MONICA OR RACHEL.

Shows like Friends and How I Met Your Mother--from my experience--seem to resonate extremely well with college students and young twenty-somethings. Possibly because they adhere to more simplistic (yet often highly dramatized) plots and are therefore relatable.

You are often called to either identify with one of the characters or pull out characteristics from each character that you find reflected in yourself. We all know that inseparable couple who have a type of love we aspire to find, the chronic jokester, the friend that seems to have it all but deep down are fighting harder battles than we'll ever know, and perhaps a few other people in the mix that we find run parallel to the characters in our favorite shows.

But really it seems reasonable to say that we enjoy watching young people (who we identify with) face familiar trials in life. There's those of us who amidst countless distractions and opportunities for fun are also trying to make something of ourselves. Then there are others, the hopeless romantics, who are chronically distracted by the pursuit for a soul mate. And there are the goofballs who don't quite seem to have their priorities straight but always come through and prove themselves as some of the most loyal friends you could ask for.

We complete our groups of friends with some slightly dysfunctionally wonderful mixture of these characters and united we battle quite an array of challenges. The fact that our favorite television characters make it through similar trials acts as simple reassurance despite the fact they have writers on their side with a pre-planned solution to each problem. But for us, whether it's a higher power or some sort of fate that we look to, we can rest assured in the fact that we are still standing and have already conquered so much in our first twenty-something years of existence. We have to admit, however, we'd all be a little less bitter if only we could look as good as Jennifer Anniston in overalls while we try to conquer these tribulations.

(With that said, hope you all enjoy the latest episode of How I Met Your Mother tonight)