Doctor Who Countown: The Roots of Evil

We all know the Doctor runs around overthrowing dictators, raising up the oppressed, and stopping colonization of already-inhabited worlds. But what happens when the colonizers decide to avenge themselves on the Doctor, and are prepared to wait nearly a thousand years for him? We find out when the Fourth Doctor takes Leela to visit the Heligan structure, a gigantic tree that floats in space and is home to people with names like Agony-Without-End-Shall-Be-The-Doctor's-Punishment. Though I rather like Aggie, and all the rest of her people, once the Doctor has convinced them to resist the tree's natural defenses. Well, not really natural.

It's rather like The Face of Evil, only this time the Doctor is cleaning up after one of his future selves. Which we can do, now that this Doctor is a past Doctor. I enjoyed it; it was a nice little Four-and-Leela romp; and now I need to get back to watching Romana regenerate.

Doctor Who Countdown: "The Nameless City" and "The Spear of Destiny"

Since I never got around to reviewing the Second Doctor estory, and just read the Third Doctor one, I figure I'll review them together.

In February's story, written by Michael Scott, the TARDIS has broken down on Earth, and Two has sent Jamie out to buy mercury and Zyton-7 for the fluid links. On his way back, Jamie saves an old man from being mugged, and receives an old book as a present. The best thing about the beginning of this story is that it's one big inside joke for people familiar with the Classics: the old man calls himself Professor Thascalos.

The book turns out to be the Necronomicon, and it allows the TARDIS to be stolen by the Archons, eldritch abominations with remarkably good taste in music. And this good taste proves to be their downfall, since--no, I've said too much already.

The one thing that bothered me about this story was its depiction of the Doctor and Jamie's relationship. There's an expository passage that says Jamie wondered at first whether he was a demon, but since has "accepted the Doctor as his new clan chief" or something like that. To my ears, this makes Jamie sound primitive--more like K9 than even Leela. That was unnecessary. To explain their relationship to the uninitiated, all you have to do is write in some clinging--which Scott did not do. Not once in the text of this story do the Doctor and Jamie ever touch each other. I was perfectly fine imagining the clinging for myself, but it would be nice if it were official.

In this month's story, by Marcus Sedgwick, Three and Jo have been asked by UNIT to find the source of a temporal distortion. It turns out to be Gungnir, the spear owned by the Norse god Odin, which might also have been the Spear of Longinus. (I like that Sedgwick isn't afraid to play with Christian mythology right along side the Norse kind.) But guess who else wants the spear. I'll give you a minute. Consider that this is set between "The Three Doctors" and "The Green Death."

I'm going to assume you guessed right and move on. The early part of the story is full of jokes about the Doctor's clothing choices and his inability to pilot the TARDIS; but once he lands in Sweden, it's a nice comfortable Three story, with a couple of clever twists--though one of them is temporal grace, and I'm not sure what to think about that.

The scene where the Master (yep) pilots the Doctor's TARDIS stuck in my head for some reason. I want to know whether the TARDIS really does like the Master, or just accepted his control for this one trip because she knew it would take her to the Doctor. The weird thing was, this was no more descriptive than the rest of the piece, and yet it's more vivid to me than the running gag about the Doctor's cape. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go sit down and thing about this.

Doctor Who Countdown: A Big Hand for the Doctor

So the BBC has commissioned eleven short stories, one per Doctor and one per month, leading up to the anniversary in November. I've decided to read all of them and review them. Just finished the first, "A Big Hand for the Doctor" by Eoin Colfer.

Colfer uses the same style for this as he does for the Artemis Fowl books, which I mostly enjoy very much. That said, I feel like his tendency to overexplain things to the reader is jarring in a Doctor Who story--this is an environment in which barely enough is usually explained. But at times the style seems to fit the First Doctor, who has lost his hand to bodysnatchers (neither the 456 nor Sao Til's species; something humanoid and much less clever). And it's the only Doctor I feel it would fit. So, good choice there.

I noticed a couple of factual inaccuracies--like the Doctor caring more about humans than you'd expect pre-Ian and Barbara--and a couple of things that were just plain weird--can you imagine the Doctor, any Doctor, saying "D'arvit"? Neither can I...well, maybe Eleven. But given what Colfer says in Artemis Fowl, it's both a little too obscene for the First Doctor, and something we shouldn't expect him to know.

But overall, the story was engaging, there were some great ideas behind it, and the epilogue made everything worth it. That little twist to literary history at the end (and no, I will not tell you what it is) is precisely in the tradition of Doctor Who. Thank you, Mr. Colfer, for tying everything up so beautifully.

