That "Ten Things" thing
I'm not usually one to jump on the memewagon, and until today the recent Ten Things I Have Done That You Probably Haven't meme has, to me, come with a faint whiff of one-upmanship that put me off a bit. But I like how Elizabeth tweaked it into something more embracing, and I'm going to tweak it one further: Ten Random Things In My Past That Make Me Nod And Say, Yeah That Was Pretty Sweet or At Least Didn't Altogether Suck.
As with your personal list, this could be much longer. Meet me for drinks and we can exchange more with each other.
1.Worked with Ray Bradbury on directing and producing two of his plays. Thanks to this event, my master's degree in theater led directly to a career in astronomy, where I found my professional bliss (even if ultimately temporarily).
2.Met Norman Mailer at a funeral.
3.There's a star system named for me in the Star Wars expanded universe.
4.Wrote and saw produced scripts for Patrick Stewart and other ST:TNG cast members on starship Enterprise sets, including Brent Spiner who insisted on being in character on the Bridge as Data. Relatedly, provided cause for Jonathan Frakes, while in character as Will Riker, inserting a hearty “fuck” and breaking up laughing in the outtakes. Within all that, I wrote what may have been the last script Gene Roddenberry approved before he died; I don't think cause-and-effect was at work there.
Similarly, for Discovery Communications I wrote an hour-long script for a former U.S. president. That it was George H.W. Bush for his library/museum in Texas, and that my private notions regarding his official biography and every member of his immediate family are not exactly laudatory … well, that was all beside the point professionally.
On a project similar to that one, exchanged ribald jokes with Capt. Jim Lovell, a.k.a. the guy Tom Hanks played in Apollo 13.
5.The biggest but not necessarily most obvious one:
Came to after a weeks-long coma to be told that my heart had stopped on the operating table, that my sternum had been emergency splayed open like a lobster and then left open for five days, that my lungs then tried their damnedest to kill me, and that my stay in the hospital was a long way from being over.
This one I could break down into an easy couple dozen meme-able subpoints:
- (a) Feared that I was going to live the rest of my life "locked in."
- (b) Felt a rush of genuine thrill the moment in the ICU when I regained the muscle strength to push my glasses up my nose. Related newly appreciated “awesome little reminder” moments continue to this day, including the fact that I'm sitting here now typing this.
- (c) Being told that the nursing staff had determined, based on experience, that I probably wasn't going to leave the room alive; that after I beat those odds they nicknamed me Miracle Man; then having them say "you remind us of why we got into medicine in the first place."
- (d) Having been spooned a breakfast of sausage and eggs and pancakes -- puréed to a pale, drinkable slurry, and taking joy in it being the first sensations to cross my taste buds in weeks while experiencing the wonderment that it tasted exactly like sausage and eggs and pancakes and was therefore the Best. Breakfast. Ever.
- (numerous etceteras)
Would I undo it, make it not happen, if offered the chance via, say, a genie in a bottle or an eccentric Englishmen in a TARDIS? Hell yeah I probably would, largely for Elizabeth's sake. Even so, I'd be aware that I was sacrificing some good things in the bargain. Okay, sure, it sounds like a line from a bad rom-com, but it made me a better me.
6.Sat between David Duchovny and Kevin Smith at an invitational “friends and family” preview screening, on the Paramount lot, of Smith’s Jersey Girl. Afterward had nice separate chats with Smith and his mom.
Also in the "writing about movies" dept., saw my byline pullquoted alongside Roger Ebert's at the New York Film Forum. (cf. The President's Analyst.)
7.Had a story reprinted in a fat Norton-style college textbook anthology of world literature, positioned thusly in the TOC:
8.Favorite romantic memory: London, late November 2004. Hand in hand with Elizabeth along the Queen's Walk beneath a beautiful night sky reflected in the Thames, after we had just seen -- with best-tickets-in-the-house seats -- a stage production of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials at the National Theatre.
9.In a public place, accidentally bumped into a former casual lover two years after she had broken up with me for mysterious reasons. We were both on the move, but we took a few moments to catch up with each other's lives since then. While doing so, she hugged me and thanked me for having said something to her that caused her to take action to change her life in ways that led to her current far happier place. We parted ways warmly, but before I found out what that life-changing thing I had said actually was. To this day I have no idea.
10.
(and by no means last or least)Married Elizabeth. I'm not the first bloke to be able to say this with pride and pleasure, but odds are looking good that I'll be the last. The quivering web of random happenstance, choices, forces, events, and quantum wave function collapses that converged and coalesced into this singular emergent event -- and thus the number of alternate-history parallel universes where we never even met -- still rocks me back on my heels.