I used to be a huge Days of Our Lives fan (affectionately know as DOOL for all you non-fans). Huge! I have been watching it for as long as I can remember. It made me very popular for one week my sophomore year in college. I was a Peer Counselor and all of the counselors returned to school a week early for training, which was all morning and all afternoon. I had a TV/VCR combo in my dorm room and taped DOOL to watch later. A few other counselors got wind of this and each evening after training was over, quite a few of us would gather to watch. But joining the working world after college was over and the hassle of first taping, then trying to find the time to watch a one-hour daily show every evening got to be too much and I gave up on DOOL (although I still watch the Christmas episode every year when the Hortons hang everyone's name ornament on the Christmas tree.) My older sister Jenn, who goes home to eat lunch everyday at 1pm so she can watch, keeps me vaguely informed.
I got back into it a little bit when I was on maternity leave, then caught another episode this past Friday when I stayed home with Hayley, who was running a fever. A few observations:
- I'm stunned by how slowly the stories and plot lines move in today's fast-paced world. Back when I was on leave, a storyline about Brady and Chloe spending "one night" in the woods in a tent lasted almost two weeks. I usually have a long attention span, but it was difficult at times to stay focused on the show.
- But on the other hand, time does move very quickly when it comes to the ages of children. It seems that children are the same age for a long time, then all of the sudden, they age 10 or 15 years. I'm almost positive Hope had her baby Zack back in August or September, but then this past Friday, he was a toddler.
- This observation is probably a reflection of how old and un-hip I have become in my thirties, but there seems to be a disproportionate number of teenagers/young actors on the show (with the surreal effect of "Kyle" from The Real World joining the cast recently). Even though they've been on the show forever, I don't remember Bo & Hope and Roman & Marlena as "young people." Roman was always a cop and Marlena was always a doctor.
