On Holiday in Scotland – Edinburgh

[This should have been posted a long time ago, but I've been fretting and worrying at it, so we've now been back from Scotland two full months and more, and not much progress has occurred. So much for my resolve to start posting punctually once a week....]

My romance with Scotland goes back to age 11. Ever since I read Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped in 5th grade, I have wanted to go to Scotland. That Alan Breck! With his annoying attitude of superiority, his bravado, his braggadocio, his fierce pride in being a Highlander, his reckless courage in the face of danger, his deep loyalty to his young friend David Balfour that overcomes even their difference in politics (he's a Jacobite, who supports the claims of the House of Stewart to the throne of Scotland, while David's a Whig who's loyal to King George). I could imagine no one more exciting as a companion for an adventure. And the landscape! All those crags, and promontories, and heaths, and bogs, and barren islands! That landscape was as much a character in the book as all the eccentric figures who put in an appearance. Finally, the Scots dialect! Who couldn't love: "'David,' [Alan] cried, 'David, are ye daft? I cannae draw upon ye, David. It's fair murder.'" Och, it's fair poetry!

Later, I read Sir Walter Scott, and saw Local Hero, and, much later, learned how to do Scottish Country Dancing in New York City. While learning the intricacies of the pas-de-basque or the petronella figure, I would listen to all those Scottish dialects coming out of those Scottish expatriate mouths, and yearn for the Motherland, even though it wasn't my motherland.

So I and the kids and my son's friend are now on holiday in Scotland. It's a dream come true for  me, a long cherished desire. For the first week, we rented a cottage in the Lothians, near the village of West Linton; now we're finishing up in a flat in Glasgow, on the edge of Glasgow Green. Neither of these is the Highlands, but they will certainly do. The cottage was on the property of a larger house, called Slipperfield Cottage, owned by the warm and congenial Kilpatricks, and had its own private woods and loch (I haven't yet figured out how large a body of water has to be to be considered a loch, but this one is the size of a middling pond), and is surrounded by farmland on all sides.

Rock wall near West Linton

Scottish cattle near Slipperfield Cottage

Now, I grew up in the Midwest, so I know farmland. But this farmland is to the farmland of my childhood what Stir- ling Castle is to an East Central Illinois split-level brick ranch house. It is wild. It is craggy and steep. It is framed by heather, and thistle, and wind-blasted trees. There are tumbledown rock walls, and rusted barbed wire, and shaggy cattle placidly chewing the cud. Grey clouds pile up at the top of a hillside, then come boiling down the side, bringing torrential downpours of rain that just as suddenly stop. Sheep fan out on intensely green, impossibly steep hillsides. Craggy men, to match the craggy landscape, stride by in thigh-high olive green wellies, taking their wee dog for a walk (and if you think the word "wee" is cutesy, you haven't heard it coming out of the mouth of red-faced, square-jawed, yellow-toothed Scottish farmer with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth).

Since we arrived during the last week of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival,  and I hadn't planned ahead, there were no rental cars available with automatic transmission. In the U.K., it's sort of a mark of ineptitude if you can't drive a standard transmission, so I had to explain over and over, at each subsequent rental counter, with mounting embarrassment, that, as a pathetic American driver, I actually needed a car with automatic transmission. Finally, I found one, but the rental price was nearly one and a half times the rental for my cottage. I gave up, and we decided to throw ourselves on the mercy of public transportation. As it was, this was perfect: we got a tranquil hour-long bus ride into Edinburgh and back each day, with the magnificent scenery unfolding around us, and I was spared the white knuckle experience of driving on steep, impossibly narrow roads at impossibly high speeds, on the left-hand side of the road. All for less than £20 a day.

