One of the many things LOST taught me

I originally had the title of this post as "One of the few things LOST taught me," but after harboring between loving and hating the show, I have to concede to the former. Despite the many times during LOST where I explicitly stated my contempt for the series, it was, in the end, a very good show. Unfortunately, I won't be talking about any of that. Perhaps I will over the summer, if my plan to watch every episode goes accordingly (spoiler: it won't), but for now, I'm going to talk about episode titles.

As with any great TV show (House and "Everybody lies," The Office and "That's what she said"), LOST had its fair share of memorable quotes. However, something that's always stuck with me are the episodes that have Latin instead of English as the title. Examples:

From "Tabula Rasa"

• "Tabula Rasa," 1x03
• "Deus ex Machina," 1x19
• "Ab Aeterno," 6x09

 Respectively, they mean "blank slate," "God out of the machine," and "from eternity." Ab aeterno has never come up for me outside of LOST (and to be honest, I didn't even know that was one of the three episodes with Latin in the title), and even Deus ex machina hasn't been said a lot. Nor have the English translations, is what I'm getting at. Clean slate. That's what I hear every once in a while, and as soon as I hear it, I immediately think to myself, tabula rasa. And think about that LOST episode where some character said you can be whoever you want on this island. No one knows anyone (spoiler: everyone knows everyone), so everyone has a blank slate. Tabula rasa.

I was thinking about that. How a simple phrase immediately triggers something in your mind where you can relate it to something very vivid. This always happens to me with House episodes. There will be an actor or actress in a TV show who was in House, and I'll be like "OH SHE WAS IN HOUSE" and then talk about the entire episode accurately. I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing, but it's a thing.

What I haven't done in a while is encourage you guys (yes, I am aware that I have readers) to do something at the end of my blog posts. Probably because I'm not springing philosophy on anyone anymore. But I'll break that streak now. Think about those phrases, people, pictures, that jog your memory. Where you hear "blank slate" and think about that LOST episode, or see someone who was in some movie (I find this to be the most common one, now that I think about it. How many times a movie do you go "WHAT ELSE WAS THIS PERSON IN?"). It might not be practical to anything in our lives, but you have to admit, it is pretty cool.