How I Met Your Mother And The Time I Became Obsessed With It.

Words are bloody annoying aren't they? Every now and again, I sit down at my computer and write a load of words out in a row. I only know what 83% of the words mean, I just put the rest in to sound clever and perspicacious.

Anyway, aside from having to put them together to make something entertaining, words can be downright cruel. Take the word 'obsessed' for example, like every other word in existence, it's just a few sounds that are put together to form a meaning. In this instance, the word 'obsessed' means "to dominate or preoccupy the thoughts, feelings, or desires of (a person); beset, trouble, or haunt persistently or abnormally." That sounds perfectly legitimate, doesn't it? No, it doesn't, because rather than seeing that definition when someone says to you 'oh, he is so obsessed with her,' you can't help but picture a young male sat in his bedroom rocking back and forth on his bed in front of a wall that is plastered from head to toe in various photos of the aforementioned woman. And a few candles.

Despite it's connotations though, there's nothing wrong with having a bit of an obsession over something. While you might not know it, everyone has an obsession of some sort. The Sun's obsessions are women, famous, attractive women such as Cheryl Cole. Liam Gallagher's is The Beatles, which is why he has been trying to sound like them for about 15 years. I've had many obsessions, including The Cribs, Scott Pilgrim and Pavement. However, these have all been put to one side for the last two weeks for my latest one, How I Met Your Mother.

By the time you have finished reading this, I will have watched 136 and indeed every episode to date of the American sitcom, all in the space of two weeks. That's 9.7 episodes, or about 3 hours and 20 minutes of time well spent each day, with a full time job thrown in the mix as well. It's amazing what the end of university life and the prospect of living in rural Devon for the foreseeable future can do to the human spirit.

Because this is my new obsession, I have obviously started talking about HIMYM to anyone I converse with for more than five minutes. I've heard people say that it's not that funny, and they are immediately wrong. It just takes a certain amount of getting to know the characters first. In other words, it's like real life. Of course, a show can't be consistently funny for well over 100 episodes, but it's a testament that there are that many. If there were that many episodes of a UK sitcom such as The Inbetweeners, I'm pretty sure the world we live in would be a much less happier one than it is now. And cruder. And more stupid. And Incongruous.

I could talk about the show for much, much longer, but that would be interminably boring for you. That's the thing with obsessions, you should never let anyone know too much about yours. It's one thing to know a person's interests, but to have to be told every single detail is a bit too much. In the last two weeks I've shared many laughs and some actual tears while viewing the made up lives of some fictional characters. Is that a bit sad? Yes. Do I need a life? Yes. Am I bothered? Not one bit. I can honestly say that the two weeks that I spent watching How I Met Your Mother have been two of the most fun weeks I've had in a long time.

In all seriousness though, I am going to leave the house tomorrow.  I promise.