Time Enough at Last

There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion. It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.

—Sherlock Holmes, “The Naval Treaty”

I’m trying to put more of a distance between myself and politics these days. I can’t stop following them; I’m too attached to the whole thing for that. But just as I have a tendency to think of having a boyfriend as the go-to thing that will make my life better, I need to stop thinking of everything in religious and political terms. When I was in college, I noticed that I had a tendency to do that when analyzing Shakespeare. The fun of Shakespeare is that you analyze it from virtually any angle, be it gender politics, historicization, metatextual elements, you name it, it’s probably there. But if you get too deep into politics, it just becomes depressing. I knew the Republicans were going to sweep the midterms. And without even bothering to read the commentary from right-wing pundits and politicians on it, I know that they’re going to talk about how they’re “taking back America” and all that other stupid shit they said when the same thing happened in 2010. There’s nothing I can do about it, and that’s that. Because change takes time. And their victory has more to do with the public’s disillusionment and their own gerrymandering than anything else.

People talk about how quickly high school flies by. Or college. Or life. The thing is that it’s always easy to say that about something once it’s over. Just as it’s easy to become attached to your money because every amount is small after you’ve spent it, every length of time looks short after it’s over. But four years is a significant length of time. It doesn’t just fly by, and the people who say it does are looking at it through the lens of nostalgia. These days, I’m just trying to make a living and hopefully have something resembling a healthy social life. It’s funny. Ten years ago, I felt like I was slamming my head up against a brick wall. I kinda felt that way four or five years ago. Depression has that way of shrinking your worldview so that all you can see is how shitty everything is and how difficult it is just to get up and shower and eat breakfast and shit. So I can’t really say “It gets better”, because my social life, romantic life, professional life, and various other aspects are nowhere near where I want them to be. But I want to see the next ten, twenty, thirty, or 200 years if I can.

I’m looking for a second job now. My savings and my income from my current job will hopefully last me up through December, but after that, it’s hard to tell. I’m hoping to make it back to New York for a week or so sometime in January so I can see old friends and visit old haunts, but that would require both getting a week off work and saving up the money. God, I miss NYC. People say they’re going home when they visit their families; New York is home for me. I applied for a job this week and didn’t get it. No biggie, I guess. It’s the same store that sells kitchen utensils and appliances at which I interviewed several months ago. I gave a great interview, but they gave the job to someone else. They don’t necessarily look for people who want the job and are qualified, do they? They told me that I could reapply for a temporary job during the holiday season. I took this to mean that they would keep me in mind for that, but obviously, they didn’t. I should know better than to get my hopes up by now.

I try not to let things get under my skin, but sometimes, I can’t help it. I got into an argument with some dbag not too long ago who called me an “insufferably pompous dudebro”. Wow, that got personal fast. And all I said was that I hate Taylor Swift. I guarantee you that I did not say anything half as harsh about this person, but I think what drives me nuts about these people is that they seem to think that because there is nothing stopping them from doing something, that means they should go ahead and do it. I don’t get that. I don’t understand why hating Taylor Swift makes me a misogynist rather than a misanthrope, and I don’t understand how applying the misanthrope label to myself makes me a faux-edgy dudebro. I guess the reason I’m fixating on this is because I could tell that a lot of people sided with him. The internet baffles me sometimes. Taylor Swift once countered a criticism made of her by Tina Fey by saying that there’s a special place in Hell reserved for women who don’t support other women. Because being a feminist means agreeing with every other woman about everything, and hating an individual woman, even in a tongue-in-cheek way, makes you a misogynist. Got it.

Most of the people I argue with seem to think that it’s wrong to act like people are different. But people are different. That doesn’t mean you should treat them differently. It’s offensive to tell other people that the labels they apply to themselves are meaningless because if you see it as a part of your identity, then anybody who tells you otherwise is robbing you of your individuality. Please do not act as if the key to recognizing everyone as an individual is to tell them that all labels are meaningless. Because then, you’re acting like everyone is the same. And you don’t get to decide for me what makes me me. If I believe that my astrological sign means something (I don’t, but bear with me), then that’s my goddamn business. I like Italian food. There, that’s a label that I’ve chosen for myself. And it means something, because not everybody does (just people with good taste). Am I making sense here?

If I had to choose a spirit animal, I’d go with snake. I’m weird, I know.