The Femifesto

People who consider themselves my friends (as well as probably a third of the population of Tumblr by now) know I have something of a dirty mind. And that I'm over-analytical and a bit self-centered. And all of this sort of distills into a desire to figure out how I, as a young woman in a male-dominated world, can get ahead. And by ahead at this particular moment I mean laid.

Ever since a guy I really cared about dumped me last spring I've been trying to figure out male psychology, at least so far as finding nice guys and making myself attractive to them. Last night, I had a breakthrough. I was at a dorm social with a guy friend (almost exactly my type but taken), and I heard two other guys behind us, talking about masturbating to build up stamina.

0.o

That emoticon there sums up the look on my friend's face, and mine for a couple of seconds. (It may also be the first time anyone's ever used an emoticon in a manifesto.) But then I started thinking: why do you need stamina? What's the point, what's the value? Why is there a stigma attached to premature ejaculation? Premature as opposed to what? As opposed to when you're ready for it? Hell, if a guy I'm with comes before he's ready to, that means I'm doing something right! (Or so I assume, given that my actual sexual experience is limited to the aforementioned ex-boyfriend.)

It occurs to me that sexual stamina is among the most misguided of the misguided contests of masculinity that occur in our society. It's both nonsensical on its own and incongruous within our instant-gratification society--why hold out on yourself in this most fundamental of things?

Yes, there are other aspects of traditional masculinity that make it difficult for nice people--male and female--to get any. To those, and to any nice guy being held back by them, I also have responses:

1. I don't care about the size of your penis--in fact, the smaller it is, the less it'll hurt.
2. I want sex to feel as good for you as it does for me. And vice versa.
3. You do not control what I put in my body. Relatedly, if I don't want you, I don't want you.
4. Feminism is not hating men; in fact, I don't understand women who hate men. Feminism is wanting a turn on top.

To summarize, guys, don't use society's standards to determine your self-worth; base that instead on yourself and the people you spend time with. In other words: stop measuring yourself and come to bed.

It's a warm day in December, and I'm indoors reading poetry

I have a habit of reading my assignments for Chinese and Western Poetry aloud, so as to understand them better. This weekend I was assigned to read "The Waste Land" by T S Eliot, and a couple of poems by Robert Frost.

First, the Frost poems. I read probably the two big ones. "The Road Not Taken" is one of my favorite poems, because I think it sums up my life pretty concisely: I often find myself wondering what would have happened, or what would have become of me, had I made certain decisions differently. Would I have a different major? Attend a different college? Not be a virgin? Would I be happier or less happy, or even alive?

Let's not be morbid anymore. I think this is my favorite line:
"And sorry I could not travel both/And be one person..."
You're one person if you take one path, another person if you take another, and then this ties back into the end of the poem, where the traveler realizes that even if he were to come back to this precise fork in the road and take the other path, it still wouldn't be the exact same other path because he himself will have changed. I may have more chances to make certain big decisions, but it won't be the same me making them, which in itself changes the paths.

There's a bit of an observer paradox in here. The decision is affected by what information you have and what you're inclined to do with the information. If any of you lurkers are quantum physicists in training, please explain what I'm thinking to me: why does macro-level decision making remind me of subatomic particles and their quantum states?

The second poem I read was "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." I don't know that there's much to understand in this one; it tells a story, and one I've always sort of liked: a peaceful evening, a weary traveler who has a lot left to do before he reaches his destination, and a horse that isn't quite sure what's going on. But with all the things the traveler has to do, he still takes time to stop and admire the snow on the trees. I hope I can always do that: no matter how busy I am, or what life is throwing at me, I pray I will always be able to appreciate the world for what it is.

I've been interrupted by a couple of yutsos outside joking loudly about how "mail" boxes are sexist, and they want a "femail" box. Not that I haven't made that joke before, but there are almost always people being loud outside my room when I want to think or sleep. And I bet they wonder why I recite poetry loudly.

Then I read "The Waste Land," all five sections of it. I'm really not sure what it was about: some of the sections were about sex, some were about death, and maybe the first one was about the loss of innocence in childhood...and all throughout, there are strange bits of birdsong and untranslated Italian and German passages. The only places where it rhymes are places where Eliot is sampling other poems.

Hmm. T S Eliot as a remixer. I'm not a fan of remixes on the whole, but seeing a written-down one from before the DJ era is an interesting thing. Did the one spawn the other, I wonder?

But here's what I think, upon finishing the poem: I feel that I have experienced something great and ancient and sad and important without really knowing what it was. And yet I feel at some level the meaning of the poem is tied up in the onomatopoeia, and the sounds of the foreign languages, and if I understood what everything meant and what it referred to, the effect of the poem would be lessened. It would be drier, simpler, an accounting of Eliot's life, instead of the ocean of evoked emotion and potential meaning it is now.

