For years while stuck in cubicles I would find things (comforts) to turn to when I got home from work each evening. Of course there was food. Of course. (Sometimes there were half cakes. Red velvet. Once there was a long dance with a carrot cake. Followed by slight self-hatred. ) There were cute shoes.  There were magazines. Lots and lots of magazines. I’d sit flipping through miscellaneous articles like How to Drive Your Man Crazy in Bed or Move Up in the Job You Love.  As a barren spinster, with more emphasis on the barren, I usually didn’t have a man to “drive crazy”and I never ever in life had a job that I loved.  Why, the words “job” and “love” were enemies. So in the midst of ugly magazine articles and food trysts I discovered a television show that changed everything.

The Gilmore Girls

I don’t know what precisely it was that drew me in and put clasps on my brain but I couldn’t get out. (Not that I wanted to get out.) Although the snappy language was a welcome change from the uber-boring corporate chat. I would watch especially the older episodes and I somehow related to both Lorelai and Rory though I didn’t come from wealth nor had I been a single parent. And God knows I never ran into a man such as Luke…But that’s just it…

The fantasy of it all (crime free town set in an idyllic setting, an entire town of support), the umph of it all (following your dreams, bucking the system), the quirkiness of it all (Miss Patty, Babbette, Kirk, the Town Selectman, the Town Troubadour, Hep Alien, Mrs. Kim with her meatless sandwiches and cryptic Bible talk, Paris Geller, etc.) the crux of it all (mother issues, love/dating issues), the pure friendship of it all (between Lorelai and Sooki and Lane and Rory, Luke and Lorelai) uprooted my very cubicle days.

Suddenly I couldn’t wait to get home to watch daily recordings of The Gilmore Girls. Somehow I had missed the beginning of the show in 2000 but in 2003 while renting a room in a house that had cable missing from certain bedrooms I found myself stuck with basic television channels and serendipitously arrived in Stars Hollow with Lorelai and Rory. And Luke. GOSH, LUKE. Life hasn’t been the same since. Even in 2007 when the show finally closed shop I purchased all seven seasons so that I would always be able to get my GG fix, so that I could just press PLAY and experience a town that hopeless viewers, including myself, have actually Googled to see if it exists so that they could possibly move there.

See? I’m not alone.

And I feel better having shared this secret that a TV show drove many days. Not a person, not a tangible friendship, not a tangible loving man figure, but a TV show.

We should all have fictional people in fictional towns to help us deal with real people in real cubicles.