Games People Play

I have a hard time just uprooting myself and moving to another place. I get too attached to my current place, even if I was the one who was trying to move all along. I’m getting settled in my new place (or at least trying to) and it’s difficult, because I keep going back to my old neighborhood (sometimes even popping by my parents’ place for a little while when they’re not around) just so I can eat at a place I liked or something. Hopefully, that will dissipate with time, because I still go by my old college town semi-regularly and, when I moved from Manhattan to Queens, I kept going back to Manhattan, often just to hang out for a while. (Also to get away from my psychotic roommate. My current roommate mainly just lies on the couch and watches TV, so we’re getting along okay so far.) What I’m saying is: I’m lonely, please smother me with compliments. No seriously, what I’m saying is: Change is hard.

I think part of the reason I’ve been watching more horror movies over the past couple years is that I’m trying to learn my limits. I’m not sure why some stuff disturbs me or just turns me off and other stuff doesn’t. I got through Audition okay. I’m not sure how much I liked it, but I can see that there was craft involved. I really didn’t like Eraserhead. Whether or not that is a horror film is debatable, but David Lynch has never been easy to categorize, so I feel we might as well call some of his films horror. Eraserhead in particular is polarizing. As somebody else said, nobody has ever walked out of that film saying, “It was okay, but…” It’s a movie that tries as hard as it can to nauseate you and make you feel really weird and icky, and it succeeds, I suppose, but I have no idea what the fucking point of that was. Strangely enough, I had no problem sitting through The Lords of Salem and Saw. (I didn’t like Saw, but it wasn’t hard to watch.) I found the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre to be a well-made film that I have no desire to see again. Its influence is undeniable, but again, what was the takeaway?

Maybe I’m trying too hard to find meaning or subtext in everything. I don’t know. What I do know is that I can’t seem to find the time for everything that I want to do. The result is that my brain feels very crowded, which is frustrating, because it means that I have to tell the screaming voices up here that they can’t always get what they want, and they don’t like that very much. It makes them scream louder, which is upsetting to me, because I miss the days where I could wake up, do shit for a while, and then go to bed without feeling as if my gray matter was going to break through my skull and plaster itself all over my wall. Like I said, it’s noisy up here. My mother told me she’s worried that I’m spending too much time alone, which might be true, but her announcing it to me as if it just occurred to her struck me as her trying to take credit for something that I already acknowledged. I still don’t know who reads this thing, but I’ll keep typing as long as anybody cares.

I have a lot of projects right now. I also have a lot of little errands to run and tasks to perform, from changing my address on my Economist subscription to checking on the status of my voter registration. (I was supposed to get a voter’s guide a little while back, but I still haven’t gotten it. Maybe my registration didn’t go through or something? I don’t know. I did it on the DMV’s website. It would be a bummer to miss out on the midterms, because if there’s one thing that drives me nuts, it’s voter apathy. The Democrats benefit when more people vote; the GOP benefits when only their people vote. Which strategy is more sustainable in the long term?)

I am definitely starting to think that there is such a thing as a Red State Liberal. I read a book last year called The Cross in the Closet by Timothy Kurek. It was a powerful, if slightly obvious memoir by a conservative Christian from Nashville who decided to spend a year living as a gay man to see what it was like. Of course, what he realized was that gay people and straight people aren’t all that different, labels don’t matter, blah blah blah, but the point is that even though Mr. Kurek and I probably wouldn’t agree on too many things political or theological, I think that’s just because we’re coming at it from different angles. Red State Liberals (not that Kurek is one, I’m just saying) and I might agree on political or religious things and still have fundamentally different worldviews. With Tim Kurek, it’s exactly the opposite. He wasn’t trying to figure out what it was like to be gay, just to understand why sexuality is such a big deal to some people. Since he had once been a homophobe himself, even calling a gay boss of his a faggot in front of customers, it’s obvious that he’s done a 180 on what he used to believe, and I applaud him for that.

Fall is my second-favorite month. Winter is my favorite. It’s tangential, but I think The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s most underrated plays. I’d put it just below Lear and Antony and Cleopatra. I like romances. This has been your stream of consciousness for now. I’m going to bed.

