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.