One, two, many fandoms
It has been a difficult summer. I have a co-worker, with whom I spend more waking hours than any other single person in the world, who is often a torment to me. I strongly suspect that other colleagues are shutting me out of important work projects and developments, in favor of this same individual (call her "Tracy"). I’m supposed to be finishing a writing project that is pivotal to a badly needed career change before September, at which time I will be returning to school while continuing to work full-time. I can’t say the writing project is going particularly well, though I don’t rule out a burst of productivity in August.
My tendency to adapt late to already mainstream technologies is starting to adversely affect my relationships, except those with my parents, who are far later adapters even than I am, but who have separate, legitimate reasons to feel resentful of and alienated from me. Sex has become almost completely peripheral and irrelevant to my life; I barely have the time, energy or inclination to even masturbate, let alone to add a new relationship I can't maintain to the old ones I can't maintain. My July menstrual cycle was the most disastrous of my life, leaving me with a weight gain of between 5 and 10 pounds that has not been very responsive to my usual damage-control methods. The extra weight makes itself felt every day when I’m getting dressed, when I’m commuting, when I’m exercising. In case I needed any further bodily indignities, the skin on my hands and feet is suddenly peeling off for no reason, and yesterday I banged my bare foot so hard into the sweeper I’d gotten out of the closet as a visual reminder to clean my place that I’m concerned I may have actually broken a toe.
I am feeling intense and simultaneous pressures to save money (because I have a new boss who may not lift a finger if our penny-pinching management and HR people make the executive decision to get rid of me) and to spend money: on the aforesaid technologies my lack of fluency in which is affecting my relationships, on travel (I am the only one of my colleagues who has not been overseas in the last three years, yet another demerit against me and further evidence that she doesn’t share our core values**), on any number of smaller purchases that, strictly speaking, aren’t required, but seem necessary to help me cope with the demands being made on me by life: an extra container of loose powder and a powder brush to keep at work because there's no point applying it to my profusely sweating face at home (it’s at least ten degrees hotter in my apartment than it is outside; I have an air conditioner I could run, but, hello, I’m trying to save money); new sandals that don't make my feet itch and exacerbate my peeling skin; a new sports watch to wear while going on more frequent runs (on my possibly broken toe) to try to bring my weight back down so that I don't have to spend yet additional money on five new pairs of pants in a larger size (my eagle-eyed co-worker "Tracy," herself a competitive exerciser, may already have noticed with disapproval the fact that I've been wearing the same two pairs of pants for the last two weeks, because they're the only ones I can still fit into).
In my "leisure" time, I’m drowning in music I feel obliged to listen to - I must keep up, and in fact I genuinely want to keep up, with what’s going down in the various subcultures I follow - but very little of it is providing me with any kind of emotional release or even much pleasure; even the Band of Horses and Decemberists albums (both of them old, and indicative of the cultural behind-the-curveness that accompanies my technology failures) containing the songs referenced in my last two entries are sinking in with ridiculous slowness. Maybe it’s because I can’t concentrate? My memory is, documentably, getting worse. The other day I could not remember the name of the mines in The Fellowship of the Ring - you know, where they go after being attacked by snowstorms on the pass of Caradhras.*** I am a LOTR head; how can this be happening? In another era of my life, even a memory lapse far more trivial than that one would have rectified itself within the next few hours; this lapse did not, and I finally had to consult the book in exasperation: Moria, duh. Speaking of movies, carving the time out of my life to get to a theater to see one has become such a struggle that it feels like a chore, and every time I succeed in returning a Netflix movie it feels like a major accomplishment. In the realm of online tasks, I can’t keep this blog fresh, I can’t find the time or mental energy to renew my relationship with my favorite commenting community, I certainly can’t finish the fanfiction mentioned here many entries ago. I can’t keep up with current events, either, another source of potential embarassment at work; I don’t understand what’s going on with Obama’s health care legislation, and if I’m honest, I almost don’t care that I don’t.