Things I Hate Doing, Part 6

6. Waiting

January and February tend to be the shitty months when it comes to movies. I used to go to the movies fairly regularly. Last year, I saw Thor, Ender’s Game, Life of Pi, Pacific Rim, Much Ado About Nothing, Catching Fire, Upstream Color, At Berkeley, Zero Dark Thirty, Django Unchained, Gravity, Blue Jasmine, 12 Years a Slave, and possibly one or two others that I’m forgetting. What is there to see now? I might see Inside Llewyn Davis if I can find a theater that’s still showing it. I would almost certainly like Her. The Lego Movie is supposed to be good, even if I’m not exactly pumped about it. And then there’s Frozen, which all of my musical theater and Disney friends are gushing about it. I’ll probably see it eventually.

Next month, The Grand Budapest Hotel comes out. Who wants to see that? If you didn’t raise your hand, something is wrong with you. A few weeks later, Veronica Mars comes out. You are not a proper geek if you are not excited for that. And a little after that, it’s Captain America. And while Game of Thrones is not a movie, it starts up again in early April. Fuck. Yes. What am I supposed to do until then? I don’t know. I guess I’ll just keep working my way through Elementary, Deep Space Nine, and The X-Files. There just ain’t much else out there right now, as far as entertainment is concerned.

5. Dealing With People

I’m pretty much always stressed out these days. This is hardly unusual, what with dealing with my employment and housing situation and all that. What’s really annoying is that even though I have so much free time on my hands, clearing enough space to focus on something like health care or just reading a good book remains tantalizingly difficult. So you can understand how much I hate it when people start fucking that up with all of their real world shit. Why, just this week, I was scheduled to work over 20 hours. Then I came into work and found out that my boss had cancelled one of my shifts because a drop in revenue had forced him to do so. For a guy with my limited income and prospects, that’s kind of a big deal. So instead of talking about that, I’ll talk about literature. What I went to grad school to study was essentially the intersection between science and policy. My goal was to become an analyst, so that I could explain heady concepts like climate change to the average Joe so that hopefully, they would be inspired to take action. My literary goals are somewhat the same.

“Penis.”

William Shakespeare is widely regarded as the most important writer in the English language. He also loved a good dick joke. Seriously, when I can’t figure out what something in one of his plays means, I just assume it’s sexual. 99% of the time, I’m right. I’ve always had difficulty merging the highbrow with the lowbrow. When I was in eighth grade, I spent most of my spring break watching Shoah, a nine-and-a-half hour documentary about the Holocaust. It was good stuff, but slow and very, very heavy. Some kids made fun of me for shit like that. I liked high art, even as I never forgot the value of a good stoner comedy. But these days, it seems you can be only one or the other: an average Joe, or an elitist. And that’s a problem. Who says you can’t be both?

4. Having Too Many Options

Anyone who has ever had the whole day to themselves knows what this is like. You can watch anything on Netflix, so what the fuck do you want to watch? Spotify has thousands of songs and artists you’ve never gotten around to listening to, so where the fuck to begin? Circling back to the whole discussion about literature, I would like to share with you one of my favorite pieces by one of America’s great humorists, a man who never tried to be anything other than charmingly immature. I am, of course, referring to Dave Barry.

Good title.

3. Looking for an Apartment

It looks like I’m going to have to start up on that again, and let me tell you, I am not exactly leaping at the chance. What kind of roommate am I going to end up with this time? A schizophrenic shapeshifter? A mad scientist who keeps severed body parts in the fridge and performs experiments on unwilling prostitutes? A sane, reasonable person who pays rent on time and stays the fuck out of my way? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! That last one was a joke, obviously. Boy, sometimes I just crack myself up.

This video has nothing to do with anything.

2. Listening to People

This sort of ties in with #5. The main point here is that I hate people who hear only what they want to hear. One guy at my job just got promoted to shift lead. I’d say good for him, except I don’t like him all that much and everyone else seems to. You know the feeling. He’s friendly and enthusiastic, but kind of an asshole. Even before he made shift lead, he was prone to bossing me around. Whereas my managers and the other shift leaders will ask nicely when they want something, he just tells me to do it, and if I challenge him, then of course, I’m holding everyone up and not being a team player. Eventually, his inflated sense of self-importance will most likely bite him in the ass. It’s not like I never need any of the more-experienced/higher-ranking employees to correct me on shit, only that I prefer it when they wait for me to ask for help first as opposed to jumping in to answer a customer’s question that I actually knew the answer to just because it took me a second to remember. It’s not your store, dude, and I know the customers almost as well as you do. So, you know, show some respect.

