the state of me
Someone asks me which Doctor is the best Doctor. After some waffling about my general lack of familiarity with earlier Doctors and the qualification that "my favorite" does not equal "the best," I write this in fairly quick response:
But--at the moment, anyway--my favorite Doctor is the Eleventh. You probably have some idea of why that is [given my flailing to this person about Eleven], but the very short version is that I cannot imagine Ten (or to a lesser extent Nine) being described as kind. The Oncoming Storm, sure. "Fire and ice and rage," absolutely. But kind? That's Eleven's province--and though he can be crotchety and oblivious, though he can be scarily manipulative and make terrible decisions, it's almost always with the best of intentions and often with a broken heart (or two). There are many small things I love about Eleven--like the way Matt Smith plays him as young-and-old, or the way he sometimes seems surprised by his own emotions, or the way his reactions to things sometimes do actually seem to come from another planet--but the biggest is that, arrogant though the Doctor is and probably always will be, Eleven still takes the time to comfort and to care about people, and approaches the world with a tender heart rather than a closed-off one. He's broken, but--unlike Ten or Nine--doesn't use that brokenness as a shield or as an excuse.
And yet I have no words at all for my emotional state at the moment, even though I keep trying to grasp for them--as though writing my way into that state would help me figure out what it is. So far the only word I can muster is "flat," for all sorts of reasons: meetings with advisors and job-market-meeting organizers, mostly, and specifically some questions I was asked to consider in both.
Basically: how am I supposed to make informed, thoughtful decisions about academia and my life in it when I just feel so tired and stifled that all I want to do is run away from it?
But--at the moment, anyway--my favorite Doctor is the Eleventh. You probably have some idea of why that is [given my flailing to this person about Eleven], but the very short version is that I cannot imagine Ten (or to a lesser extent Nine) being described as kind. The Oncoming Storm, sure. "Fire and ice and rage," absolutely. But kind? That's Eleven's province--and though he can be crotchety and oblivious, though he can be scarily manipulative and make terrible decisions, it's almost always with the best of intentions and often with a broken heart (or two). There are many small things I love about Eleven--like the way Matt Smith plays him as young-and-old, or the way he sometimes seems surprised by his own emotions, or the way his reactions to things sometimes do actually seem to come from another planet--but the biggest is that, arrogant though the Doctor is and probably always will be, Eleven still takes the time to comfort and to care about people, and approaches the world with a tender heart rather than a closed-off one. He's broken, but--unlike Ten or Nine--doesn't use that brokenness as a shield or as an excuse.
And yet I have no words at all for my emotional state at the moment, even though I keep trying to grasp for them--as though writing my way into that state would help me figure out what it is. So far the only word I can muster is "flat," for all sorts of reasons: meetings with advisors and job-market-meeting organizers, mostly, and specifically some questions I was asked to consider in both.
Basically: how am I supposed to make informed, thoughtful decisions about academia and my life in it when I just feel so tired and stifled that all I want to do is run away from it?