Amidst all this, there’s one thing, one part of my daily grind, that is consistently giving me pleasure. Like most of the problematic things mentioned above, it’s a task I’ve set myself to complete, it requires effort on my part; but unlike most of the above litany of burdens, I am enjoying it actively enough to feel certain I will succeed in completing it. That task, my nonexistent readers and friends, is finally reading the whole series of Harry Potter books and seeing all the movie adaptations that have been made thus far. Since June, I’ve read the first four books and seen the first three movies, with movie four on the way from Netflix; I'm now a hundred fifty pages into book five, Order of the Phoenix, with the intention of finishing book six, Half-Blood Prince, before the current movie adaptation leaves theaters.
As almost the sole redeeming feature in a life greatly in need of redemption, is a huge-selling young-adult book series about an adolescent wizard a lame or inadequate offering? Maybe, but beggars probably can't be choosers. I admit to being a bit self-conscious about reading the books on the subway - I feel not only like a walking cliché, but like an overage latecomer to the walking-cliché party - and I pull them out in certain neighborhoods with even greater trepidation, as my standing with the hipster community is precarious enough as it is. But read them publicly I do: you can't please anyone everyone, so you got to please yourself, as Rick Nelson says. Anyway, I won't get through them in a reasonable time frame otherwise: these are some long-ass books. Not that I'm complaining; as the books get longer, they are inarguably getting better. Less than a quarter of the way in, Order of the Phoenix has already yielded what is simultaneously the funniest and most poignant scene yet involving the Dursleys (Uncle Vernon compulsively botching, but nevertheless using, the most basic wizarding terminology, even as Aunt Petunia goes him one better and reveals a small but extremely telling chink in her Muggle armor), a satisfying picture of the burgeoning anti-Voldemort underground resistance movement, and a funny and politically pointed glimpse of the inner workings of the Ministry of Magic.
You'd think that with everything else making demands on my time, I would not need or want to add a new fandom to my life right now. Isn't it going to distract me from, or dilute, my already suffering Trek thing? Harry Potter musings are further delaying my much-delayed fourth TOS post, it's true. But with things the way they are, I need all the pleasure, all the dumb, idle, unpuposeful fun, all the artificial sense of having mastered the way a world works, all the feeling of belonging to a virtual community that I can get: in other words, all the things that fandoms provide and which are the reasons people participate in them in the first place. Now is a time to enlist everything I've got in that department, to bring out the heavy artillery from all quarters. My third major fandom, namely Lord of the Rings, has not been in heavy rotation in my life for a bit, but the other night, for reasons not related to the Moria memory lapse, I felt the need to put one of the movies in to fall asleep to. Not unlike Sauron and Lord Voldything, my LOTR fixation has risen again and made itself felt. It seems appropriate. After all, if there's any takeaway lesson from the failure of Hogwarts to provide any kind of stability in its Defense Against the Dark Arts instruction, it's that you can't count on any one talisman or technique to consistently protect you against the bad shit in your life. Not only had you better have a backup in case your first line of defense fails, you should be prepared to throw anything and everything at your more daunting problems and be glad, and not too fussy, when something sticks. As a human Bludger of sorts, even the loathsome Dolores Umbridge may have her uses in the end.
.
So I'm hereby serving notice that this journal's purpose and subject will henceforth be, not Star Trek only, but fandom/s in general. For me that currently means the (un?)holy trinity of Star Trek, LOTR and Harry Potter, but later may mean something else as well. For now, I'm relying on their combined force to carry me through a trying period.
I'm sure one or all of the three could yield some cornball slogan about making it through bad times that I could use to finish this off. I just can't fucking remember any of them.
*I can't even remember the exact name of my own goddamn song of choice. (I'm writing this at work, so the song is playing in my head rather than on some actual playback medium, and thus I can't cheat by checking any kind of iSource for the title. I could Google it, of course, but the question remains: why do I need to look for this information anywhere outside of my own head in the first place?)
