I’m currently living at my mother‘s house, waiting for my work permit to come through so that I can start my first real job, teaching in England. Suffice it to say, I suddenly have a lot of free time.  I’ve been watching my way through Six Feet Under, a show which aired before I had either the emotional capacity to enjoy a program about a funeral home or HBO, which means frequent trips to our local movie rental for the next few discs.  As people who work slow-moving jobs in small towns are wont to do, the gray ponytailed man at Video Exchange has struck up a bit of a rapport with me, enough that he now feels comfortable commenting on my selections.

As you may have heard, Lost recently came to its overly complicated end.  The final episode faced the impossible tasks of tying up six years of bizarrely frayed storylines and ending the journeys of over a dozen major characters in one two and a half hour chunk.

Obviously, only the most central plot points and themes could be covered. So why, then, would a show which always focused more on building complicated mythologies and dealing with huge life questions than on developing credible romances devote so much of its finale to kissing and flirting?

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Lee DeWyze is officially the winner of the ninth season of American Idol.  The triumph of Lee, the third scruffy, low-key, guitar strumming, regular Joe white guy in a row, over the dreadlocked and husky voiced Crystal Bowersox will no doubt cause a certain amount of consternation amongst the incredibly devoted Idol commentators and fanbase.

Many will blame tween girls and their mothers for voting with their eyes instead of their ears, and many will claim that Crystal deserved the win. But Idol is a voting show, a show about giving the people what they want. And if “the people” are young girls and middle-aged women, why shouldn’t their desires count?

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Last week, I wrote about Ricky Martin’s declaration of himself as “a fortunate homosexual man” on his official website, arguing that the coming out of a major figure, even one past the prime of his or her cultural relevance, is always a positive step for queer visibility and therefore queer rights. And yet, it is important not to overpraise those like Martin, who spend the peak of their career denying their homosexuality and then choose to come out once their greatest successes have already passed. Though we should not look down on or attack Martin, who is perfectly entitled to live his life as he chooses and had very good reasons for not being open about his sexuality earlier on, we must recognize that celebrities hiding their sexualities until a big reveal after their heyday is not the best way to move forward as a culture.

ABC currently has a sitcom called Cougar Town, about a recently divorced woman who finds herself dating younger men. TV Land had a reality competition called The Cougar, in which a group of 20-something men fought for the affections of a beautiful woman in her 40s. 30 Rock had a second season episode called “Cougars,” which followed Liz’s relationship with a man 17 years her junior. As these examples indicate, “cougar,” a slang term which has gained enormous popularity in recent years, is generally defined as an older woman who is attracted to younger, handsome men.  The concept of a woman being interested in a gorgeous man who is in his sexual prime is apparently so surprising to the culture at large that we needed a special name for it.

I was really hoping that as a culture we were just going to let this one go, but as I just read a series of blogs and gossip sites attacking someone for criticizing Susan Boyle’s album, I guess we’re not yet done with this particular sob story.

For the uninitiated (and extremely lucky), Susan Boyle is a singer who shot to instant fame when a YouTube clip of her audition for Britain’s Got Talent went viral last April. Though she ultimately finished the competition in second place, her debut album, I Dreamed a Dream, was released in November and immediately sold an obscene amount of copies, breaking all sorts of records and becoming 2009′s highest selling album in the world.

Why has this shy, middle-aged Scottish woman so captured our society’s attention? Basically, because she isn’t very pretty.

Lost is a show that often gets praised for its cast’s diversity. Major characters have belonged to widely varying ethnic groups, age ranges, socioeconomic statuses, and nationalities — an attention-getting move in a television culture still hugely reliant on pretty white 20- and 30-somethings. While Lost‘s racial make-up is still problematic (for example, the only Middle Eastern character is an Iraqi torturer), it is fairly refreshing to see a show where a man in his late 50s is seen as a complex and still-developing character, where non-whites have more to do than act as sassy sidekicks.

So why, then, does Lost have such a problem with women?