My father was an Eliot fan when he was the right age for it; tonight I shall talk to him about it, maybe get up to my knees in that ocean. And then on Tuesday or Thursday I'll come to my poetry class and half-listen to my professor drain all that ocean away.

If there were water
and no rocks
If there were rocks
and also water

An English god in America

So here I am, writing for the very first time on my brand-new laptop. The first thing I did, after configuring the browser and connecting to my school Internet, was to come here to tell you about the beautiful and delightful and sad thing that happened to me this evening.

Tonight I went to Neil Gaiman's Night of Stardust at a concert hall just off campus. Neil Gaiman himself came and spoke to us about the fifteenth anniversary of Stardust, the history of the book and how he wrote it, and all kinds of other things--he read us an excerpt from his new book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which I now very much want. And it was lovely--he talks like he writes, and I fell in love with his accent, and was swept up in the story and his voice and the experience of being near one of the masters of storytelling.

Now comes the sad part. At the end of the talk, the audience were all invited to stand in line in front of six microphones, two on each level, and ask him questions. I was second on my side, behind a guy who waited fifteen minutes to ask a one-word question. By that point, I had to pee so badly it hurt, and I wasn't going to give up my spot in line--in fact, I asked that guy if I could go before him. No luck. So I stood there and waited, while Neil Gaiman answered questions at great length. He answered eight questions, as I stood with my mouth to the microphone, silently rehearsing my own question so I wouldn't forget it--and then the man who'd introduced him said we were out of time, and could Neil please read something, and could we all please sit down.

I felt like crying. I felt like my heart had sunk into my stomach. I felt like I had stood not fifty feet from God, incense in hand, and had not yet knelt to pray when I was told the temple had closed.

I can't imagine how anyone else was feeling.

What a slut time is: another open letter to John Green

Dear John Green,

Here we are at the present, and your most recent book. And I can't help but see it through the lens of yoru first one. The characters are of a similar type: Hazel the Drizzle, (sixteen, thyroid cancer with mets in the lungs, and I'm okay) Isaac the best friend, and Augustus the Hurricane, who brings Hazel out of her shell and proves that dying is not all about dying.

And again our heroes live in the shadow of imminent death; and again, you show how three teenagers can encompass the entire world.

But TFiOS is something else beyond all this: it's a journey, on the epic scale of The Wizard of Oz. (This is, I think, what you tried to do but did not quite achieve in Paper Towns, Which ends after Q discovers his wizard is a Fraud, but Before she can give any Life-Affirming gifts.) Hazel makes the journey from her mundane yet doomed life to the magical city of Amsterdam, where she meets her own personal god and discovers that he's simply a crazy old man who no longer cares for the story he created, the myth that has sustained her. And she returns home by way of discovering love...and in the end, Peter van Houten is a good man, but a very bad god. Or, as Augustus said in his last letter, he's a bad man, and a good writer.

I suppose it's ironic that I'm reading this on Veterans Day. Or maybe it's just appropriate, because of Augustus's obsession with heroic sacrifices. I dare say that the people who fight cancer are veterans even more so than the people who fight wars, and I wonder what Augustus would say to that. And I suppose it's apt that I find Hazel drawing strength from the experiences of Anne Frank, reading as I am just after the anniversary of Kristallnacht, at which I wondered once again why it is important to be saturated with sad stories, and whether merely surviving is heroic. Augustus thinks not; I wonder what Hazel would say.

I was reluctant to read this for a long time because in the last few generations of my family there have been two cancer survivors, one of them my mother, and three victims. So I didn't think I needed another cancer story. But this was neither too much nor too soon. To be honest, I thought you were going to end the book mid-sentence; I'm glad that you chose the other sort of ending that this book needed, the ending that doesn't end.

John, your stories show us the universe within each of us that needs to be noticed. They give us forever within the numbered days, and for that I'm grateful.

Sincerely,
Mara

A few sad things

Today is the 47th anniversary of Kristallnacht, a series of acts of terror that effectively kicked off the Holocaust. I got to Hillel an hour late by accident, and discovered that the board had invited a group of local Holocaust survivors. I ate with some friends and left early to avoid getting punched in the feels.

Yesterday I had the fight to end all fights with my ex, who is one of about three people who reads this blog. It was the fight we should have had when he dumped me, except neither of us had the balls to let each other go then. That much at least I've learned about yourself. He may stop reading after yesterday; but I started writing this before anyone read it, and I will probably keep writing when no one reads it.