**I don't share their core values, but if my role-playing skills have declined to such a degree that I can't keep them from noticing this, I am in big fucking trouble.
***I couldn't remember how to spell "Caradhras," either. It's a weird word, admittedly, but I have always been a good speller. If even my nerd skills are deserting me, what the hell have I got left?
My tendency to adapt late to already mainstream technologies is starting to adversely affect my relationships, except those with my parents, who are far later adapters even than I am, but who have separate, legitimate reasons to feel resentful of and alienated from me. Sex has become almost completely peripheral and irrelevant to my life; I barely have the time, energy or inclination to even masturbate, let alone to add a new relationship I can't maintain to the old ones I can't maintain. My July menstrual cycle was the most disastrous of my life, leaving me with a weight gain of between 5 and 10 pounds that has not been very responsive to my usual damage-control methods. The extra weight makes itself felt every day when I’m getting dressed, when I’m commuting, when I’m exercising. In case I needed any further bodily indignities, the skin on my hands and feet is suddenly peeling off for no reason, and yesterday I banged my bare foot so hard into the sweeper I’d gotten out of the closet as a visual reminder to clean my place that I’m concerned I may have actually broken a toe.
I am feeling intense and simultaneous pressures to save money (because I have a new boss who may not lift a finger if our penny-pinching management and HR people make the executive decision to get rid of me) and to spend money: on the aforesaid technologies my lack of fluency in which is affecting my relationships, on travel (I am the only one of my colleagues who has not been overseas in the last three years, yet another demerit against me and further evidence that she doesn’t share our core values**), on any number of smaller purchases that, strictly speaking, aren’t required, but seem necessary to help me cope with the demands being made on me by life: an extra container of loose powder and a powder brush to keep at work because there's no point applying it to my profusely sweating face at home (it’s at least ten degrees hotter in my apartment than it is outside; I have an air conditioner I could run, but, hello, I’m trying to save money); new sandals that don't make my feet itch and exacerbate my peeling skin; a new sports watch to wear while going on more frequent runs (on my possibly broken toe) to try to bring my weight back down so that I don't have to spend yet additional money on five new pairs of pants in a larger size (my eagle-eyed co-worker "Tracy," herself a competitive exerciser, may already have noticed with disapproval the fact that I've been wearing the same two pairs of pants for the last two weeks, because they're the only ones I can still fit into).
In my "leisure" time, I’m drowning in music I feel obliged to listen to - I must keep up, and in fact I genuinely want to keep up, with what’s going down in the various subcultures I follow - but very little of it is providing me with any kind of emotional release or even much pleasure; even the Band of Horses and Decemberists albums (both of them old, and indicative of the cultural behind-the-curveness that accompanies my technology failures) containing the songs referenced in my last two entries are sinking in with ridiculous slowness. Maybe it’s because I can’t concentrate? My memory is, documentably, getting worse. The other day I could not remember the name of the mines in The Fellowship of the Ring - you know, where they go after being attacked by snowstorms on the pass of Caradhras.*** I am a LOTR head; how can this be happening? In another era of my life, even a memory lapse far more trivial than that one would have rectified itself within the next few hours; this lapse did not, and I finally had to consult the book in exasperation: Moria, duh. Speaking of movies, carving the time out of my life to get to a theater to see one has become such a struggle that it feels like a chore, and every time I succeed in returning a Netflix movie it feels like a major accomplishment. In the realm of online tasks, I can’t keep this blog fresh, I can’t find the time or mental energy to renew my relationship with my favorite commenting community, I certainly can’t finish the fanfiction mentioned here many entries ago. I can’t keep up with current events, either, another source of potential embarassment at work; I don’t understand what’s going on with Obama’s health care legislation, and if I’m honest, I almost don’t care that I don’t.
