You’ve never really seen the bottom of the barrel until you’ve been kicked out of a house party by a woman with an at-home dye job and Hobby Lobby art hanging on her walls. Now, I hope this never happens to you, but let me assure you: it feels miserable.

It’s a long, boring story, but trust me. From the moment I walked in the door, I could tell this wasn’t an environment where a person like me tends to flourish.

The lighting was that bitter yellow color, and people were playing cards in the living room. The kitchen had one of those huge, ornately-trimmed dark wooden shelves to hold plates. Plates that had apparently been airbrushed with portraits of angels. Lots of plates. Each one with one or more angels.

Now I’ve never really been persecuted in my life, but when you are used to being the loudest, gayest man in a room, you take on a certain watered-down form of double consciousness. Sure, gay men love interior design, but a lot of it probably stems from the fact that we’re generally forced to scan new rooms in an effort to figure out if some guy has a knife in his jean jacket pocket or something.

Before long, my gut proved correct and I was kicked out of the party by an angry hostess who told me to “shut the fuck up.” And I’m asking you to take a leap with me here, but I hadn’t even said anything!

The lesson here is twofold: first of all, don’t ever walk into a house party where the central feature is two side-by-side televisions that allow party guests to simultaneously play Call of Duty and watch DVRed shows from the fishing network. Second, leave every party five minutes earlier than you think you should.

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Imagine that you sign up for a jewelry-making class at your local community center–for the sake of this illustration, let’s say it’s Beaded Necklaces 101–and you join a teacher named Leslee for six weeks that culminate in one carefully-crafted spectacle of drapey, dazzling color. Then you give that necklace to your friend at her bridal shower, and…she laughs at it. Hard. She’s not really trying to be a bitch, she just thought you were giving her a tacky gag gift.

What do you do? Do you start acting all sad? No way! You start laughing right along with her. “I just couldn’t take that class seriously!” you exclaim, through your fake giggles. “It was miserablehahahahaha!”

This is what happened with season two of Glee. The creative team carefully strung together what they thought were beads of meaning: tiny gemstones of acceptance, pearls of meaningful truth, and when viewers hated it, they acted like they were being ironical the whole time. So they brought in a new writing staff (that one guy who has a small but hilarious part in every movie you’ve ever seen! that one woman who did Buffy! other people!) and planned to bring the show back to basics.

Luckily for us, according to this TV Guide article, creator Ryan Murphy is “all confidence” this year, which is refreshing for a man known for his courtly manner and crippling self-doubt.

Did the new writers help? Well, some of the jokes feel a little bit sharper (I actually laughed out loud at Emma’s “macabre Kent State” joke) if not over-milked (self-diagnosed Asperger’s was funny the first 16 times), and the overall pace feels a bit faster. Though I wanted to share in the joy of Murphy’s new-found swagger, however, my writing staff of one has determined that this episode sucked. Hard.

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I have been dragging my feet about this show for a while, but this week it reached a new level: SB had to get in touch with me and remind me that I write about this show. Either through busyness or boredom or sheer PTSD, I forgot to even watch this week’s episode. After watching it, that’s hard to imagine. How could you forget something this heavy-handed?

Of course we’re close to the finale, so someone had to die. I guess they thought Sue’s sister Jean was pretty disposable since she hadn’t been on much, and they could also use it to teach us a lesson about tolerance and do that old thing of where mean people are actually nice way down deep.

All the little snarky comments I want to make about Principal Figgins using gmail and Sue wanting to have the glee club killed seem irrelevant for the sobfest that follows. See, my grandma died last week and although funerals are great sweeps week and finale fodder, they’re also something very real and very sad.

My grandma was a badass lady with an amazing sense of humor, so I’m sure she would tell me to lighten up if she were reading over my shoulder. But she’s not, because she’s not here anymore, and not in an actress-who-wants-out-of-a-contract kind of way, but a very real way. And so I watched this episode through a lens of increasingly lighter grief, and it made all the jokes feel a little less funny than the usual not-that-funny that I find them to be.

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I have this friend—we probably all have one—who thinks that everything is cool. He discovers stuff about two months after the rest of the world, but he always thinks it’s really neat. That email forward with intricately carved pumpkins that your mom sends you every October? He loves it. A polyurethane bag that allows your plants to grow better by hanging them upside-down? “Awesome!” he shouts, when he sees it at the CVS checkout.

I’ve often wondered what it would be like to see the world like that: to think that everything is awesome, rather than stupid, by default. Considering my bad attitude about Glee lately, I thought that maybe I’d try the childlike wonderment approach and see if it made me happier than wallowing in my own too-cool-for-schoolness. Ready? I’m glad you guys are here! Let’s GO!

Opening with a scene of Aaron Sorkin-paced dialogue in Figgins’s office? Sue saying mean things about Scheu’s hair? The old me would have rolled my eyes with the knowledge that this meant we were in for some kind of heavy-handed talky episode, but the new me thinks it’s SUPER GREAT!

Mercedes hasn’t been asked to the prom. The old me would have gone into some deep political rage about how this is because the Glee writers hate women and especially fat women and so of course no one will ask this beautiful, smart girl to prom because she has to go uninvited to hold onto her victim status, but the new me says CHEER UP SISTER FRIEND, IT’S PROM SEASON AND WE ARE HAVING FUN!!!

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You know how they make you take a gym class in high school? Well, I was the fat kid who hated it, so I signed up for summer gym. The summer before my freshman year, I had to do organized activities in the blazing sun from 8am until noon every day for five weeks. It was the summer of Batman and Robin (I remember the promotional cups at Taco Bell, where I ate too many lunches). It was also a watershed moment in my process of falling in love with pop culture: every single day I would come home from summer gym and flip back and forth between MTV and VH1.

