Ooh, I know! Upon arriving in Georgia (well, a few hours later), I had the chance to meet one of Janaí-Chanelle’s best friends. Her name is Lindsey and we were bedmates while the four of us (the two girls I just mentioned, me, and J-C’s boyfriend, Steven) tripped to Tennessee. I had the opportunity to get to know her and, because Twitter is my muse, I started a trending topic (that only ever trended on my own feed) about what I learned about being a redhead. It was called #TILARBSLOTWAR: Things I Learned About Redheads By Spending Lots Of Time With Another Redhead. So, uh, I guess I’ll just post those things?

We do not make decisions.

Even after we’ve been awake for lots of hours, our eyes remain half-closed and our faces look like pillows.

We roll up straw wrappers and put them into our purses in lieu of finding a trash can in which to throw them away.

The few times we say the word “confetti,” we say it at the same time.

Old men named Virgil who operate swing rides like to tell us how much they enjoy our hair color.

That was fairly anticlimactic. I’m gonna go.

Well, anyway, this celebration is off to a great start; I know nothing about one of my heroes and I feel right shit about it. I’m dramatic. So, you know how Tina Fey is my life? Well, Louis C.K. is also my life, but the redhead dude version. If those two had ever married and had a kid, it would’ve been me that popped out. Like Tina, Louie is a brilliant writer (Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, as well as various projects with Chris Rock), and just an insane and funny person. He also seems like he’d be nice in real life.

I planned on making him my Ginger in March, but then his new FX show, Louie, was pushed back to premiere at the end of this month instead. I’ve been waiting so impatiently at this point, I feel like throwing up. I’ve now watched the (NSFW!) Bobby Canavale preview below four hundred times.

Follow him on Twitter! He’s threatening to quit again, but I’d be really sad about that.

Anyway, I love this lady. Of course, Sixteen Candles was released eleven days before I was born, so I kind of missed her eighties heyday and had to wait until around junior high school for the second wave of those Brat Pack movies to take hold of that day’s youth. The first film of hers I saw was The Breakfast Club and, obviously, I was more of a “Freak” than a “Princess”. Still, you couldn’t totally dislike Claire because of her popularity and prissy demeanor; Molly plays every role sympathetically. She has the uncanny ability to weave through roles that require her to be a nobody (Sixteen Candles), a popular (The Breakfast Club), and a loser (Pretty in Pink) and, somehow, we believe her in all of them. I feel like these character traits are the plight of being a redhead – you’re either a leper or a unicorn. Having such a fiery mane gives you attention, but you never know what kind.

Uh, I feel like my writing sucks today (sorry, Molly! I know you read this!), so just enjoy more pictures.

I wish I could write her more justice. I feel like I’m at a loss. Just know, Bernadette Peters (I know you’re reading this), that I truly love you and have since I’m a kid.

THINGS!

And in looks news, I’m finally living up to my online identity again!! Titian-haired and gingerchildren make sense now!! All is right in the world!!

Lastly – and with less exclamation points, but no less exciting – my friend, Kim, made her 101 Things in 1,001 Days list and I’ve finally frigging started mine! I’ll obviously alert you, two readers, when I’ve completed said list and posted it within the top links. Some of you people are involved in my goals so, sorry. I’ve only got forty-four things so far, though. Thinking up 101 of anything is slightly impossible for me. My attention span is about non-existant.

Which is why this post has ended so abruptly.

The show and characters faded, though, and I had to make it through the remainder of my formative years feeling completely stupid compared to the characters on Dawson’s Creek (which was, like, supposed to be kind of a continuation of a MSCL-type, yes?). We didn’t have that large a vocabulary or deal with the amount of adult things they did (or, at least I didn’t). I was much happier following Buffy around. She was my new Angela Chase. Not necessarily popular, not necessarily a total outcast. She got the guys she wanted, but she felt like a total dummy around them anyway. She was equal parts tough, and vulnerable to the high level of emotion teenagers feel when they’re, you know, teenagers.

But now I’m twenty-five and going through a whole slew of new angst. The quarter-life crisis, if you will (I mean, you did read this, right?). I think from age twenty-three until, I’m guessing (hoping?!?!), thirty, it’s the second round of teenager. Most of us are finished college (oops! on my part) and thrown into this “real world” that is nothing like what we’ve been preparing for. Instead of worrying about failing that geometry midterm (because we’ve been skipping reviews to makeout with Jordan Catalano in the boiler room), we’re worrying about just getting a fucking job we can stand at all. We still have strange and awkward and strained relationships with old friends who we fight to keep in our new lives, no matter if they fit or not, because we just fucking love them. Our parents are still our parents, and we’re not really that grown up at all compared to them.

