Which is a lot like telling us what's going on instead of showing us, again, some more, which makes it really frustrating, but more importantly it's very frustrating that, for this week, everybody knows the rules of fake comas even though they don't exist, and everybody knows the rules of parallel universes even though they don't exist, and they keep explaining these things to each other as though they were self-evident, even though they are not true and they are not facts. If this were happening in the alt-world only I would have no beef, but I'm talking about random nurses wandering up and offering shamanic dream quest advice in the course of her daily job. I accept the coma and I accept the parallel universe and I love the whole "overcome your shit and you win" concept, obviously, but it's just so... Gilmore Girls does this sometimes and it always makes me uncomfortable. Like Rory will say some made-up concept and Lorelei will be like, "What?" and then for the rest of the day everybody knows about the concept and it's like so crazy. Except really what it is, is stupid, because the thing doesn't exist, it's just something the writer of the episode felt amorously toward. Or how post-Friends and -Sex & The City every sitcom powerloads itself with catchphrase after catchphrase, like, desperately trying to make one stick. Not a huge one, and I like the episode, but could you get out of your own way for like five seconds, show? Again, not a major offense, but on the other hand, grossly underestimating your audience is how you get a Season Three, which directly results in my not getting to watch a whole hell of a lot more of this show The O.C., which I love very much, after today.

Taylor and Ryan head into Kirsten's Christmas party, planning to divide and conquer. Sucky Seth comes whining into the room bitching at his mom about how he's not going to the stupid party, because Summer will be there, and he cannot deal with Summer because she is affianced to "that burly dingdong," which is, okay, pretty cute. Ryan nods at Taylor and they split up; she heads into the main room where her mother is yelling at a violently hot boy named Taylor. "Your ass looks like the back of a truck!" she says. No comment, no reference to moving violations, nothing. I am pure class right now. Boy Taylor sucky-seths about how maybe he should do Pilates and she tells him to go stand against the wall. "And my mom is still a bitch," Taylor sighs to herself. I've said it before and I'll say it again: parallel universes exist so that you can make out with parallel versions of yourself. I agree with Omar that cloning is basically science's next great way to have sex with yourself; I could quite confidently settle down with alt-Jacob or clone-Jacob with no ill effects. I mean, if and only if I could get him to shut up about Tennyson and Jung and stop being pretentious all the time, because that would really get tiresome after a while. But this doesn't even seem to occur to Taylor. (Well, girl-Taylor at least; boy-Taylor seems ready to jump her bones in a sec, but really just in kind of a Seth and Ryan way where you know it will never actually happen.) Neither does it occur to Taylor to wonder WTF about her being a boy in this universe, which is similarly confusing to me like the Cohen = Marissa thing above. There's a connection I'm not making, because no way would you just randomly do that stuff and be all symbolic about it without there being a reason, and it angers me that I do not know what those reasons are.