Gilmore Girls: All My Feely Feelings

In a leader, you really want tenacity. Friends, I want you to know that you can trust my influence because I totally committed to the entire Gilmore Girls series this summer. I see through my vows. I am not a quitter.

A lot of you followed “my journey” through GG since June, and the thing about Gilmore is that you want to talk about it with other addicts enthusiasts. Because Brandon refused to join me on my journey (BYE FELICIA), most GG observations have pooled in my brain and need voicing. They need to be heard and understood by other Friends of Gilmore. So can we talk about the quirky, hilarious observations only people who’ve watched 154 consecutive hours of the same show can appreciate? In no particular order:

The coffee. This has several subpoints:

• Luke only pours about three swallows of coffee into everyone’s mug.
• Lorelai and Rory never pay for their coffee, which is only fair (see previous sentence).
• The to-go cups of coffee are clearly empty. The girls wave them around like the empty Styrofoam containers they are, and they can carry a whole carton of coffees like they weigh nothing at all and will never spill. Which they don’t and won’t.
• Always black coffee? What is this, Communism?
• After ordering coffee at Luke’s, Lorelai and Rory take one swallow and then leave in a rush to the inn/Chilton/Yale/town meeting: “Thank you for this huge cheeseburger! Oops. Gotta go.” They clearly don’t value their food purchases, which is a wash since they never pay.

I was obsessed with the background activity. I have never seen a show with so much going on. Constant people walking (near and far), cars driving, people fake talking, someone decorating the square (again), people eating, mamas pushing strollers, folks standing in line, people shopping. It was someone’s whole entire job just to coordinate the background activity. I always tried to find repeats. WHICH I FOUND. That same car sure loves to circle the square.People “eating” at Luke’s. A cousin to the background activity obsession, these people had full plates of food and never, ever ate. They pushed the food around, picked up food with their forks and put it back down, shook a lot of salt, held their (mostly empty) coffee mugs, talked with no actual sound, nodded and smiled, dabbed their mouths with a napkin, cut food with a knife repeatedly, and basically acted like a toddler pretending to eat. Well done, Fakers.

Related: in general, I have never seen an empty or even half-empty plate on GG. Every Friday dinner at Emily and Richard’s? They leave full plates. Luke’s? Full plates. The dining room at the inn? Full plates. No one eats in Stars Hollow. It is a town of abundant food and zero consumers. This is why Lorelai and Rory constantly eat like 18-year-old frat boys at a fast food convention and still zip up those size 4 jeans every day. WHATEVER, fake eating skinny girls.

Apparently in Stars Hollow it is always and only Fall and Winter. There is a tiny window of spring for one episode and then all major characters take a full summer vacation/summer job/traveling responsibility/distant internship. Summer is dead to Stars Hollow. Spring is hanging on by a thread. The bread and butter of Gilmore is Fall and Winter. The chief mascot of Stars Hollow is the pumpkin, which adorns every home, stoop, business, and town activity in 91% of the series.

Sookie’s kitchen looks like a staged fresh produce commercial that is entirely, completely impractical. Overflowing baskets of fresh bread, a sink full of beautiful washed lettuce, giants bowls of cherries/peppers/oranges/purple onions, perfectly decorated pastries and pies just sitting there (never covered and no pieces ever cut out), pans of tiny, lovely roasted quail, a glass-front refrigerator that looks like an ad for OCD medication. And absolutely zero chopped anything, no mess, no dirty bowls piled up, nothing in the sink (except that beautiful produce), nothing half-prepared, no sloppy utensils, no used pans, no foul-mouthed, sweaty chefs, no signs of actual cooking. I make one average meal for seven people and my kitchen appears ransacked by drunken raccoons.

The boyfriend dilemmas. The rotating cast of boyfriends/fiancés/husbands was our cross to bear during Gilmore. I guess Amy Sherman-Palladino wanted us to kind of like each one and kind of hate them. Dean was so kind and considerate…but OH MY GOSH STOP YOUR WHINING. Jess was intelligent and deep (compared to Dean the sweet dumb-dumb)…but if he opened that fresh mouth one more time to Luke, I was prepared to snatch him bald-headed. PRACTICE YOUR MANNERS, YOUNG MAN. I never bought Max for Lorelai. And the Luke/Christopher conundrum drove me to the bottle. The only boyfriend I really liked was Logan. I don’t care what you say! Team Logan! And we all know how that ended. THANKS FOR NOTHING, PLOT SUBVERTERS.

Low: my least favorite part of the series was when Lorelai and Rory were in an eight-episode silent standoff. I basically hated that whole season. Are you kidding me? Eight episodes of childish, heartbreaking silence?? I actually googled: “Were Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel in a real life fight and Amy couldn’t write them into scenes together?” Because otherwise I guess the writers just hated us. I was so mad at Lorelai and Rory during that fight, I actually prayed for their reconciliation. And God was like, “Get a life, Hatmaker. I have people to help who are not imaginary.”

Second low: Rory and Married Dean. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. No. No. No. Hate. Sad. Tears. Despair. Fury. Disappointment. Five stages of grief. Never reached “acceptance.” Terrible. I want to go back and write that part out of the show.

Highs: Rory’s high school graduation speech. This was my actual face during that episode.

Other highs: Kirk’s night terrors. LOLZ. The fast-talking babbling. Paris’ hilarious commentary (she really grew on me, that one), Lorelai’s sarcasm (to Rory before her Yale panel presentation: “Good luck, honey! But just remember: if you don’t do well, we will stop loving you.”), Rory’s bangs, Emily’s outrageous elitism made me howl.

And I know I am in the minority, but I loved the series finale (minus the absence of beloved Logan; still bitter). I started crying when Lorelai watched Rory sleep and I bawled like a newborn baby until the very end. The tents Luke sewed together, the townspeople, the signs everyone was holding (when they pulled up in the Jeep and saw the signs in the rain, I’m pretty sure I needed a therapist). It tied up the series with a lovely bow and I thought about it for three straight days. (Brandon was just happy it was done. He was like, “Remember that summer all you did was watch Gilmore Girls? That was fun. Good times.”)Gilmore made me feel so many feelings! I loved it. Loved, loved, loved. I was devastated it was over! (I heard rumors that Luke and Lorelai didn’t get along in real life, and I CHOOSE COMPLETE DENIAL ON THAT.) I read all the articles (Liza Weil tried out for Rory and was so interesting, Amy wrote the character of Paris for her), clicked on the Gilmore-related Buzzfeeds, listened to the interviews, and watched the reunion taping from earlier this year. I drank all the koolaid and it was delicious.

Thank you, Amy Sherman-Palladino! Please make us a Gilmore reunion special or, better yet, a Gilmore movie. It must seem obvious at this point that millions of psychotic fans will beat down the doors to every theater in the country. We are incredible weirdos and you made us this way. We used to be normal, but now we are Gilmore lunatics. We miss Stars Hollow and that wacky cast of characters. Please bring them back to us.

I would still be in mourning…but I’ve already started Parenthood.

EDITED: I can’t believe I didn’t mention Michel! I am hopelessly devoted to him: “People are particularly stupid today. I can’t talk to any more of them.”

GG Fans, what else did I miss? Funny observations, quirks, best and worst moments, favorite scenes, favorite quotes. We could do this for DAYS.