Anyway, I feel like I’ve talked about everything surrounding Angela Chase and not really her, as a character. I mean, she’s my Ginger, after all, the show isn’t. But the show is her, you know? She narrated (almost) the entire series. It was from her perspective (almost) the entire time. She lived the show, and I lived it along with her (and continue to do so). And, I know she’s not even a natural redhead, but whatever. I’ll allow it.

(I’m really shit at finishing things sometimes, which is why this entry just kind of trails off and turns to nothing. Sorry.)

There are infinity reasons to equally love and envy this girl, aside from her breathtakingly good looks. For the short run of it, she worked on It’s On with Alexa Chung (while simultaneously bumping elbows with the celebrity guests), interned at bestweekever.tv before that (BEING NEAR DAN HOPPER, Y’ALL!), and is so good friends with BWE-blogger Michelle Collins that they, like, text message each other and stuff.

Since then, she’s come to visit me in Philadelphia and I’ve gone to visit her in New Brunswick (and for an Audrey Hepburn mini-marathon no less!). I haven’t seen her yet this year – omgosh, not even since the summer, right?!?!?!?! – but I can’t wait to. She’s a darling person to be around and was one of two amazing girls (you’re the other one, Tammi!) who forced urged me into Harry Potter-dom. For that, I am forever grateful.

She’s singing Pat Benatar here. I wasn’t there for it, but I really wish I’d been!

I can’t remember the first time I watched Late Night, but I’ve never been a regular viewer. I’d normally watch on the nights I knew a favorite celebrity of mine would be a guest. Or – as the internet and my e-girlfriend, Oh No They Didn’t!, came around – I’d just watch those particular segments online. It’s not that I didn’t like Conan and Andy (and then just Conan), it’s just that I was a big poopy head. I honestly have no excuse. Yes, I’m usually in bed fairly early, but what about when I got DVR? Poopy head. Regardless, though, my viewership never really mattered, as I’ve never had a Nielsen Box and I’ve never been asked to keep a diary for the company. So, no matter how little or much I liked a show – or if I watched the show at its allotted time – it wasn’t up to me whether a show was safe or not. And I’ve definitely lost some amazing shows because of it (Pushing Daisies and Aliens in America are just two of many).

We watch television whenever we want. If we miss its original air-date and -time, we’ll watch it online (if we don’t have DVR). And, remember a few years ago, when NBC took their shows off of iTunes? Heroes’ ratings plummeted (and have never recovered), and it was just the beginning of the fourth place-ness NBC is currently experiencing. Fortunately for them, they realized their mistake and rescinded their fuck-up the next year – and went balls deep into Hulu – but the damage had already been done. But NBC still doesn’t seem to understand how this younger generation works. They want our viewership so fucking badly, but they don’t take into account the ways we actually, duh, view. This is evident on Hulu, where they leave out skits and musical numbers of Saturday Night Live episodes. They rely so heavily on Nielsen’s numbers without giving much thought to DVR views and online “play” numbers.

And this is where NBC fucks up more. We get that Jay doesn’t have a family to hang out with, and wearing a suit of denim can become pretty boring and lonely (not to mention fucking your cars), but he managed to weasel his way back into the schedule. And this time, during primetime. Long-loved shows, like ER, were cancelled; new shows, like Southland, that were promised renewal, were sent packing; and long-running shows, like Law & Order, were ripped from their Wednesdays at 10pm time slot and banished to the ghost-town of Friday nights (this statement works on many levels: one, two ghost shows air on CBS on Fridays (and they both do amazingly in the ratings) and two, no one watches television on Friday anymore (unless it’s about ghosts); also, I am a wordsmith). They thought this Leno-experiment would’ve been the biggest success they’d ever seen: they were going to save money by producing a much cheaper hour than a scripted drama, AND they were going to retain that “Leno lead-in”! Things were going to start happening to them now!

Unfortunately for NBC, they didn’t realize that people like scripted television more than Jay Leno. Perhaps the reason Jay enjoyed such large ratings all of this time is because he had those scripted shows leading him in, not to mention the news immediately before. Lots of people just leave things on; I’ve watched plenty of shitty shows because I wasn’t paying attention enough to change the channel. I know one person, in particular, enjoyed falling asleep to Jay Leno. That doesn’t say much about his content, does it?

Well, Conan had three months to get slightly comfortable before NBC’s experiment with The Jay Leno Show debuted. Of course, Jay experienced good ratings for the first week or so (out of general curiosity from viewers), and almost instantly began to struggle. He struggled so much, affiliates all over the country were threatening to stop airing his show because their eleven o’clock news shows were doing abysmally, having to follow a show no one was watching. So, as with any television show doing poorly in the ratings, NBC planned to cancel his show. AND THAT SHOULD’VE BEEN IT. “Jay, you tried, you failed, we’ll see you at the reunion.” And, I mean, his failure shouldn’t have even been this much of a shock. How often has Jay been up for an Emmy compared to his contemporaries? Conan’s writers were up for awards every single year since 1996 (not to mention, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and The Late Show with David Letterman were the usual contenders and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno was almost never nominated).

