Finding Beauty in the Mundane: Skins Volume 1

skins DVD

Skins volume one is now available on DVD to purchase, watch, and enjoy once again. You get three discs, nine episodes, and ”bonus video diaries and ancillary storylines”. Pretty snazzy.

I’m a great fan of Skins as it’s a wonderful show. I recently watched a bad movie called Remember the Daze (Amber Heard, Alexa Vega, Leighton Meester) which had originally had the movie title of The Beautiful Ordinary. I think they changed it to mooch off of the huge success of the cult classic Dazed and Confused.

Again I will say, Remember the Daze was horrible! Or at least…not any good. (It was a major time-waster.) Anyway – the term ‘the beautiful ordinary’ applies rather well to BBC America’s Skins. Because, as you might have jumped ahead and guessed – they show the beauty in the ordinary. Of which there is a great amount, if you’re looking for it.

(Speaking of movies, I highly suggest the creepy drama: Transsiberian with Emily Mortimer.)

To honor the idea of beauty in the ordinary, and the beauty that is found within Skins, I’m going to share something I wrote in my journal the other morning:

I awoke at 4 a.m. this morning, having slept hardly an ounce – whatever an ounce of sleep would be, I assure you I mean it to be very little. Anyway, I awoke with covers rumpled around me – my limbs tangled in a blanket I’d stolen from my mother and insisted was mine, though I later realized it never had been mine at all. So now I’m awake and trying to feel a sense of okayness with the world, finding these spare moments where nothing can hurl itself at me to throw me unsteady.

I’ve put on my CD of ocean sounds, something that’s maybe more soothing in theory than the practiced reality. I like to think that I’ve slept enough times with a lake outside of my window to tell the difference between the real and the fake. In fact, I get more of a sense of joy from hearing my humidifier burble with water occasionally, than this CD of captured noise. Isn’t that something? Maybe you’d nod and think, no, it makes perfect sense. Either way, there is no lake or ocean outside my window, and even if there was – it’s too damn cold to open a window.

Did I mention yet how we are surrounded in snow? I joke I will make tunnels, but mostly I am grateful not to have to have many occasions to achingly, slowly – puuuull on my boots, gloves, hat, scarf, jacket – and go outside where my glasses fog up every time I exhale deeply (which is often – life frustrates me).

In here, in my room, it’s almost a bit too warm. I feel my face flushed by a heater that is always too hot in my room, and I’m imagining how lovely it will be when I crawl back into bed with vanilla buttercream-scented lotion on my hands. I hope I dream I’m in a bakery.

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