So I've been reluctant to start reading The Fault in Our Stars; I don't need more sadness right now. On top of that, I have projects I've been neglecting in order to read these--reading for pleasure seems to take up more time than it used to, even when the book goes as fast as John's do. But it will happen this weekend.

And now a happy thing: Yesterday I had a bit of an epiphany. In my music class we're studying gamelan, a kind of Indonesian classical court music. And ever since I learned what Gamelan was, I've hated it; I've thought it sounded jangly and cacaphonous and alien. But yesterday in my recitation we actually learned to play gamelan. And I realized it's like meditating, but in a group. Each instrument has a melody that repeats over and over, and they all fit together and it's beautiful. At least from the inside. I don't know whether I can stand to listen to it from the outside yet.

Count the headlights

Will Grayson, Will Grayson is essentially a 180 from Paper Towns. Where on Monday I felt empty, today I'm feeling ALL the feels.

First: frustration. Will 1 reminds me of myself--but of John's protagonists that remind me of me, he's the least. He's dark in a way I'm not, resigned to his situation and determined not to care anymore. And Will 2 is lonely and depressed, living out a Facebook fantasy that dare not speak its name. And yet at the same time I can laugh aloud, because their observations about life are occasionally so pithy or maybe just so offbeat that I have to stop and wonder whether they have a point.

But both Wills will be redeemed; their saviors seems to be time, random chance and the rainbow-striped mass of emotion who goes by the name of Tiny Cooper. This story is really about him, and his attempts to find love, and his dream that someday he'll be appreciated for who he is.

Will 1 was right: he is more or less a moon, caught in the orbit of Planet Tiny. But that really isn't a bad thing--he's swept along and into and through adventures like Pudge in Alaska's orbit; and in the process, he learns to choose his own path without wandering away entirely. Likewise, Will 2, who's always been desperate to keep control of his misery, is caught in Tiny's gravity, and in falling, he learns how to land on his feet.

My name is not Will Grayson, and I appreciate you, Tiny Cooper. You've made my life a little bit more fabulous.

Updates

He did show up. And Obama has, on the surface of things, won. And now it's bedtime.

The most exciting part of the election is the most boring

I had no reading time to speak of today, since Tuesdays are one of my busiest days (the other being Thursdays). And after all my classes I went to an election watch party in my dorm...at which I was so bored I couldn't even come up with things to say to the few people who talk to me at such things. Though I did invite a male neighbor over...but if he was going to show up, it would have been fifteen minutes ago.

Why is the most important part of the election--the voting and counting of votes--the boring part? And it's arguably the most exciting part too--this is the part where people actually get to do something. I don't get it. Though I am wondering whether, if Romney should put my healthcare in jeopardy by winning, I should convince my mom that we all need to move to Canada or England.

I'll probably go to bed before anything is decided, but in the meantime I'm watching November videos from Brotherhood 2.0, and wishing I was in Nerdfighterlike with someone.

-.- So it goes.

I ripped these out of your symbol: an open letter to John Green

John, I have a confession to make: While reading Paper Towns, I felt bored. Let me explain why: on the one hand, it's the book--it seems to move more slowly and say less than your previous two. Looking for Alaska had all the pretensions of a first novel. But I like those pretensions, the fact that when a writer is starting out, he or she tries to explain the whole world and everything in it, and how we the readers should live our lives. Which Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines both do quite well. Paper Towns seems shriveled by comparison, its moral being not that the world is an extraordinary place full of extraordinary people, but that we must, for reasons of living, see people as only ordinary.

On the other hand, there's me. Because I was a friendless misfit at a high school just like Q's, I feel I know the meat of the story already and don't need to be told it. I remember being awkward and rejected at dances, not going to parties and then feeling alone in the crowd when someone was nice enough to invite me, feeling the "high-school-is-ending-so-we-have-to-reveal-that-deep-down-we-all-love-everybody-bullshit." I've had Q's experiences, all but the frantic road trip that forms part three of the book, but including the painful realizations that accompany its end...and I don't need to be told that these things happen.

The thing I do wish is that I'd had a Ben and a Radar, people I was actually friends with, or thought I was--by sophomore year of high school I was thoroughly disillusioned with my classmates. I wish I'd had friends, I wish I'd had that kind of adventure...and yet I can't envy Q, because I have perspective he doesn't. Being in college, I know life will get better for him without Margo and without high school. He'll go to Duke, find love (or at least lust) there, learn to imagine people--and himself--more complexly, without the sad paper girl who has haunted his dreams all his life. I'm glad I didn't have a Margo Roth Spiegelman, because I can make my own adventures; I don't have to follow someone else to make my life interesting.