Singers advertising a musical

My daughter and street magician

The Fringe Festival was so much fun: the streets packed with crowds of people from all over, street performers and musicians on every corner. Street vendors were hawking their wares, caricature artists were drawing people's likenesses, barkers were handing out flyers for shows later that night. The catalog of shows was nearly an inch thick. We tried to figure out how to get tickets at the half-price booth, but the process was so difficult, and you had to know exactly what you wanted to see, so we eventually gave up and picked up a booklet advertising free shows. We eventually managed to find a couple of free comedy shows that were rated PG (by far the most common rating was 18+, as the raunch and profanity factors were high in these shows). My son and his friend were a little dubious: if the shows were free, how could they be good? And if they were PG, how could they not be other than childish?

Chris Turner

Well, the boys were wrong. The two shows we picked at random were both excellent. One was a comic play by an ensemble cast from London performed in the basement of a Mexican restaurant (every possible open space is commandeered as a performance space during the Festival); the other was a set of three English stand-up comedians performing in a tiny room above a bar. We the audience were seated with our knees up against the backs of the people in front of us, the people in the front row nearly toe-to-toe with the comedians. The piece de resistance at the end was a freestyle rap performed by one of the comedians, Chris Turner, who incorporated five random words from the audience into his rap: in our case, Viking, handbag, harpist, jellybean, and utilitarianism. I can't figure out how he managed to think so fast on his feet, find all the rhymes, make sense, make clever jokes, and stay on the beat. In one portion, he used the word "slag" (offensive British slang term for a woman of easy virtue) to rhyme with handbag, all the while apologizing (in rhyme) for his use of the offensive word.

Kids touching the nose of Greyfriars Bobby

In addition to the Fringe, we took in many of the more touristy sights of Edinburgh, including Edinburgh Castle, the Botanical Gardens, Greyfriars Kirk (and the nearby Greyfriars Bobby Pub, with its bronze statue of Greyfriars Bobby outside, the wee faithful terrier that sat patiently on his dead master's grave for fourteen years until dying himself in 1872. That seems a suspiciously long life for a Skye Terrier, but what do I know? The statue is cute, its nose is rubbed shiny by all the tourists, and we had to queue up just to get a chance to take a picture, after a young couple from England, a large tour group of Japanese, and the extended family of some South Americans.

Distorted room at Camera Obscura

We also went into the Camera Obscura, a museum built in 1853 with a real camera obscura on the fifth floor, the pinhole apparatus being attached to the roof with a swivel, and reflecting its picture of the city onto a white wooden bowl in the middle of the room, which we all croweded around while our Swedish (yeah, it's a summer job) guide explained what we were seeing. Unfortunately, the day was overcast, so the picture was dim, but I still got a sense of what those mid-19th-century people must have felt seeing their city in miniature, flags waving, tiny tourists walking across even tinier cobblestones. Downstairs, there were rooms full of holograms, optical illusions, and mirrored mazes. There was a room that looked like a normal room from one central position, but, once you entered it, it was clear that it was terribly distorted. My son and I stood in two corners of the room (see above, and know that my son is taller than I am), and the effect to the onlooker was surreal–we look like we're built to different scales. But both the floor and ceiling are tilted, and those windows along the back wall are not square at all.

Then there was the bridge across the "Spinning Vortex" (spinning tubular walls with lights), which, though absolutely stationary, felt as if it were tilting drunkenly to the side. We staggered across the bridge, clinging to the railing, feeling as if we were in imminent danger of falling, though nothing was moving at all. If you closed your eyes, the sensation of falling vanished instantly. My daughter and son and his friend went across multiple times, laughing with glee; after a second time across, I felt faintly ill, and watched from the sidelines after that. Amazing how suggestible the human brain is.

Old Town Bookshop in Edinburgh

On our last full day in Edinburgh, I insisted that we visit a bookshop specializing in rare and antique books, with a special emphasis on Scottish authors and Scottish history. I found a whole shelf of leather-bound Scott novels printed on tissue-thin paper, and had a choice of a three- or a five-volume set of the collected poems of Robert Burns. I had no idea the man was so prolific. I settled on the three-volume set. While I love Burns, there is a limit to how much I Burns I can take in one sitting.

