Becoming Larry
I posted this a while ago right after this episode aired, so this was my immediate reaction--but it's Numb3rs meta. Things may have changed a bit since the episode, naturally.
This past week Alan, father of Charlie the Math Genius, is getting on his case about doing grown-up things like taking care of household repairs. This turns out to be a cover that he's worried Charlie isn't going to get married and have children and might instead turn out "like Larry," his weird physicist friend. Turns out Charlie has had the same fears. Not only did I find that a pretty disappointing thing to learn they think about their friend, I thought it was a profound misunderstanding of who Larry is.
Larry is an oddball. He only eats white food, he recently sold his house because he wants to live with as few possessions as possible. He's often shy, especially around women. Not that this keeps him from starting a tentative relationship with hot!FBI woman Megan--one wonders what's wrong with turning into Larry given that info. But the main thing that confused me as that Larry seemed to be being seen as a Charlie who failed to thrive, which not only implies that Charlie and Larry start out as the same character (when they seem very different) but that Larry's is a personality one gets by accident. I mean, it seems to me that Larry is in fact a person who's put a lot of effort into who he is--not as a performance, but just by thinking a lot about the world and who he is in it. It's not that Larry is superior to everyone else by any means, but he's not inferior either. His issues aren't so much more problematic than other peoples just because he lives outside the box.
This seems to apply sometimes to single people in general. Now, it's true that a single person can sometimes naturally become more eccentric than someone with a family simply because you naturally mold your life around your own interests. You don't have to provide a stable routine for children, for instance, or compromise for other people in the family. But the show seemed to go a step further and make that common assumption that single=stunted and childless=childlike.
This is something that used to come up a lot in LOTR--I remember always getting really annoyed when anyone would suggest that Frodo was single due to the ring's influence which "kept him from growing." Obviously on one level this just annoyed me because I'm single too, but I think it was more than that. Throughout history there have always been many people who didn't get married and have children, who had to fashion their life around other things (particularly in times in history where there was a shortage of one of the sexes, like after a big war). Those people have always been an important part of any society, contributing along with everyone else, and I guess it surprises me when people casually reveal a kind of prejudice about it. As if the single people are failed marry people, the childless failed parents--certainly that the single people aren't the "grown-ups" of the society, which implies they're being taken care of by the parents, somehow.
Now, marriage and children are two things that seem attractive to me. I just pretty much accepted very early on that they obviously weren't so attractive to me that they'd ever be a priority. If they happened they happened, but I probably wasn't putting as much effort into making them happen as I did into making other things happen. But that never made me feel like I had a life that was any less of a life than anyone else. It’s a frightening thought how many people throughout history get written off through this idea, or put on some lower level of experience. You only get one life to live, isn’t it better than people can fashion many different shapes out of it?
That was the thing with Larry. He's an odd guy, but he's also a unique guy. His life might not be for everyone, but then it's not like he's proselytizing about it. Why not just accept that you have this one interesting friend who has this life? Part of what's so ironic about the whole thing, after all, is that Alan is the one worried his sons will be this guy, so who perhaps feels sorry for this guy....and yet where are any signs that Larry is so much less happy than widower Alan? Sure Alan has Don and Charlie--but so does Larry. Larry just has them as friends instead of grown sons, and has never expressed any desire to have them as sons. In fact Larry very often is the character excited over some new thing he's thought or discovered. Of the two Alan seems to spend far more time worrying over what he *should* want or what he *should* have. So what exactly is the fear Larry represents? It's just apples and oranges. Only I get the feeling the Orange is less bothered by the apples than the apples are by the orange. Really the exact same thing goes into "having a life" whether you have children and are married or not. It's the approach rather than the chosen activities.
I guess the reason it seemed to relate to fandom in a small way is that fandom draws people interested in ideas and imagination. There’s plenty of married people in it, and plenty of people with children, but it still often carries with it the same casual dismissal. Rather than celebrating the passion involved it’s associated with misusing passion that would be better applied to other things. Not that words like sad, pathetic, unhealthy and wanky can’t ever honestly apply to fandom/fandomers-it can. But I think it gets overused or is used carelessly, without anyone really wanting to think about why it’s being used-which is I think was going on with Larry on that particular ep of Numb3rs.
