking for message board posts about what people thought about a show, and that’s when the season ends. I enjoy reading people’s speculation for what will come next; some people devote much more energy to a show than I ever would.

House’s third season ended tonight. So I took to the internet to see what people were saying, as usual. What they were saying is irrelevant here; what stuck out to me was how much more these people got out of the episode than I did. It’s rather embarrassing: on one side was theme, motivation, insight; on the other side I was all but drooling on myself.

If my real-world performance for assessing character and motivation is as impaired as my TV-world performance, then I should never be responsible for another person in any capacity. I do that bad.

…

My saving grace is that TV-world is not real-world. Despite my general disdain for the “different people learn in different ways” line of educational theory, I came head-to-head with my own learning blind-spot in seventh grade: TV. We would watch educational videos, and then take a quiz on them afterward to give us motivation to pay attention. I consistently got Ds and Fs on those quizzes. I was not a D or F student.

I was never happy with those scores, so I focused my entire energy into watching and absorbing those videos. (I also tried taking notes during the video, but there was just too much information flying by too quickly for me to capture it all.) No dice: Ds and Fs plagued me throughout my seventh grade educational TV quiz career.

I literally could not remember what I had been watching ten minutes earlier. That was incredibly frustrating. But it now leaves me an out for my stunning inattention to huge details on one of my favorite TV shows.

…I guess that’s good.