House and a Good Story

I don't have TV. I mean, I have a TV, but I don't have cable or Netflix or satellite or anything like that. I sometimes wish I did, but we don't really need it. I have an XBOX 360 that I would love to play XBOX Live on, but we don't have internet either. I have to come to the coffee shop by our house to get a signal. I recently heard that Norway or Sweden have made internet a human right. I tried telling this to my wife Teri, but she has trouble equating internet to food, water, and shelter. So I'm still walking to the coffee shop.

Instead of TV, I end up heading to the library and renting DVDs or old TV shows or documentaries. I've learned a lot about Miles Davis, Muhammad Ali, and Bob Dylan. In between documentaries, I watch the reruns of TV shows. In the past few months, I've been addicted to watching House M.D. Love this show. Originally, I loved this show because of the character Thirteen, who is just all kinds of good looking. But when I realized she wasn't in the early seasons of the show, I had to find new reasons to watch.

One episode I watched had a patient who had just hidden her teenage pregnancy by wearing baggy clothes. A boy kept visiting her while she was in the hospital and the staff thought he was a bully who was coming by to taunt her. In fact Kutner, one of the doctors on House, was so irritated with him for being a bully, you started to realize that he must have been bullied as a teenager and was sort of projecting something...

In a way, he was projecting something, it just turned out that Kutner was the bully, not the one being bullied. The end of the episode shows him knocking on an unknown man's door in order to apologize to him for treating him so poorly while in high school.

All that to say that I think this is what makes House a good show. It's what makes good movies good and good stories good. I think it's because in order to make a good story, the characters have to go to "those places". They have to do the thing they really don't want to do. They have to have the conversation that is so hard to have. They have to apologize.

But as I watched Kutner head up the stairs to his old classmates' front door, I began to wonder if that's what makes a meaningful life as well. Does my life become more meaningful when I do the thing I don't really want to do. When I have the conversation that is so hard to have. When I apologize.

And maybe my life is better when I tell my wife I love her, even if we just gotten done fighting. Maybe my story is better when I apologize for not loving my neighbors in the way I know I should. Maybe my story is more compelling when I begin to stop talking about writing and actually write.

It could be anything I suppose. I'd imagine there are a thousand different ways to live a better story. This just happens to be the one House is teaching me right now.