But I continually digress. Jay should’ve bowed out like a gentleman (as he hinted at in 2004), but he didn’t. He wormed his way back on the airwaves, and failed miserably. He had the opportunity to leave on top, but he decided to be a jerk and play Daddy Lead-in again. Conan never had the chance to rake audiences back in on his own. They’d left after their curiosity was peaked, and they definitely weren’t coming back now that Jay was stinking up the place. And NBC is so far up Jay’s butthole, they didn’t give a second thought to changing the time of the motherfucking TONIGHT SHOW, to accommodate a would-be shitty half our of Jay. The Tonight Show, a show that has been around for fifty-six years and has always aired, um, tonight. Like Coco alluded to in his brilliant “People of Earth” statement, airing the show at 12:05 isn’t tonight anymore. 12:05 is tomorrow.

And this is where NBC bullied Conan into an impossible corner. Conan had the opportunity to leave NBC fives years ago. He was receiving offers from ABC, among other places; so, to keep him around and, hopefully, bring in more viewers (re: money), they promised to give him The Tonight Show in five years if he stuck around. And so he did. And then those five years came, and he was, again, having to follow Jay after being given only three months to hold the night on his own. And then, when The Jay Leno Show failed, NBC offered Big Jaw a half-hour show immediately following the news. Nevermind that that timeslot already belonged to Conan. Nevermind that Conan uprooted his entire family and staff, had a majestic Mario Bros.-inspired set built, and finally realized his dreams when he moved to Los Angeles and took over The Tonight Show. Conan never had a say in the 11:30-matter. He would either have to agree to move the show back a half hour, or leave. These were the choices he was given, while the man who was to blame – the man whose show was cancelled – was given some sort of bullshit-backwards royal treatment. Never in my life have I experienced seeing someone fail and then have the opportunity to put someone else out of a job. THIS MAKES NO SENSE.

I can’t stop thinking about how he must feel when he goes home, as the days near to the end of his reign (I really don’t want to know how he must feel today :( – I think I’m crying right now). I can’t stop thinking about what must’ve been going through his brain when this whole thing started. Who knew that Conan’s future depended so much on Jay’s dumbfuck show succeeding? I STILL DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS ENTIRE THING, OBVIOUSLY. I mean, does this mean that every cancelled show’s replacement can be replaced by said cancelled show when said replacement fails? If so – can we bring back American Dreams, please? Because, aside from shitty sports, nothing has succeeded at eight o’clock on Sunday nights on NBC, right? And while you’re at it, just give the show to ABC or something. No, Fox, since they’re actually in first place.

In closing (but did anyone actually read all of this blubbering? I probably won’t), I am so privileged to have gotten the opportunity to attend a taping of The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien in November. Not only was it an experience I’d never had and will never forget – and not only was my hero, Jim Carrey, on the episode, making the experience that much richer – but Conan (and Andy and The Tonight Show Band) did such an incredible job of ensuring everyone there had a wonderful time (AND DINNER!). Just being in the audience amped me up to really push my writing and get the fuck in it. I was dreaming of writing for his show and/or being interviewed by him someday down the line. I’ll put that on hold for now until we see his next move.

As for tonight, I will be spending the night celebrating a friend’s birthday, Rock Band-ing, and crying throughout the entirety of Conan’s final Tonight Show. I’ll probably have lots of orange snacks, too.

To kick off the new year, I am combining a few of my favorite things: cats, cartoons, comics, and – of course – gingers. As you know, if you know me at all, the only comics I’ve semi-regularly kept up with are of the Archie variety; Archie, Betty & Veronica, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Josie and the Pussycats. And, since I’m still a little wary of declaring my undying Ginger love to Archie, I’ve picked my second favorite Archie-ginger, Josie James/Jones/McCoy (will we ever know her true last name?).

For Christmas, I was the lucky recipient of the complete television series from 1970, and I plan to marathon the ess out of it before school starts again in just a couple of weeks (wahhh). Not only that, but I haven’t watched the 2001 live-action film version, featuring Rachael Leigh Cook (remember her?), Tara Reid (omg), and Rosario Dawson (she came out alive!) in a long, long time. I think it’s about time I crack that out, at least to recite my favorite line of any film ever: “I’m so pretty and popular!” Ok, wait, you’d have to see the movie to find that line even remotely giggle-worthy. And after my recent purchase of Absolutely the Best of The Archies, I should probably get my hands on Josie and the Pussycats: From the Hanna-Barbera TV Show, if I can find it at all. (Of course I already have the film’s soundtrack, duh!)

In other words, welcome your first Ginger of the Month – of the new year and decade – by rocking the frig out to this: