Jaded

Joyce and I are getting jaded.

BTW: I didn't know the origin of jaded, so I just looked it up. It comes from the word jade ("of obscure origin," say my dictionaries), a word that once meant "a worn-out, broken-down, worthless, or vicious horse"--from the 14th century.  In that famous, flaring flash of wit between Katherine and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, we get this exchange:

PETRUCHIO

Thou hast hit it: come, sit on me.

KATHARINA

Asses are made to bear, and so are you.

PETRUCHIO

Women are made to bear, and so are you.

KATHARINA

No such JADE as you, if me you mean. (2.1)

Anyway, Joyce and I are not horses (sure, I'm sometimes an ass).

(See dictionary definition above if you don't understand what I just wrote.)

But we are getting, sort of, "worn out."

Not really by Life, which is wearing enough, but by the sorts of TV series we are streaming. Shows about detectives and cops. We love them ... but ...

Currently we are streaming that endless BBC series called Waking the Dead (about a cold-case unit), Vera (a wonderful show)--and we just finished the most recent season of Brokenwood. And, before those, we streamed numerous others--like Wire in the Blood and The Doctor Blake Mysteries.

All good ... but ...

We're sort of wearying of watching psychos murder women (and sometimes children), wearying of seeing pathologists pick at the remains of human beings who've been buried in a landfill for twenty years, wearying of watching creepy guys (almost always guys) stalking and raping and terrorizing and dismembering and whatever-ing. There seems no end to it.

And there probably isn't. I mean, after all, what do the producers of the local news do? They look for whatever the most depraved people in town have done--and that becomes the nightly "news." And we are so shocked--and then tune in the next night to see what new outrage has occurred, what new outrage we can be outraged about.

The other night, while we were streaming in bed, Joyce joked: "They ought to make a series about detectives devoted to finding out who's done a good deed!"

Yeah. An hour about how some Sherlockian character finally figures out who shoveled the Old Guy's sidewalk, who gave a wad of $$ to a homeless person, who donated bags of food to a shelter, who ...

You get it?

I'm sure that show would rocket to the top in ratings.

Nah.

We prefer the creepos and the corpses, don't we?