Sweet relief

It's funny how sometimes when a series comes to an end you feel disappointed because there's no more, and other times you feel relieved that it's over and you can relax. As I mentioned a post or two ago, Steve Pavlina posted a great series on self-discipline this week. It was a great series both in the sense that it was full of good information, and in the sense that there was a lot of it. I'm glad he wrote it and posted it up for free, and I'm glad that I read it, but I'm also glad it's over.

To keep up my geek status, I suppose I also have to talk about Star Wars at some point, and that's probably the best opening I'm going to get. I saw Episode 3 this week, finishing off another series. Now, it would have wrapped up the last paragraph perfectly if I could say that I felt disappointed that there was no more to come, but, unfortunately, I'm relieved that Star Wars is over too. I hadn't been looking forward to Episode 3 all that much, I liked the old movies, and no amount of reality checking can wash the rose tinting out of my glasses. But I knew I had hated Episodes 1 & 2, so I was very surprised to find that I loved the latest movie, it wrapped everything up nicely enough for me, the pace was great, there was plenty going on, I got completely into it. It also recaptured some of the darkness and menace of the earlier movies that the first two prequels completely missed.

Maybe in the years since the massive disappointment of The Phantom Menace I'd subconciously made my peace with the bad scripting and acting, and that this latest movie was just the first one to fully benefit from that new perspective. In that case, maybe if I was to watch Episodes 1 & 2 again with a low expectation level, I would change my opinion of them.

Maybe, but I doubt it, and I feel quite comfortable thinking that the series went out on a relatively high note.