So now this blog entry has stretched ridiculously long and ridiculously late, so I am cutting it off here and making the Glasgow part of the trip a separate entry. In Burns's famous words, "The best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley." Cheers! (Scottish all-purpose word that seems to mean hello, thanks, and good-bye, depending on the situation)

The Twelfth Doctor

A little over a week ago, BBC One made it official: Peter Capaldi has been chosen to portray the title character on its long-running show, "Doctor Who." He is the twelfth actor to pilot the TARDIS, and the first Doctor to start off another half-century of the show. The fiftieth anniversary of the show, which began in 1963, less than a year after I was born, is coming up fast, and some kind of top-secret celebration in televisual form is being planned for November. But I'll write more on that anniversary in the fall.

Peter Capaldi

Peter Capaldi, who will be taking over from Matt Smith, the youngest actor ever to play the Timelord (age 26 when he started in 2009), is the same age (55) as the first and oldest actor to play him, William Hartnell. This has reportedly stirred up a storm of protest among the younger fans who only came to "Doctor Who" this millenium (see the article on the Daily Mail Online) and who think he's too old to play the Doctor. To them I say: rubbish! I have been more than a little dismayed at seeing younger and younger Doctors, and I think Capaldi will be excellent in the role. He's a comic actor, but he can play dramatic parts, and he has more than a little edge and quite a bit of whimsy--a perfect mix for the Doctor. He has just enough of an eldritch appearance to make one think he could possibly be an alien. While the Doctor should not be conventionally handsome, there has been a tendency in the revival to make him more sexually appealing--there has to be a reason all those young people drop everything and run away with him across space and time--and here again Capaldi fills the bill. He has a certain magnetism, a way of commanding the room with his gaze (ethereal and chilling as the angel Islington in the television mini-series version of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere), a facility for comedy and improvisation (as the abrasive and foul-mouthed spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker in the half-scripted, half-improvised series "The Thick of It"), and an ability to show vulnerability (as OCD- suffering Head of News Randall Brown in the second season of "The Hour"). He is the third Scot to take on the role of the Doctor (the other two being Sylvester McCoy (Doctor #7) and David Tennant (Doctor #10) ; it will be interesting to see if they allow him to keep his accent. So far, only Christopher Eccleston (Doctor #9) spoke in anything but the King's English (By far one of my favorite bits of dialogue is when Companion Rose Tyler says to Eccleston's Doctor, "You're an alien? You sound like you're from the North." Doctor, defensively: "Lots of planets have a north!").

TARDIS exterior

TARDIS interior (current)

All right, so what's all the fuss about? Trying to describe the appeal of "Doctor Who" to my friends who aren't fans is almost impossible. Either you buy into the premise or you don't. And what is the premise? All you Whovians out there who are reading this can skip ahead three paragraphs while I explain the show as concisely as I can. The Doctor is a two-hearted, highly intelligent, humaniform alien from Gallifrey, a planet in a distant galaxy, from a species called Timelords, who have learned to navigate through space and time in vehicles they call TARDISes. TARDIS is an acronym for "Time And Relative Dimension In Space" (How come Timelords speak English and use a Roman alphabet? All right, go away! You ask too many questions!); they are bigger on the inside (something about folding space within–stop asking so many questions!); and they have a chameleon circuit that can cause its exterior to blend in with its surroundings. The Doctor's chameleon circuit has been stuck since the sixties, however, so it always remains a police call box (Wait, if he's so smart, why can't he fix it? That's it, leave the room, please!).

Timelords have a clever little trick to outwit mortality: whenever death approaches, as long as their body remains more or less intact, they can regenerate, transforming into a completely new person with an utterly new personality. This allowed William Hartnell, the original Doctor, to leave the show when he got tired of it, but for the show to go on with a completely different actor at the helm. Very handy, that! Originally, it was claimed that Timelords can regenerate up to a maximum of twelve times, allowing for thirteen total incarnations, but they seem to have jettisoned that rule some time ago. A small group of diehards insist that there can only be two more Doctors, but we all know he will go on forever, or at least until the show is cancelled again.