To be fair, John, I copied down a lot of quotes. Your books (thus far) are extremely quotable, which is good because I like reading things I can savor on my tongue like bites of a GoFast bar. But I'm not reading this one aloud, because in the middle it bored me, and at the end it made me feel empty, the kind of emptiness I expected from Looking for Alaska, which made me scared to read it for my whole first year of being a Nerdfighter. (Listening to you read a draft of Paper Towns in a Youtube video from 2007 is what inspired me to read all your books together. Now that's ironic.)

But  the end of Looking for Alaska was beautiful and uplifting, and I'm certainly not complaining about the male stripper. In Paper Towns, however, the quest leads only to a dimensionless girl, in a town that exists only on maps, and so instead of a book of ideas, this was a paper book. It baffles me how, during the wondrous time that the first years of Brotherhood 2.0 must have been, you created a story that was this empty.

Tomorrow I shall start Will Grayson, Will Grayson. It isn't all yours (cowritten); but perhaps it was time for that. I hope it's one I can read aloud.

Most sincerely,
Mara

A Cabana Enshrined Toe Funk

Today I read An Abundance of Katherines. Actually, I reread it--the first time was in high school, well before I knew who John Green was. I expected to enjoy coming back to it, since I usually love rereading books...but I didn't. And I think I know why.

I have Asperger's, and I've worked very hard (albeit with a lot of prodding from my mom) to get to a point where you can't tell in casual conversation. And spending time with people who remind me of my junior-high (or even high-school) self makes me uncomfortable. I don't want to go back to that.

I'd forgotten how much Colin Singleton reminds me of me.

But as I kept going, half-ignoring the footnotes I remembered loving, I realized that Colin has made the same journey I have, and, at the end of the book, is about where I am now. He set out on the path toward appearing normal the day he met Hassan, who not only tolerates Colin but actively helps him, telling him when he's going off on tangents that ordinary people find uninteresting and steering him towards actually having social skills. I don't remember having a Hassan, besides my mom, so I'm not sure how I got here, either because looking back is painful, or because I don't actually remember the process.

Whatever the case, I think An Abundance of Katherines does a very good job of explaining me, both to myself and to other people. I wish it had existed during the years my mom tried to make me read boring nonfictional books about autism. When I have children who are at least nerdy, if not on the autism spectrum (because I intend to marry someone who's as nerdy as I am, if more socially savvy), and they don't understand why people at school don't like them, I will give them An Abundance of Katherines and tell them that it's about a boy named Colin, and at some level about a boy named John--but most importantly, it's about them, and it's about me.

There's a scene early in the book where Colin, at about three years old, reads the fable of the tortoise and the hare, and The Missing Piece by Shel Silverstein, and doesn't understand that they're about him. Seeing that, I realized how far I've come, and how far Colin has come, and how, in a way, without knowing it, we're making the journey together.

PS The title of this post is one of a shit-ton of results I got from plugging "An Abundance of Katherines" into an anagram generator. (Given that Colin makes anagrams like I make bracelets, it seemed appropriate.) Here are some of the other funny results:

A Cabana Kneed Nosher Unfit (yeah, cabanas are like gazebos. You don't want to anger them. (Comment if you got that and I'll come up with a prize to give you.))
A Cabana Kenned Our Fishnet (that's smart of it)
A Cabana Kenned Shire Fount
A Cabana Feed Neutron Knish (I'm not sure why this thing is fixated on cabanas, but there we are.)

PPS The other bit of media I consumed today was a truly terrible movie called Fright Night. I watched it with a friend (yes, I have a female friend) and took screencaps of David Tennant.

The Labyrinth of Suffering

I got it into my head this week that I should read all of John Green's books. All five, in a row. A classmate lent me the first four, and today I'm reading Looking for Alaska.

I didn't like the first few pages; it took me a while to sympathize with Alaska and the Colonel and to understand just how desperate for friendship the narrator was. But once i got past that little, I was hooked. I'm reading it as fast as I read anything, but when I slow down, to savor a quote, I hear John reading it aloud in my head. This book is very him; not, perhaps, anything he ever wished to be (which is what I base my writing on), but certainly something he could have been.

The narrator is obsessed with learning famous people's last words. Of these the most relevant to Alaska is Simon Bolivar's: "How am I to get out of this damned labyrinth?" In the first third of the book, Alaska challenges the narrator to tell her what the labyrinth is, and later answers the question herself: suffering. And she has an answer to Simon Bolivar: straight and fast, which is what convinces the Colonel that her death was suicide.

I believe it, even three-quarters of the way through, when the narrator still refuses to. And at some level, I'm dealing with Alaska's death as intensely and deeply and personally as Pudge and the Colonel are. This is why, in spite of my first-page misgivings, I think this is a great book. It makes me live its characters' lives.