This past week Alan, father of Charlie the Math Genius, is getting on his case about doing grown-up things like taking care of household repairs. This turns out to be a cover that he's worried Charlie isn't going to get married and have children and might instead turn out "like Larry," his weird physicist friend. Turns out Charlie has had the same fears. Not only did I find that a pretty disappointing thing to learn they think about their friend, I thought it was a profound misunderstanding of who Larry is.
Larry is an oddball. He only eats white food, he recently sold his house because he wants to live with as few possessions as possible. He's often shy, especially around women. Not that this keeps him from starting a tentative relationship with hot!FBI woman Megan--one wonders what's wrong with turning into Larry given that info. But the main thing that confused me as that Larry seemed to be being seen as a Charlie who failed to thrive, which not only implies that Charlie and Larry start out as the same character (when they seem very different) but that Larry's is a personality one gets by accident. I mean, it seems to me that Larry is in fact a person who's put a lot of effort into who he is--not as a performance, but just by thinking a lot about the world and who he is in it. It's not that Larry is superior to everyone else by any means, but he's not inferior either. His issues aren't so much more problematic than other peoples just because he lives outside the box.
This seems to apply sometimes to single people in general. Now, it's true that a single person can sometimes naturally become more eccentric than someone with a family simply because you naturally mold your life around your own interests. You don't have to provide a stable routine for children, for instance, or compromise for other people in the family. But the show seemed to go a step further and make that common assumption that single=stunted and childless=childlike.
This is something that used to come up a lot in LOTR--I remember always getting really annoyed when anyone would suggest that Frodo was single due to the ring's influence which "kept him from growing." Obviously on one level this just annoyed me because I'm single too, but I think it was more than that. Throughout history there have always been many people who didn't get married and have children, who had to fashion their life around other things (particularly in times in history where there was a shortage of one of the sexes, like after a big war). Those people have always been an important part of any society, contributing along with everyone else, and I guess it surprises me when people casually reveal a kind of prejudice about it. As if the single people are failed marry people, the childless failed parents--certainly that the single people aren't the "grown-ups" of the society, which implies they're being taken care of by the parents, somehow.
Now, marriage and children are two things that seem attractive to me. I just pretty much accepted very early on that they obviously weren't so attractive to me that they'd ever be a priority. If they happened they happened, but I probably wasn't putting as much effort into making them happen as I did into making other things happen. But that never made me feel like I had a life that was any less of a life than anyone else. It’s a frightening thought how many people throughout history get written off through this idea, or put on some lower level of experience. You only get one life to live, isn’t it better than people can fashion many different shapes out of it?
That was the thing with Larry. He's an odd guy, but he's also a unique guy. His life might not be for everyone, but then it's not like he's proselytizing about it. Why not just accept that you have this one interesting friend who has this life? Part of what's so ironic about the whole thing, after all, is that Alan is the one worried his sons will be this guy, so who perhaps feels sorry for this guy....and yet where are any signs that Larry is so much less happy than widower Alan? Sure Alan has Don and Charlie--but so does Larry. Larry just has them as friends instead of grown sons, and has never expressed any desire to have them as sons. In fact Larry very often is the character excited over some new thing he's thought or discovered. Of the two Alan seems to spend far more time worrying over what he *should* want or what he *should* have. So what exactly is the fear Larry represents? It's just apples and oranges. Only I get the feeling the Orange is less bothered by the apples than the apples are by the orange. Really the exact same thing goes into "having a life" whether you have children and are married or not. It's the approach rather than the chosen activities.
I guess the reason it seemed to relate to fandom in a small way is that fandom draws people interested in ideas and imagination. There’s plenty of married people in it, and plenty of people with children, but it still often carries with it the same casual dismissal. Rather than celebrating the passion involved it’s associated with misusing passion that would be better applied to other things. Not that words like sad, pathetic, unhealthy and wanky can’t ever honestly apply to fandom/fandomers-it can. But I think it gets overused or is used carelessly, without anyone really wanting to think about why it’s being used-which is I think was going on with Larry on that particular ep of Numb3rs.