Timelords have a non-intervention policy with regard to events in the universe–they're not allowed to mess with time and causality to change outcomes (sort of the Timelord version of the Prime Directive from "Star Trek"). The Doctor, however, is a renegade Timelord, who stole his TARDIS, and he interferes all the time, dashing about the universe and pretty much saving it a hundred times over (For a hilarious spoof of this, watch Rowan Atkinson in Steven Moffat's "Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death," a comedy sketch written and aired for the Red Nose Day charity telethon in 1999). He has a name, but it's apparently a secret and he only ever introduces himself as The Doctor. He usually travels about with human (he has a soft spot in his hearts for Earth) or alien companions, and for a while with a female Timelord (oh all right, I'll say Timelady, but it sounds stupid), Romana. These Companions are stand-ins for us, the audience: they are the means by which the Doctor explains his actions and relates to us as human beings. The Doctor has a nemesis, supposedly a childhood friend, who only goes by the epithet of The Master, and who is all about destruction and enslavement. There is also a cast of rotating baddies: the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Sontarans, the Autons, etc. Believe me, if you're not a fan, you're not going to care.

Tom Baker as The Doctor

Okay, now we're up to speed. Before we proceed any further, however, let me say for the record that I was not always a Whovian. As a girl, I was a Trekkie, not at all interested in "Doctor Who." In high school my friend Diane was the Whovian par excellence; she even knitted herself one of those 12-foot long scarves that Tom Baker's Doctor (#4) wore. Actually, there was apparently also a 14-foot version used from Season 12 on (for directions on making these and other variants, there is a handy-dandy website dedicated to this, with minute instructions about yarn weight and colors. Really. People do this). No, I started watching in college, when the president one year of our science fiction club, Katherine, was a complete Doctor Who fanatic. She had dreams of being the first female Doctor. My viewing started out casually enough as mockery of the cheesy special effects (you could practically see the wires used to pull the miniatures across tiny fake alien landscapes), the ridiculous electronic music, and the hilarious alien costumes. When bubble wrap was new, they wrapped one of the aliens in this to simulate bumpy skin. I don't remember how it came across at the time, but when I watched this episode recently with my children, we kept gasping with laughter every time the aliens appeared.

But then, gradually, as time wore on, I started to care. I had favorite Companions. I had a favorite Doctor (Peter Davison, #5)! The weird, otherworldly synthesized title theme music could make my pulse race as I gathered with the other faithful in the living room of the dorm to watch (almost no one had a t.v. in her room). We would exchange little catchphrases. We would wield toilet plungers at each other and intone in gravelly monotones: "Exterminate!" Yeah, you kind of had to be there....

Along with the president of our college science fiction club, there are many who feel that the time has come for the Doctor to be something other than a straight British white male.  In his Aug. 6 Rolling Stone article, Peter Holslin addresses this issue directly: "...as far as the story goes, it's hardly a stretch to imagine the Doctor as a woman, person of color or LGBT." In an Aug. 6 New York Times op-ed piece, Jennifer Finney Boylan, a transgender English professor at Colby College, compares the lack of imagination in casting the Doctor to the glass ceilings faced by candidates to the papacy, or to the United States presidency. Yet the progress we've made on those fronts gives her hope that even a show stuck in the '60s, just as the TARDIS is stuck in the shape of a '60s-era police call box, can crash its way through that glass ceiling: "As the producers think about whom they want to take on the role next, they should keep in mind the way people’s hopes are lifted when they see someone breaking the glass ceiling, even when it’s for something as seemingly trivial as a hero on a science-fiction program. Equal opportunity matters—in Doctor Who’s universe as well as our own."

John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness

Freema Aygeman as Martha Jones

I would agree with many of the sentiments expressed above, with a few reservations. One, the Doctor has to be British. It's a quintessentially British show. Would you watch if he were American? French?? Really? You would? I think not. Two, the Doctor is a man, just as Romana (Doctor #4's Timelady companion) was a woman throughout all of her regenerations, and River Song (who is human and not a Timelady at all, but it's complicated), remains a woman/girl throughout all of her regenerations. But, three, yes, why not? Why can't the Doctor be black, or Asian, or gay? It would be a refreshing change of pace.