And I have an answer to Bolivar's last question, a challenge to poor Alaska and to Pudge, who resents being left behind among the living, and to every single person who lives on this planet. It comes to me through the scenes in which Mr. Hyde discusses Buddhism, and has echoes of my favorite album, The Complex by Blue Man Group. Which I intend to listen to after I finish this book. (I guess that's a mark of a great book: you have to recover from reading it.)

How are you to get out of this damned labyrinth? By climbing the walls. I can't do it, sobs Alaska, already drunk and tired of life. I don't have the strength. Bullshit, I'd tell her, and give her a boost.

PS The awkward-blowjob scene? Not worth banning a book over. Though if I had to come up with a list of reasons to ban a book, I'd probably give you a blank page.

Dreams, headaches, and the fine art of being a sycophant

I think I've been too busy watching Vlogbrothers videos to notice that October has ended? Well, it has, all of a sudden, gotten cold and wet. Thank G-d the hurricane didn't come this far inland.

Monday night I had the best dream I've had in a while. It involved four different incarnations of the Doctor, Elijah Wood, and that's all I'm going to say for the sake of keeping this blog family-friendly. Not sure why Elijah Wood...maybe I'm just excited for The Hobbit.
But it's been sort of downhill from there. The last two nights I've had trouble sleeping (and some really weird dreams last night), and today I woke up with something that may now (at 3pm) be a full-fledged migraine. I rarely get headaches, but when I do they're bitches. Trying Ibuprofen and chamomile tea.

Wednesday morning was quite nice too...I dressed up as a Turing machine for my Mind and Machine class. The prof probably won't give me the free A he promised, but I'm pretty sure I made his day, especially because I was the only person who took his idea to heart. Wish I'd taken a picture...I used my scarf and some binder clips for the tape and symbols; the symbols I deleted were MnMs. That was a fun last-minute costume.

So, all I ended up doing was sucking up to the teacher. I am now officially a sycophant, and I can't say I care, not this late in the semester anyway. And in half an hour, I'm off to do some more brownnosing in my Comparative Poetry class. I'm one of those people who doesn't look like they're paying attention but can still answer all the questions correctly. That being said, I'm not a fan of the prof. She's the kind who insists she's right about everything, and says the same things over and over. Not to mention I really don't want to go to another class today...this morning I was so tired I was practically high off lack of sleep (just ask my linguistics classmates); the nap before Chinese didn't help--and then the nausea and headache showed up. But I can't miss today, since we're starting the Western half of the class (a lot less than half now...we've got what, five weeks left?).

So I shall soldier on reluctantly...and then go to bed very early.

Love your legs...or else!

So here I am, sitting on a hill in the shadow of what's going to be a freshman dorm after having a morning class canceled so I watched old Vlogbrothers videos all through lunch and that's why I'm talking like this. They tend to get stuck in my head.

Anyway, it's been an interesting week. On Tuesday I took two old pairs of jeans and cut the legs off them; right now I'm wearing the obscenely short ones, which friends say look good and which I can get away with wearing because it's 80 degrees out and will be nearly as warm tomorrow; after that, it'll get chilly again. But I've started thinking of these as my "love your legs...or else!" pants, because when wearing shorts that don't even reach mid-thigh (because I cut the legs where they've started fraying) you have to have high self-esteem or you're screwed. So, here I am, on a hill, learning to love my legs.

The other pair of cutoffs are knee-length (again, where the fraying started) and I don't think they're as flattering. But I'm using those four extra legs to make a tote bag that maybe my knitting needles won't punch through. Speaking of which, I'm knitting a Dalek dishtowel that I found on the Internet, and crocheting a Sierpinski Carpet blanket. Pictures when they're done.

Wednesday night I went to The Finer Things Club, where the board members seem to think I'm cooler than square watermelon. And I'm not quite sure whether they're being ironic, but it's nice to feel like you feel needed. I've joined the Dress Code Committee, because the current board isn't quite accommodating  enough of women. But it soon will be *evil laugh*

Which brings us to my adventures today.

Here are two leaves I caught out of the air on the way to my World Music test. The one on the left I fumbled three times and finally picked up off the ground; the other one I actually caught.

After the test I ran into an astronomy class using solar-filtered telescopes to look at the sun. My response: "ooh, there's spots!" It was awesome.

And now I have a quiz in Chinese. So I'll see you around. DFTBA.

Eat of it and you shall die: how The Da Vinci Code changed my life

Today's post is inspired by NPR's PG-13 series, in which writers talk about the books that influenced them as preteens.