1. Letting Go

I’m talking about revenge, which, unfortunately, most of us don’t get to exact. Steve Martin has the right idea, though. I mean, yes, forgiving and being nice is all well and good, but why try that when you can take over the world?

I Hate Everyone

Let us talk, for a second, about the holidays. I barely even noticed they were approaching. My Christmas shopping consisted of buying books for a handful of people. I had neither the time nor the money to do much else. I worked on Christmas Eve and work again tomorrow. This job doesn’t allow for much vacation time. Since I was so broke when I went Christmas shopping, I had to charge everything for my credit card, and since my father pays the bill for that, he essentially bought his own Christmas present. At this time last year, I had five weeks off of school. I spent it sitting around working on my resume and cover letter. I also watched lots of movies. Netflix has an annoying tendency to make stuff unavailable for streaming with very short notice. A few months ago, they made every episode of Columbo available after inexplicably making on select episodes available for years. So there’s that.

“Hooray, we slipped f-bombs into a PG-13 movie!”

Let us now talk about The Hunger Games. It’s a pretty good series. I saw the second movie and finished the first book not too long ago. The second movie is definitely better than the first, although I have no idea about the books. Suzanne Collins is not a brilliant writer, nor is she a terrible one. The second movie essentially does everything the first did, except better. Haymitch was my favorite character in the first movie, because I wish I could work up the courage to stop giving a fuck. In the second, it’s Johanna, who is played by Jena Malone as a woman so fed up with being told to dance by the government that she’s not even trying to hide her contempt. Since the whole movie is about a totalitarian system that is slowly crumbling, the most relatable characters are the ones who see right through the whole thing.

I was starting to like New York, you know. It takes a long time to adjust to the rhythms of a different city, but New York is certainly more interesting than California. I’ve often wondered what it would be like to live in a rural area, but maybe that would just be really boring. Maybe I’m just tired of living on one side of the country or another. Keeping in touch with friends at that distance is difficult, but then again, it’s not like I have any friends. From the looks of things, I’m stuck here for a while. It could take close to a year to save up enough money to move back, especially with what I’m making. And I don’t particularly like California; it’s just hard to escape. So I think I’ll just keep moping about for the time being if you don’t mind. I don’t even seem to be getting much reading done these days. I know people who read, like, three books a week. How do they do that? I have only a part-time job, yet I still don’t have all that much free time.

Science fiction, to make a generalization, is a little bit more idea-driven than “literary” fiction. Suzanne Collins has been accused of stealing her premise from the Japanese book/film Battle Royale, but that really isn’t fair. The idea of teenagers being forced to kill each other until only one remains is essentially the same, but in Battle Royale, it’s part of a military experiment. The whole reality show/dystopian future aspect is completely missing. Anyway, there aren’t very many truly original storylines to begin with. The Matrix was great, but the question as to whether our world is nothing more than virtual reality has been around since Plato’s Cave. Sci-fi seems to lend itself more to accusations of stealing ideas than any other genre. (Harlan Ellison sues people left and right, but that’s because he just can’t help himself.) And of course, Shakespeare ripped off half of his plays from commedia dell’arte. So at a certain point, we have to call the whole thing off.

Could Katniss Everdeen be the first female action hero since Sarah Connor? (The Bride doesn’t count. She was more of an antihero.) She’s tough and feminine at the same time. (That her weapon of choice is a bow says something, but I’m not quite sure what.) I like Ellen Ripley a lot, and I feel that movies need more badass women in general, so if Katniss is to become a role model for young women, I’m okay with that. She’s no Mary Tyler Moore, but she doesn’t need to be. Cinema is not about realism, but escapism, so anyone who thinks that it’s harmful that so many teen girls are eating up a story in which one of their own shoots arrows through people can bugger off. Why do you even go to the movies?

I am, as usual, rather miserable these days. I just don’t have much going on, that’s all. I see movies on my own a lot, which is fine, but annoying, because it also reminds me that most of my friends don’t live close by. If I want to hang out with anyone, I usually have to go way out of my way to do it, provided that they can even find the time to see me. So it’s not entirely by choice that I spend so much time by myself. It’s just that when I am by myself, I like to be able to decide what to do. And when I go out, I like to have at least some agency in what I’m doing. Got it?

By the way, if Jennifer Lawrence is the new It Girl, I can live with that. She’s a good actress and, by all appearances, a very charming lady.

