day tree

If you're not a fan of Lost, don't even bother reading this post. You might end up thinking I'm insane in the brain and will positively be annoyed because you just don't get what I'm talking about. Kind of like when Lost was still on, and I was working at Jefferson's, and the entire staff excluding three or so people watched it religiously.... and those three people would get beyond annoyed and testy when we would talk about the newest episodes because they weren't part of the awesome club that is LOST.

Our freshman year of college, my bff Katelynn and I spent one sad, long year apart because we ventured off to different schools. I was at KU, while she was at Baylor. I remember calling her second semester and listening to her rant and rave about this show she had started watching on DVD... and when this girl rants and raves about something, she rants and raves. Every time I talked to her on the phone for two months straight she would gush about the last episode she had watched and how she couldn't wait for the next one and what was she going to do when she was finished with Season 2 because Season 3 was over on TV but not relased on DVD yet and she was getting super irritated whenever a professor assigned homework because it would intervene with her watching of the show. Usually when she would ramble on and on to me about Lost, I'd be doing a cryptoquip or miserably failing at a Sudoku...aka TONING HER OUT. 

The next time I saw Katy, she literally shoved Seasons 1 and 2 in my face and threatened my life if I didn't watch it immediately. It was summertime, and aside from working part-time I didn't have much else to do. A few weeks after she leant me the seasons, I absent-mindedly popped the first disc in as I was getting ready to go somewhere. The first episode came on. My brothers happened to be in the room and with each passing minute we became less and less distracted by what we were doing and more and more intrigued with the pilot. It ran about an hour long, and by the end, the three of us were all sitting on the couch, mouths open, and naturally...wanting to know what was going to happen next.  (Having re-watched the first season twice, I now realize that the pilot wasn't THAT intense or THAT suspenseful...I was just so enthralled because, despite Katelynn's insistance, I wasn't expecting it to be so...fascinating.)  So we went on to watch the second episode. Then the third. Then we finished the disc. We cancelled everything we had planned that night.

Over the next several days, my brothers and I didn't sleep. We hardly bathed. We left the house ONLY when necessary and would grumble the entire time we were ever being deprived from another Lost episode. We would not-- could not-- stop until we had finished both seasons. Each episode is an hour long. Each season has 24 episodes. It took us a little less than a week to finish both seasons...that's a lot of TV people. At first Katelynn was a bit bugged that I had taken so long to join her obsession....for about 0.3 seconds. Next thing I knew, she was constructing discussion questions for my brothers and I to do after each disc (there simply isn't time for discussion between episodes. You HAVE to click "next" right, right away. You're lucky to get a bathroom break) and would cautiously time her phone calls so not to interrupt a showing. You may think I'm exaggerating...I wish I was.  The show got more and more and MORE intriguing with each episode. I remember somewhere in the haze of our Lost week, Katelynn calling and asking "have you met the 'others' yet?" and I said, "excuse me....there are 'others'?!?!?!?!?!" Like I thought the Island couldn't be any crazier than it already was. Bahahaha, was I in for a real shock.

Waiting for Season 3 was like torture. It came out on DVD at the end of the summer, so I was able to spend another few days of living in our own filth to catch up with my brothers before I went back up to Lawrence. Katelynn and I found some other Lost groupies, and Season 4 we had watch parties at this kid's house. They had a huge flat screen (when HD was new, peeps) and we would turn off all the lights and it felt like we were on the island. It was awesome.

I starting watching Season 5 on my own, but work intervened too often and I decided I liked watching them on DVD better anyways because you don't have to wait an entire week between episodes. So I waited for it to be available and watched it over Christmas break with my brothers, right before my mom got sick. We had purchased this projector so we could show it really huge on our basement wall and a lot of the time I fantisized about jumping in the picture and participating in all the drama with the islanders...you have no idea how many times Katelynn and I have wistfully talked about the amazing possibilities of one of our planes crashing and being stranded on an island...sigh.

Like I said, everyone at Jefferson's was obsessed with Lost, and one day the cooks decided to assign every staff member an identity of someone on the show.  I remember asking them, "who am I?!?!" thinking they would DEFINITELY cast me as Kate, no question, and one of them looked at me and said "hmmm...my first instinct is Shannon...but no, I definitely think you're a Rose." and the other cook nodded and said "oh yeah, she makes a perfect  Rose." I had started to object when they said Shannon (she's the brattiest character ever to be on TV) and then when they assigned me Rose?!?!?!  (they knew they'd get his sort of reaction out of me) I think I threw a spatula at the kitchen window and wouldn't speak to them for days.

Seth died before Season 6 was over.  A few weeks before, Katelynn had sent him a Dharma Initiative party package (it was totally cool. and yes I was totally livid that my best friend had sent my brother, and not me, a party package).  No one, and I mean no one could ever crack a joke about my brothers death--ever--period--besides Katelynn. Only because she loved him to pieces and because she gets my sense of humor and gets timing is key and all that good stuff. And this is the only "joke" she's ever made about it (actually,  she was extremely serious when she said it)...and it totally made me keel over with laughter. (I repeat: if anyone else said this, I would have beat the crud out of them.) A few days after he died, and my family and I were still in complete shock and struggling to understand why he had done it, and how he could have done it, and Katelynn and I were raking through the details for the hundredth time, she said, haha-I'm sorry Kate-she's going to ream me for putting this on here- "What I just cannot, cannot understand...is that how he could have done it without knowing how Lost ended." and then she went on to say, "Oh my gosh...do you think he already knows how it ends since he's in heaven???"  She didn't mean for it to be funny at all, but of course it was. It was definitely exactly the laugh break my mom and I needed at the time.

 I miss both of my baby brothers and it was so sad to watch the last season without them. Eli is on his mission obviously, so I'll get to watch it again when he gets home. I remember on the day of the season finale (which ended the show PERFECTLY, seriously, there couldn't have been a better ending) I sent him one taunting sentence in an email, "I know how Lost ends, and you don't." My mom got so mad that I was trying to torture him while he's on his mish but I couldn't resist.

Bottom line: Lost is, and always be, the best show ever to hit network television.