Don't get up. I know what the intelligent world thinks of The Da Vinci Code. And let me be the first to say I agree with them. But that's not what this is about. This is about the day at summer camp when a counselor gave it to me with the best of intentions, and left me alone with it. It fascinated me. It was like nothing my twelve-year-old self had ever read. And it taught me three lessons that have made me who I am.

The first thing I got from The Da Vinci Code was a rough understanding of how sex worked and how people thought about it.  At twelve, I was embarrassed to even think about What's Happening To My Body, let alone to read those cute pink books my mother bought for me. Dan Brown nudged me toward accepting what I was becoming, and may even have been a root cause of my starting to write myself, and about that in particular. My free-range detective Mia Lazarus, whose response to her occasional mental blocks is to get laid, would not have been possible otherwise.

The second lesson I learned was that orthodoxy is not always right, and that challenging it could be worthwhile. I read that the Mona Lisa could have been named for Egyptian fertility gods, that there could be some truth to conspiracy theories, that Jesus could have been married--in fact, the closest I've ever come to believing in Jesus was while I was reading that book. My mother would finish the job in a couple years' time as my high school civics teacher, giving me not only orthodoxies that needed to be challenged but also the tools and arguments to challenge them with. But the world Dan Brown created made me a little more ready to learn her lessons.

I say "created," and that's an important part of the third lesson, which I didn't learn until years later: that books could lie. There's an important distinction in my head between fiction and lies: fiction can be true if it's well-researched or -crafted; if its insights into human nature trump the fact that its events never actually took place. The Da Vinci Code packaged its lies and poor construction in just enough truth that I learned from it--and in addition, I learned how to spot bad writing. The book was both the snake and the fruit in my childhood Garden of Reading.

The game of expectations

I saw two sad youtube videos this morning. Each was part of a series I follow closely, yet one struck me as much sadder than the other.
Here they are: "The Lizzie Bennett Diaries" episode 42 and Doctor Who's "Pond Life" part 5. The second one had a much bigger emotional impact than the first. Go watch them both, and then I'll tell you why.

Meanwhile, here's a picture that might help explain it.

Back? Good. Here's my thought: For one thing, I'm much more invested in the plight of Amy Pond, Doctor's Companion, than I am in the travails of Lizzie Bennett, whiny closed-minded grad student. Why do I follow her, then? Because I want to see what they do with the narrative. Doctor Who, on the other hand, is narrated by much more likeable characters, and practically an adopted religion for me. Second: Amy's troubles are bigger--her husband just walked out for no specified reason. Lizzie's best friend is moving away to take the job Lizzie herself just turned down. I'd tell you the fable of the dog in the manger, but I think you already know it.

The thing that got me thinking about this whole deal, though, was this. Notice I said "narrative" just now. The Lizzie Bennett Diaries are a direct update of Pride and Prejudice; it follows the plot exactly, with a couple of topical changes (the racelifts, the swimmers, job offers vs marriage) that make sense given that it's an update. But it's still a known narrative: I can go to Wikipedia and look up what's just happened and what will happen next.
This Doctor Who story is an entirely new thing. All I knew going in was that Arthur Darvill (who plays Rory, for those of you not yet in the know) said there'd be a cliffhanger leading into tomorrow's season premiere. He didn't say it would involve Steven Moffat punching us all in the gut, as is his executive wont. There's no prestructured narrative, from the perspective of the audience: even with all the online spoilers, everything new is totally new and surprising.

And this didn't make me feel any less like I want a hug. Oh well, I guess I'll go celebrate Bad Wolf Day early.

A little back-to-school pop culture analysis

I have returned to Pittsburgh; the big thing right now, aside from the obvious eighteen credits, is preparing all the clubs I'm on the board of for the school year. Making sure Teahouse has enough spoons (and schmoozing freshmen--when did I learn to schmooze? Must have been in China), getting on the same page with my ex about the Doctor Who Club meeting for the season premiere, three hours of tabling at the Activities Fair, all the good stuff. And I've been relaxing by picking things apart.

First, Nathan Fillion. He really is ruggedly handsome...and I've finally forgiven him, three days after seeing it, for being Captain Hammer in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. The character of Captain Hammer takes the little bit of immature assholery that make Malcolm Reynolds and Richard Castle amusing, and makes it a defining character trait. But that's not the worst part. The worst part is that you go into Dr. Horrible expecting a lighthearted parody of superhero movies, with heroes that are heroes and villains that are villains. But about the middle of Act II, what's been staring you in the face for fifteen minutes finally slaps you: Billy's an ordinary nerd, and Captain Hammer is deliberately messing with him. And from there, the audience's expectations break down right along with Billy's sanity. And just when you think Dr. Horrible has the upper hand, the bottom drops out.

