Ok, I just finished watching How I Met Your Mother again. I was considerably more emotional this time ‘round. A lot of it I’m sure is having to accept that I’m not going to have certain things in my life that I’ve always wanted, like a family. As fucked as things are right now, I can’t so much in good conscience ask a woman to have a child with me. Being back home now and seeing the things I could’ve been doing over the last twenty-five years instead of shuffling through my exile in utah and wasting my life in a series of dead-end, no-paying jobs trying to fix the damage that artie did to my name and credit, just to barely almost get by. I often struggle with the thoughts of what might’ve been weighed against the reality of what is. I fully understand I wouldn’t be the man I am had my experience deviated from the path I’ve been walking but I’m confident that I still would’ve become a good person with just the dead dad and not necessarily with the decades of being ground under foot by my shitty “mother” and jackass siblings. I still could’ve developed my work ethic by going to college when my teachers said I should have as opposed to working two or three jobs at a time and not be able to pay my bills let alone save any money. I’m pretty sure I still could’ve developed empathy by learning from other peoples’ experiences and not being stuck in a know-nothing burgeoning theocratic nightmare of christians denying Christ at every turn. But who knows? Multiversal cognizance is a big enough pain in the ass without developing such an understanding in my teenage years and having so much time through the years of menial labor to intellectually map out my personal history and retrace the causal cascade that brought me here to now, writing this…DOODY. Ha! That’s never not funny. In any case, How I Met Your Mother is still a great show.
This time watching through I was going through episode by episode on IMDB and reading up on the Trivia and Goofs as I watched each episode. A lot of the goofs are fairly standard continuity things where a director or DP most likely decided in the moment “Hold this in that hand instead so you face this way.” and things like that. A lot of things though are actually pretty interesting observations. Things like different actors wearing the same shirt or specific jewelry that in retrospect would speak to someone remembering their personal experiences and connecting key details to multiple people in our lives. For example, at one point while Ted(Josh Radnor) is with Stella(Sarah Chalke) and in one episode she is wearing a specific and unique necklace. In the next episode they’re broken up and then Robin(Cobie Smulders) is wearing the same necklace. The necklace, a gold pendant on a simple chain, similar in style to the locket that later, Ted works so hard to find for Robin when she marries Barney(Neil Patrick Harris). An interesting detail that keen observers may have seen and anticipated the ultimate conclusion of the series.
One of the biggest things for me in this show is the episode Bad News, s06e13. The countdown is of course, ever compelling and the conclusion of the episode has always been hard for me to watch. In particular, Marshall’s(Jason Segel) reaction. In the Trivia section of that episode on IMDB, he wasn’t given that page at first. Alyson Hannigan got that page before filming that scene, Segel reacted cold and raw to that line and then improvised the response “I’m not ready for this.” They filmed the one take and that was on the screen. I haven’t confirmed this but if I ever get the chance to talk with Jason Segel, I’m definitely going to ask him about it. And then the next episode, Last Words is especially painful for me. I don’t remember my dad’s last words to me.