In My Secret Life

I feel that I haven’t written at length about Doctor Who in a long time. I don’t have too much to say, really. The 50th anniversary is coming out, and I hope I have the day off of work to watch it. It’ll be a big event, that’s for sure. I’m hoping it’s good, and not just an overstuffed mess. I’m on record not much caring for Matt Smith and respecting but not actually liking David Tennant all that much, but as usual, I’m in the minority, and if they can play off of each other well enough, I’ll consider it time well spent. It’s nice to see John Hurt in there, although—ugh—what the fuck is Rose doing there? Her character arc is over. I know that some people think that her romance with the 10th Doctor is some sort of grand, epic love story, but I want to beat those people to death with a copy of Antony and Cleopatra. She’s been brought back so many times that I’m tempted to kill Billie Piper just to make sure that it doesn’t happen again and I don’t even blame her for how much I hate her character.

So with that out of the way, I will go on a nerdy digression that will make no sense whatsoever to those of you who aren’t Whovians. I feel that Tomb of the Cybermen is due for a reappraisal. It was thought lost for many years and garnered a reputation as one of the all-time greats. Then it was unearthed in the early ’90s and suffered quite a backlash. I think it’s time for a bit of a backlash against the backlash. It’s far from perfect, but the moments that work far outnumber the ones that don’t. For one thing, Troughton is awesome, and the scene where he consoles Victoria about the death of her father is one of the finest moments in Who history. The Cybermats look silly and Toberman is a horribly racist caricature, but his character still has a moving arc, fighting back against the Cyber-conversion to eventually save the day.

The momentum does stall a bit in the last two episodes, but I think people who criticize it for having plot holes are missing the point. The Cybermen intended the facility to basically be a hibernation facility for the ones inside to hang out until, I don’t know, Cyber Central Control needed them or something. They filled it with puzzles to entice the curious (the Doctor), but when the space crew wakes them up, they realize that the only one of them who will make a good Cyberman is Toberman. So they kill the dude who thought he could team up with the Cybermen once they were reawakened (there’s always somebody like that in a story like this) and set about converting Toberman so they can kill the others. In the end, the Doctor and the others escape and the Cybermen go back to hibernating because that’s what they were there for in the first place. It does make sense if you are willing to overthink it (which, of course, I am).

Did you get all that? Good. There’s a test. And yeah, the ending is anticlimactic, but somehow, that kind of works for me. It’s like they’re still there…waiting for someone else to disturb them. That’s almost scarier than if they had kept chasing the Doctor and the others. Kind of like a monster movie.

Oh, and this makes me swoon. It’s also very funny. I think my favorite is the dude from Lilo & Stitch. Peter Pan looks like such a sexy twink. After years of Disney Princesses who look like perfect Barbie dolls, I have to say that I am rather turned on by somebody giving the other half of the population a little eye candy.

Let’s talk about classic science fiction for a second. In literature, the big three are Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein. I’m a big fan of the first and only slightly less so of the second, but still unsold on the third. His writing is good; his politics are abhorrent. Starship Troopers is fascist. I guess some people admire it as a portrait of a society gone horribly, horribly wrong, but it troubles me that the guy who wrote the book seems to have honestly believed that that was the way to go. I also read Stranger in a Strange Land. To some people, it’s a brilliant countercultural document, but the ideas in it struck me as silly and dated. Maybe I’m just grumpy. (I also dislike Easy Rider even though so many think it’s a masterpiece. When I mused that perhaps you had to have been alive in the ’60s to get it, my mother and father both assured me that no, you didn’t, because they thought it was stupid, too.)

It’s possible that I’m missing something. Heinlein is one of those people who you almost have to respect, even if you don’t entirely like him. He was so influential and beloved that he can’t be written off by any serious science fiction fan. (My opinion of him is also tainted by the awful Starship Troopers movie, which set out to satirize fascism and cheesy 50s sci-fi but ended up hewing too close to what it was trying to mock. Some will say that that just makes the movie that much more brilliant, but…they’re wrong.) So I guess I’ll have to pick up something else by him eventually.

I’m going to leave this blog without an ending. If it seems like a collection of disorganized thoughts, oh well. It’s the internet. My dreams are essentially a bizarre hodgepodge of futuristic machines and naked men these days, so that seems fitting. Here’s a funny video.