I'm sure I said at some point on this blog (and if I haven't, I'm saying it now) that I can't play tropes straight anymore. Everything I touch becomes either invoked, subverted, or deconstructed. Joss Whedon writes the same way. And as creepy as Firefly was at times, and as much as I hated Nathan Fillion for what he was doing to poor geeky Neil Patrick Harris...it's beautiful. I can't get it out of my head, not because of the scary, but because of how it transcends scary. Joss Whedon is like Neil Gaiman in that regard: he scares you, but he makes you happy about it.

Next week is the series premiere of Doctor Who. More on that then; I may also blog about "Pond Life," the series of shorts that starts on Monday about Amy and Rory trying to be normal, up until they get dragged back into the Doctor's adventures.

And the other new thing from the Moff this week: three words have been released regarding the next season of Sherlock. The words are "Rat, Wedding, Bow," and I'm fairly sure I know what they mean.

• "Rat" can be the Giant Rat of Sumatra, which is mentioned briefly in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" as "a story for which the world is not yet ready." The story of the giant rat of Sumatra has been written several times by other authors; perhaps the Moff has decided we're finally ready for the story.
• "Wedding" is most likely "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor," a relatively straightforward runaway-bride case. I look forward to their making it complex and interesting. Alternatively, John could be getting married, as he does at least once (at most thrice, depending on how you order the stories) in the original; however, since everybody but Sherlock and John ship Sherlock/John, I don't think that's likely.
• "Bow" is "His Last Bow," the very last official Sherlock Holmes story. This tells me that the series will end after episode nine.

The Moff has done his homework, and he expects us to do ours. As cheat sheets go, I wouldn't rely on this one for the final, but it's an idea of what you might study.

One more fun thing I came up with today: If David Tennant is TV dipped in chocolate, what are the rest of the New Series Doctors and their Companions? Enjoy.

Week 6: Mahjong, rain, Oxford, and the Enlightenment

It's kind of hard to get my head around that I'm going home in a little over two weeks. Except maybe I have been comprehending it subconsciously: I've been more homesick lately, and more likely to eat Western food--though having a cafe in the dorm helps with that, since in means I don't have to walk twenty minutes to get to the cafeterias on campus.
On the other hand, yesterday I had the most Chinese-y experience I've yet had here, and will probably ever have in this program: my tutor and I and a couple of my classmates spent most of the afternoon at a teahouse. The building was probably a hundred years old. The rituals of steeping and serving the tea (jasmine, by the way, and very good) may not have changed for centuries. The mahjong table was new--the electronic dice and built-in tile shuffler make it maybe thirty years old--but mahjong is mahjong, and all together it gave me a feeling I hadn't yet experienced. I've been to Tian'anmen, and to the Great Wall...but tea and mahjong are the real soul of China.
And the weather held for our excursion. There's been a lot of rain in Beijing lately. Last Saturday floods killed nearly forty people, and it's only supposed to rain more this weekend. Ah well, I guess it's a nice break from hot and humid. If it ever actually rains.
And speaking of last Saturday, that was the evening I finally watched Anonymous. It's a lovely movie; the only people I know of who don't like it are the ones who can't be buggered to put aside their pet theory about who wrote Shakespeare's plays. That the movie supports the Earl of Oxford theory only matters insofar as Edward deVere (said Earl) is a well-constructed and beautifully-acted character. (Not to mention attractive--he's played by Rhys Ifans, whom most people know from Notting Hill, and Jamie Campbell Bower, whom everyone will soon know from The Mortal Instruments.) The point of the story is that no matter who wrote Shakespeare's plays, they're still wonderful works of art, and powerful cultural icons, and a picture of the human condition at a particular point in history that still resonates with modern readers/viewers. All that good stuff.
And so it annoys me that people get bogged down in petty details, and stick to their biases to the point that they can no longer understand why anyone else sees the world differently. Which brings me to this week's episode of Crashcourse, in which John Green tells conflicting stories about the death of Captain Cook and asks whether, since transcending our own biases is so difficult, it's actually worth doing.
My answer: of course it is! As they keep quoting in Up the Down Staircase, "a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" The fact that something is difficult makes it even more important that we try to do it. Colonizing the Americas was difficult; so were uniting the United States and landing a man on the moon; so too will be curing AIDS and sending manned missions to Mars. Humans do things because they're difficult.
And learning to see things from someone else's perspective shouldn't be all that difficult. To return to the Enlightenment, which I mentioned a couple of months ago and which John Green seems to enjoy talking about: the scientists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries believed it was possible for man to see the world from God's perspective. I'm prepared to argue that we've accomplished that. Now that we can see what a god sees, why do we refuse to see what other human beings see?