For the last few weeks, I’ve been recording Northern Exposure for my friend Mark Traphagen. Mark’s headed off to seminary, and he and his wife, Karyn, will both be in school at the same time. Two full-time graduate students + tuition at Westminster == minute entertainment budget. Knowing that Mark loves Northern Exposure, and having come across the word that Hallmark Channel is airing it nightly quite by happenstance, I set a Season Pass on my TiVo before even asking Mark if he wanted me to tape him copies.

When I first started this little venture, I thought that it was solely just one of those things that you do for your friends whenever you can, but I find that I’m being enriched by the experience as well. I watch each episode as I’m taping it, fast-forwarding through the commercials so that I can fit more episodes on each tape. [Let's ignore that I'm only gaining one episode per tape---my engineering side demands efficiency!] In watching them, I’m revisiting the show with a worldview far more capable of digesting the show than I had when it originally aired. I know that my parents enjoyed the show when it was first running; now I’m beginning to understand why.

There are essences of the show that give it a veneer of the absurd—a Jewish, Columbia-trained doctor from the Upper West Side brought to rural Alaska by the town’s rich mayor? A 19-year-old world-unwise floozy shacking up with a 63-year-old barkeep?—but the moral and ethical undertones of the show are deeply moving.

I’m perhaps most drawn to John Corbett’s character, Chris Stevens. The plot device of having Chris playing music and reading from the great thinkers of our world seems a bit hokey at first, but it only serves to underscore the thread that ties each episode’s seemingly-divergent stories together.

Last night, I watched “Things Become Extinct“, where Holling finds out that his 110-year-old uncle has passed and Joel realizes that he’s the only Jew in his entire county. The entire episode is about finding one’s place in the world, something that any viewer can certainly relate to on some level. That set me to thinking about my continuing wanderlust.

Then I was hit with a line from the second episode I recorded, “Lost and Found“. Joel finds out that a man committed suicide in his cabin some 40 years previous; obsessed by the finding and paralyzed with fear, he studies the man’s life and begins to identify with him. Joel’s self-denial about his loner tendencies is smashed apart by an exasperated one-liner from Maggie: “For God’s sake, Fleischman, you’re still in boxes!”

I don’t know if there’s a psychological profile for it, but I am what I think of as an extroverted loner. I have a ton of acquaintances and a goodly number of friends, but I have this strong central tendency towards being alone. I remember once when my friend Alisa asked me how many people had ridden with me in my truck. I counted it out, and in nearly eight years of driving it, the number was scarcely more than the number of digits on my hands and feet. Nine miles out of ten, the right seat holds a pile of junk rather than a passenger.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but when I began to throw post-hockey-game parties at my apartment three or four years ago, I was doing just as Joel did at the end of “Lost and Found”: I was breaking through that tendency to be by myself and opening up my place to having people whose company I enjoyed around me. Those experiences were highly beneficial to me; I gained at least one very good friend—my former roommate, Todd—out of that time in my life, and if Jennifer Fox hadn’t moved from Huntsville, that would make two.

I think this need to break through my introversive tendencies—mind you, every personality profile I’ve ever taken has me leaning towards extroversion, and anyone who sees me in public knows that I fit the profile—explains why I spend so much time on the [rocksmyfaceoff.net] project. At a time in my life when my routine has me seeing the same people most every day, I’m able to break outside of that and share experiences and live vicariously through the people I know there.

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At some point, I was going somewhere with all of this, but I find that I’m completely losing focus on the subject as my mind chases tangents. [Common in my mind, I assure you!] Comment as you will, and perhaps you will spark further discussion–or chase me down a tangent.