Russell T. Davies

Russell T. Davies, when he was executive producer and lead writer of the show from 2005-2010, made sure to diversify the cast in just such refreshing ways. Davies, who rose to British reknown with his show "Queer as Folk," a fictional recreation of his experiences in the Manchester gay scene, gave us Martha Jones, the Doctor's first African Companion; Donna Noble, the first Companion played by an actress who was older than the actor playing the Doctor; and my son's favorite Companion of all time, the flamboyantly charming and pan-sexual Captain Jack Harkness. Under Davies's tenure, people the Doctor encountered along the way were Indian, African, Asian, Caucasian, and Cat. There were lesbian and gay couples (married ones, even!); there were male and female and alien-of-indeterminate-gender love interests for Captain Jack to flirt with ("Can't I say hello to anyone?"). The Companions all had families, messy private lives, and people who loved them and worried about them.

Steven Moffat

Since Steven Moffat took over as executive producer and lead writer in 2010, there has been a definite narrowing of the social spectrum of "Doctor Who." While some traditionalists have welcomed this as a return to what they see as the Ur-"Doctor Who," I really enjoyed the fresh vision Davies brought to the show, and I miss the diversification of the cast. I especially liked the incorporation of the Companions' families into the storylines, and the sexualization of the Doctor. In his original incarnations, he was sort of neuter: a kindly uncle or older brother figure. Under Davies, the Doctor grew up, and developed a (heavily repressed) sexuality. Now Moffat is trying to shove him back into the closet, metaphorically speaking. Even though the Doctor never acts on his urges, he does seem to express a preference (heterosexual, thus far). I could easily see a gay Doctor being the next step in his evolution. Unfortunately, I'm not sure the viewing public is ready for that, and Steven Moffat is definitely not going to go in that direction.

Idris Elba

Paterson Joseph

So we're left with race. Specifically, it is high time for a black Doctor. Among male African-British actors of the correct age range, there are many possibilities: Idris Elba, Paterson Joseph, Shaun Parkes, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and David Harewood, to name a few. Paterson Joseph apparently lost out to Matt Smith in the last go-round (a mistake, in my opinion), and writer Neil Gaiman claimed on Tumblr that a black actor was offered the part of the Doctor in an earlier incarnation and turned it down (Aug. 7 Telegraph online article), but said he wasn't at liberty to reveal who it was (My guess, based on nothing at all, was that it was Idris Elba, who has become too much of a hot property since appearing on HBO's "The Wire" as Stringer Bell, and now with his own hit show in Britain, "Luther").

Shaun Parkes

Chiwetel Ejiofor

David Harewood

Although Harewood, Parkes, and Joseph have already appeared on "Doctor Who" as guest roles in other episodes, there is definitely precedent for subsequently casting one of them as the Doctor: Colin Baker (Doctor #6) first appeared as a minor role under an earlier Doctor. While these actors are on the younger side (except for Joseph), they all possess both a suitable gravitas and a certain dangerous, mad edge that is required for the persona of the Doctor.

So, while I look forward to seeing what Peter Capaldi does with the role, I hope the producers have the courage to look further afield in the Doctor's thirteenth incarnation, whenever that may take place.

All right, all right, this post has gone on quite long enough. Quite possibly I have wasted far too much time pondering an issue that has slim to no real-world repercussions. Except that I agree with Prof. Boylan, that role models matter, whether it's the Pope, the President, or a madman in a blue box.

Procrastination

I know I said I'd write a post on this theme a while back, but I kept putting it off. [See what I did there? Ha, that's called humor!]

Seriously, though: "Hi, my name is GeekMom and I am a procrastinator." If there isn't a Twelve Step Program for this, there ought to be. Although I can appeal to a Higher Power all I like, my affliction doesn't seem to improve. Only fear seems to work: fear of public humiliation, fear of not meeting a deadline, fear of the stern look of disapproval on an authority figure's face. I have to create my own deadline for these blog entries and be my own stern authority figure in order to get them out in a timely fashion.