Minute by minute, I fell deeper in love with Jakob Dylan. Each afternoon I lie prostrate before the Lord asking for a Jewel video to come on. And several times a day, for months, I watched Fleetwood Mac’s VH1 reunion special, “The Dance.” The morals of this story are plentiful, but they apply to this post in these ways: I love Fleetwood Mac with the burning nostalgia of a tea partier reminiscing on a klan rally, I am so fat that I would leave summer gym and ride my bike to Taco Bell, and high school fucking sucks.

What I mean to say is, Fleetwood Mac episode of Glee, don’t fuck this up for me.

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You know I like to set expectations up front, so let me do just that: the best part about tonight’s episode is the commercial for So You Think You Can Dance.

I’m a little bit late with this post. I thought about summarizing the episode with one word: “Nope.”

See, I don’t like to complain. I LOVE it. And life has been shit-handing me lately. My house flooded, so I had to rip my carpet up and I am currently writing this surrounded by three of those noisy fans that look like giant whistles. I say all of this for two reasons: one because I live my life in a constant state of overshare. Two, because I want you to understand that the small amount of fuck that I give about this season of Glee was washed away in the Great Pipe Burst of 2011.

Tonight’s episode is called Night of Neglect, which is funny since I was trying my hardest to neglect the show. I think part of my struggle is that the plotlines and airing schedule have been more erratic than Samantha Jones’s menses. I mean, the last time I wrote about this show, I was happily married. Now I’m just a gay divorcée with an exposed concrete slab for a floor.

The kids are selling taffy. They are in some kind of academic decathlon in which you ring in your answer with an easy button. Gwyneth is back, which is terrible. Charice is back, which is confusing. Cheyenne Jackson is back, which is at once both arousing and underwhelming.

The show is front-loaded with jokes about former teacher Sandy being overly effeminate and predatory and swishy, which fits like a singular sequined glove into this show’s obnoxious and ignorant conflation of gayness and pedophilia. It further proves that the only people Ryan Murphy hates more than women, non-white people, the dentist, Kings of Leon, and himself are gay people.

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Okay, I have to be honest: my heart isn’t really in it tonight. I sort of watched halfassedly, and I’m sitting here in front of a blank screen, with a cursor blinking, and I am struggling to care. I thought that I could maybe blame it on recent global tragedy, but really it’s a me problem: I just feel anhedonic about the whole Gleeverse right now. But momma’s gotta get paid, so here goes.

Kurt does that thing to Blaine where he’s actually in love with him so he treats him horribly. The surprise is spoiled for us early on: this episode is going to be jam-packed with more self-aware in-jokes than this sentence is with hyphens. You see, the creative team realizes that Blaine sings lead on every Warblers song, so they make it a joke IN the show! One jump ahead of the bread line, that crew.

Quinn has a roughly seven-minute monologue about her plans to befriend Rachel and steal Finn. It’s frustrating, because being forced to listen to her speaking voice works to quickly unravel all the good that her incredible hair has done over the last few weeks. I mean, really, her hair is perfect, but there’s something about her Renée Zellweger soft-talking sidemouth schtick that just makes me want to scratch at the walls.

One of the things that makes me really terrible at this job is that I am really bad at remembering storylines. I know that I could JFGI, but I’m sticking to the whole “my heart’s not in it” theme, so someone remind me, wasn’t Kurt supposed to be punished if something happened to the bird? I guess he subverted his punishment with a cassette-accompanied Beatles song, which, who hasn’t?

Quinn comes up with the idea of original songs, and she’s lucky that her loose, breezy updo calms my nerves, because in retrospect, I would reach through the TV and strangle her if I could. I know she didn’t really think of the idea herself, but most of these original songs are an abomination unto the Lord. Much like corporate corruption has its Kenneth Lay, and political misbehavior has its Richard Nixon, the aural diarrhea of this episode will forever be pinned on this one poor woman.

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Behold the mighty ouroboros, the mythical, cyclical snake that eats his own tail. While scientists and scholars have tried to apply meaning to this symbol for centuries, to me it represents how much I totally fucking hate Gwyneth Paltrow. I mean, I really think she sucks. And it’s not usually important to me to be a pioneer (although I do have a few things I heard of first, like Damien Rice and Lady Gaga, and I was in to Adele long before everyone was J-in’ in their P’s about her, but like I said, being acknowledged for that kind of genius just really doesn’t matter to me), but for the sake of historical accuracy, I need you all to know that I have hated Gwyneth since BEFORE “Shakespeare in Love.” That’s at least 1998, for those of you who are keeping track. So my loathing of her almost predates the internet, meaning that I thought she was a basic bitch before she even had the chance to start an e-newsletter telling us commoners how to live a life as touched as hers.

You didn’t come here to read about how much Gwyneth sucks because you, my friend, are smart enough to already know that. So let me finish this ouroboros thing. See, the thing is, last night SB mentioned that she hates Gwyneth so much that she sometimes loves her again, and I think it’s totally true: The Gwyneth Paltrow Hatred Ouroboros. You hate her so much that it cycles around to love, then you realize that your love is intricately linked to your hatred and it creates this consumptive cycle of chicanery from which you can never escape. What do I love and what do I hate? Where is the tail and where is the mouth? It doesn’t matter, it’s all a deadly loop.

I think part of my job here at OCTV is to make you average people feel a little bit better about your paltry little lives, so I wanted to help you quantify that confusing feeling you got when you realized you didn’t want to die every time the GOOPmistress herself came on the screen. Let’s move on to the show.

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