I'd misplaced my mobile sometime in the last day. This in itself isn't surprising, and there's a reason I opted for the bright-pink case that has nothing to do with recent Sherlock Holmes adaptations. But I woke up from a nap this afternoon to it making noises, but couldn't find it. Turns out it had been on my bed and I'd kicked it off during the night - into the trash bag full of garbage I was rounding up to take downstairs. Eep! I assumed it has just fallen behind the nightstand or something.
But we're having enough rain they issued a flash flood warning, which made my phone beep until I acknowledged it, which is when I found it in the trashbag. Otherwise I would have probably never found it until after I took the trash out which could be a bit not-good. Things like this are why I have phone insurance, but even so. Sometimes I am not the best at adulting.
Anyway, the rain is remarkably beautiful, romantic even, when I don't have to be out in it. Peaceful. Here's a picture from out my window.
That doesn't really do it justice, though if you remember the pictures I've shared of looking out my window at (say) snow-covered roofs when there wasn't anything actively falling, it does give you an idea. For the full effect, though, video is required.
That's just the sound of the rain through a window; my air conditioner was off at the time. It was around that point that I started wondering if we had empty honeypots to weather the storm in, and if they'd be necessary. The name Sun-day certainly seems a misnomer. :-)
In other (more fannish) news, over at Tumblr, Natka asked me what my favorite Sherlock scene was a while ago. This is a particularly difficult question because I love this show (for all its faults, and particularly the first two series) for so many different ways. There are funny moments and philosophical moments and heartwrenching moments and wonderful-dialogue moments and why-don't-you-just-kiss-already moments and Mycroft moments (because he gets a category all his own) and just ... everything moments, really. But maybe because I'm going on interviews when I have to talk about my academic past or maybe because school's starting in the US I'm thinking more about the moments that made me fall in love with Sherlock as a philosopher. At its heart I think what speaks to me is the way this show asks philosophical questions and frames them in a consciously philosophical way (Sherlock's brain is really quite good for this), but Sherlock lacks the emotional connection and appreciation of something beyond logic to always see the answer in convincingly human ways. Which allows for genuine dialectic in a way I don't think Socrates quite managed.
So I finally settled on talking about the above scene from "The Great Game," where I think Sherlock finally frames one of the show's fundamental questions for me, specifically, "Should we care about people even if it's not an advantage?" And this has me thinking about (spoilers...) Mary's shooting of Sherlock in "His Last Vow" in a new way. I still want to flesh this out, but the ninety-second version is that Mary is operating like Sherlock on steroids. Even assuming she doesn't want him dead (which I believe but I know would need arguing or at least stipulating), Mary took a big risk by cornering CAM in a situation where some innocent (Janine, for instance) could just walk in like that. Once you're in the moment there may not be a better way out, but the thing Sherlock keeps coming back to is, did you take an unjustifiable risk that perhaps painted you into the corner. And Sherlock's behavior over the first two series is escalating in that way: not just arresting the cabbie in ASIP, letting the old lady stay with Moriarty in TGG, actually engaging Moriarty directly at the end of TGG/ASIB, and most noticeably putting himself in a position where he'd have to fake his own death and let John grieve for him. These are actions that in that moment, what else could he have done and the actions that led up to it make a certain amount of sense but also ignore the potential to box him in. It seems like there's a real similarity in what Sherlock is doing throughout those first series and what Mary does in HLV, or at least that they exist on the same continuum, and it seems to me that maybe Mary's shooting makes more sense thematically if we view it not as the action of a villain opposing him but as an extreme that Sherlock is increasingly veers toward and really, really needs to avoid.
Which doesn't excuse her actions. Quite the contrary - I think it shows why she's wrong in a way that also makes sense why Sherlock is wrong in the beginning and needs to grow into something better, and also (since Sherlock is growing, I think) why Sherlock is a more healthy match for John than Mary is. Take that in the sense of non-romantic, platonic soulmates if you prefer.
Anyway, that's more a promissory note than anything, and a chance to kind of flesh out the thoughts rolling around in my head. It needs to be fleshed out, obviously. But I have been thinking a good bit about it lately and it seemed worth taking a first stab at kinda-sorta explaining it so I can maybe get it down in some form outside my skull one of these days.
PS - An interesting meta on the opposite viewpoint, that Mary really meant to kill Sherlock:
here. This is mostly so I'll be able to find it if i ever sit down to write this up in a more structured way, but I think some of you might find it interesting. One of the more well-thought-out approaches to this issue, and while I don't accept some of her premises so I'm not really convinced, I definitely think this falls into the category of "worthy opposition."