If there's a way of putting something off, I will, especially if it involves the writing down of coherent thought, or the filling out of forms. Thank God for accountants, or I would be under investigation by the IRS for never filing my taxes. But there are many other things one can put off nearly endlessly: trimming the hedge, washing the kitchen floor, taking the pets to the vet,  getting the car inspected, sending thank-you letters, doing the laundry, writing a blog entry on procrastination.... Paradoxically, these can all be used as procrastination devices in turn for an even more onerous task, such as organizing one's office files. I find I never have a cleaner kitchen than when I'm preparing to do some filing.

Toad's To-Do List

I wasn't always a procrastinator. As a young child, I constantly drew up schedules for myself and followed them rigorously. I would cross out each item as it was accomplished, as Toad did in Arnold Lobel's story "The List" that appears in his book, Frog and Toad Together. In elementary school, I always did my assignments as soon as possible. My mother was suspicious that I never seemed to have homework, because I would do it during lunch and recess and leave it in my desk at school (Yeah, I was a serious nerd, even at age 7).

Once I got to junior high, smaller assignments would be done while having my milk and cookies after school at the kitchen table, larger assignments would be done a week in advance. I would wait until the deadline to hand them in, though, so I wouldn't provoke the jealous ire (or ridicule) of my classmates. By then I was getting an inkling that being a nerd was not going to be a social advantage.

By high school, however, I was starting to slip. I'd do the last of my trig homework at midnight, or finish copying a paper over at breakfast (back when papers were written in cursive in pen--only our term papers required a typewriter (What's a typewriter, you ask? Oh Lord, you're making me feel old!)). I'd find myself folding my laundry or sharpening all my pencils or making myself increasingly elaborate snacks as the night wore on, while successfully avoiding any actual work.

 Then, with college and its concomitant lack of parental supervision and parentally supervised bedtimes came the dreaded All-Nighter, with its many cups of coffee and bleary, staring eyes, as I racked a brain that had mysteriously gone blank in my frantic quest for tree imagery in As You Like It or examples of the commodification of women in Thackeray's Vanity Fair. And finally appeared the fair and bewitching apparition of The Extension. Oh joy! To be given a day, two days, a week extra in order to complete a paper! Of course, you had to grovel before the Dean, but I learned to take groveling to a high art. I once callously used the premature and tragic death of someone I slightly knew from high school as an excuse for why I couldn't finish the paper in time, overcome as I was with grief at his passing. Even now I squirm with shame as I make my confession. Yes, I was shameless back then. And I still ended up staying all night to finish the paper, as I wrote nothing at all in the intervening week of grace.

So why do I procrastinate, if it makes my life so miserable? Why do any of us procrastinate? Well, as I'm a word geek, let's start with the origins of the word. It comes from Latin, the pro- meaning "forward," and crastinus meaning "of tomorrow" and its first known use was in 1548 by Edward Hall in a non-pejorative sense, to describe events leading to a wedding between two illustrious families being delayed by agreement. It wasn't until the mid-eighteenth century, according to Ferrari, Johnson, and McCown in their book, Procrastination and Task Avoidance: Theory, Research and Treatment, that procrastination began to take on its current, negative connotations. Schraw, Wadkins, and Olafson, in their paper, "Doing the things we do: A Grounded theory of academic procrastination" (Journal of Educational Psychology, Feb 2007, 12-25), have stated that, for the putting off of a task to be considered procrastination, it must meet these three criteria: it must be counterproductive, needless, and delaying. The "delaying" bit seems obvious; the other two not quite as much, but, after some thought, it becomes clear that these other two conditions must also hold true if a delay is clearly to be called procrastination. If you delay finishing a task because there is a fire in the building, you cannot be said to be procrastinating. If you delay finishing a task because you want to bake chocolate chip cookies first, it is procrastination. There is a sense that all the attempted definitions of procrastination ultimately point to a sort of psychological disorder.