Amidst all this, there’s one thing, one part of my daily grind, that is consistently giving me pleasure. Like most of the problematic things mentioned above, it’s a task I’ve set myself to complete, it requires effort on my part; but unlike most of the above litany of burdens, I am enjoying it actively enough to feel certain I will succeed in completing it. That task, my nonexistent readers and friends, is finally reading the whole series of Harry Potter books and seeing all the movie adaptations that have been made thus far. Since June, I’ve read the first four books and seen the first three movies, with movie four on the way from Netflix; I'm now a hundred fifty pages into book five, Order of the Phoenix, with the intention of finishing book six, Half-Blood Prince, before the current movie adaptation leaves theaters.
As almost the sole redeeming feature in a life greatly in need of redemption, is a huge-selling young-adult book series about an adolescent wizard a lame or inadequate offering? Maybe, but beggars probably can't be choosers. I admit to being a bit self-conscious about reading the books on the subway - I feel not only like a walking cliché, but like an overage latecomer to the walking-cliché party - and I pull them out in certain neighborhoods with even greater trepidation, as my standing with the hipster community is precarious enough as it is. But read them publicly I do: you can't please anyone everyone, so you got to please yourself, as Rick Nelson says. Anyway, I won't get through them in a reasonable time frame otherwise: these are some long-ass books. Not that I'm complaining; as the books get longer, they are inarguably getting better. Less than a quarter of the way in, Order of the Phoenix has already yielded what is simultaneously the funniest and most poignant scene yet involving the Dursleys (Uncle Vernon compulsively botching, but nevertheless using, the most basic wizarding terminology, even as Aunt Petunia goes him one better and reveals a small but extremely telling chink in her Muggle armor), a satisfying picture of the burgeoning anti-Voldemort underground resistance movement, and a funny and politically pointed glimpse of the inner workings of the Ministry of Magic.
You'd think that with everything else making demands on my time, I would not need or want to add a new fandom to my life right now. Isn't it going to distract me from, or dilute, my already suffering Trek thing? Harry Potter musings are further delaying my much-delayed fourth TOS post, it's true. But with things the way they are, I need all the pleasure, all the dumb, idle, unpuposeful fun, all the artificial sense of having mastered the way a world works, all the feeling of belonging to a virtual community that I can get: in other words, all the things that fandoms provide and which are the reasons people participate in them in the first place. Now is a time to enlist everything I've got in that department, to bring out the heavy artillery from all quarters. My third major fandom, namely Lord of the Rings, has not been in heavy rotation in my life for a bit, but the other night, for reasons not related to the Moria memory lapse, I felt the need to put one of the movies in to fall asleep to. Not unlike Sauron and Lord Voldything, my LOTR fixation has risen again and made itself felt. It seems appropriate. After all, if there's any takeaway lesson from the failure of Hogwarts to provide any kind of stability in its Defense Against the Dark Arts instruction, it's that you can't count on any one talisman or technique to consistently protect you against the bad shit in your life. Not only had you better have a backup in case your first line of defense fails, you should be prepared to throw anything and everything at your more daunting problems and be glad, and not too fussy, when something sticks. As a human Bludger of sorts, even the loathsome Dolores Umbridge may have her uses in the end.
.
So I'm hereby serving notice that this journal's purpose and subject will henceforth be, not Star Trek only, but fandom/s in general. For me that currently means the (un?)holy trinity of Star Trek, LOTR and Harry Potter, but later may mean something else as well. For now, I'm relying on their combined force to carry me through a trying period.
I'm sure one or all of the three could yield some cornball slogan about making it through bad times that I could use to finish this off. I just can't fucking remember any of them.
*I can't even remember the exact name of my own goddamn song of choice. (I'm writing this at work, so the song is playing in my head rather than on some actual playback medium, and thus I can't cheat by checking any kind of iSource for the title. I could Google it, of course, but the question remains: why do I need to look for this information anywhere outside of my own head in the first place?)
**I don't share their core values, but if my role-playing skills have declined to such a degree that I can't keep them from noticing this, I am in big fucking trouble.
***I couldn't remember how to spell "Caradhras," either. It's a weird word, admittedly, but I have always been a good speller. If even my nerd skills are deserting me, what the hell have I got left?