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Still watching Gilmore Girls
and still loving it

It’s one of my favorite episodes, “A Tale of Poes and Fire”. Because it’s a tale of fresh starts in the lives of three of our characters.

Rory’s story

Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Oh my!

How to decide between the three? A pro-con list, of course!

Everybody knew the answer would come back “Harvard,” because Rory has been planning to go to Harvard since she was a little girl. Lorelai, however, was surprisingly agnostic about the list, even though she was the one who freaked out when Rory applied to Yale as one of her backups. I wonder how much of that agnosticism is true acceptance of the list. And how much is just support for Rory, because Lorelai knows that Rory feels so much better about her decisions, after she makes a pro-con list.

I get the impression that Rory was always ready for the answer to come back “Yale,” but she wasn’t ready for Lorelai to be ready for the answer to come back “Yale.” Not after Lorelai had birthed the idea of Rory going to Harvard, after they had spent their whole lives planning for Harvard, after they had spent dollars upon dollars on Harvard merchandise for Rory’s bedroom wall.

“But how can I go to Yale with my wall looking like this?”

Simple. You can’t. So change the wall.

Lorelai’s story

Lorelai may not have known how she was going to handle the inn burning down, but she has always risen to the challenges she’s faced. Sometimes, I think she needs a challenge in order to really shine.

The Independence Inn means so much to Lorelai, she has never wanted to leave it. At one point, when Lorelai and Sookie began moving on their dream to own their own inn, Lorelai freaked out, because she realized it meant leaving the Independence Inn… and that Mia would sell it. Part of her, I think, still wants to hold on to the Independence, her old job, her old inn, her old home. They’ve essentially put their dreams on hold, which Fran made easier by refusing to sell them their dream property, the old Dragonfly.

But now the Independence has caught fire. This fire represents burning down the old, making way for the new. It will be several more episodes before Lorelai and Sookie can buy the Dragonfly, but I have to wonder whether Lorelai would have even jumped on that opportunity, had the Independance still been alive and well.

The first also represents a further challenge to Lorelai, because it takes away her steady income and her safety net, and throws her world into disarray. In the succeeding episodes, this all becomes crystal clear, as she even tells Sookie they can’t start their business, because she has no longer has investment capital. But that’s just a challenge, which Lorelai allows to work out for the best, even though it takes Rory going behind her back. (But that’s a different story.)

Lorelai hates to be out of control, but when circumstances are out of her control, that’s when she really shines.

Paris’s story

“Little did I expect my demise would come this early.”

When life hits you hard, it’s possible to sink into depression. And that’s what Paris did, lying around all day, watching TV, blaming herself, dwelling on her sense of helplessness, disconnecting from the world. Black-and-white thinking: “There’s no alternative to Harvard.” If she can’t get into Harvard, her life is over. That’s depression.

Thank God for Rory, who pushed through to get her back up on her feet.

Every success came at the cost of devastating failure. You may have heard some of the stories.

• Michael Jordan was cut from his high-school basketball team.
• The headmaster at Lucille Ball’s acting school told the teenage Lucy, “try another profession—any other.” It wasn’t until she was in her forties that she finally broke through to stardom.
• Henry Ford bankrupted himself five times before he succeeded, and R.H. Macy tried seven times before his New York store caught on.
• Fred Smith, who invented Federal Express, first earned only a C on his college paper detailing the idea for FedEx, because his professor said it would never work.
• Tom Landry, Chuck Noll, Bill Walsh, and Jimmy Johnson share an important distinction: none of them won a single game their first season as NFL head coaches. (And then all went on famously to win whole series of Superbowl championships.)
• Lance Armstrong finished dead last in his first professional bicycle race, before he went on to win the Tour de France six times in a row, the only person ever to have done so.

And the examples go on and on. You can catch some more here and here.

-TimK