In James Surowiecki's review in the New Yorker of the collection of essays entitled The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination (ed. Andreou and White, Oxford: 2012),  he says:

You may have thought, the last time you blew off work on a presentation to watch “How I Met Your Mother,” that you were just slacking. But from another angle you were actually engaging in a practice that illuminates the fluidity of human identity and the complicated relationship human beings have to time. Indeed, one essay, by the economist George Ainslie, a central figure in the study of procrastination, argues that dragging our heels is “as fundamental as the shape of time and could well be called the basic impulse.”

 Wow. The Fluidity of Human Identity. The Basic Impulse. I like that. So when I put off working on this blog entry, I am only experiencing the flow of my own identity, and am succumbing to that basic human impulse–to delay as long as possible. It's not a psychological disorder–it's human nature!

There are attempts at a Freudian definition of procrastination as the use of the pleasure principle to avert the stress and anxiety caused by the deadline for a difficult task, and there is the physiological definition of it as a struggle between the prefrontal cortex, which is in charge of executive brain function--things like planning, impulse control, and attention--and the limbic system, which governs things like emotion, behavior, and motivation. This whole argument, though perhaps not rigidly scientifically explained, is discussed quite charmingly by a young British vlogger called Charlie McDonnell in the video below:

"Stop Procrastinating" from charlieissocoollike on YouTube

Charlie also gives helpful advice on how to avoid the temptation to procrastinate. This particular vlog entry, I might add, is about his inability to get to work on his video log, just as the subject of my blog is how I've been procrastinating on my blog. My, it's all so meta!

For me, however, procrastination has become a way of life. I have actually been accused of thriving on it, which makes me crazy, because I hate the feelings of stress and desperation induced by prolonged procrastination. On the other hand, there is something about the rapidly diminishing minutes that drives an adrenaline push to that final effort, and there have been times when the pressure of the time crunch has led me to make certain leaps in thinking that might not have occurred to me had I been working in a more leisurely manner. So maybe my accusers aren't entirely wrong about this. Procrastination: it's not all bad.

The World of "Being Human"

Like all geeks, I have my share of obsessions, things I fangirl about. "Fangirling"has emerged as a recent slang term to describe the outsize, overemotional reaction to people or things that are the object of the fangirl's obsession; the term is also used to describe gatherings (real or online) of like-minded females to discuss said obsessions at great length, or the incessant writing or gushing about them in any forum she can find. While the term fanboy exists as well, it doesn't seem to be as pejorative, or, at least, doesn't seem to imply the sheer sentimentality and swooniness that fangirling does.

So if you, Unknown Reader, will grant me the latitude, I will devote this post to fangirling about the British television show, "Being Human." This show has just completed its fifth and final season on BBC3, much to my and its fanbase's sorrow. Even The Guardian waxed indignant over the cancellation of the show in its March 8, 2013 blog posting. No, this is not just defensive citing of critical authority to justify my own crazed passion. Well, yes, actually, it is.

Here is the premise of the show: a werewolf, a vampire, and a ghost rent a flat together in Bristol. Sounds like the setup for a really dreadful joke, doesn't it? Which is precisely what I thought when I first heard of this program (or, since it's BBC, should I say, "programme"?) several years ago. I dismissed it as riding the wave of the Twilight- and "True Blood"-inspired madness, a cheap televisual knock-off of the lucrative teenage girl-focussed vampire/werewolf craze. But I kept hearing critical acclaim for the series, and I finally decided to give it a try so that I could mock it with a clear conscience.

I watched the first episode in the spirit of derision and was instantly completely hooked. Within a month or so I had watched all five seasons, the most recent ones in grainy, jumpy cuts on illegal YouTube posts uploaded in Great Britain. Thus, I became part of the national pandemic of binge-watching (the back-to-back watching of multiple episodes or entire television series in a short period of time), as decried by a July 2012 article in Slate. Would it have been better if I had waited a decent interval, say, a week, between consuming each episode? Undoubtedly. But I was in the grip of an addiction. In my defense, I did limit myself to one episode a day. Mostly.

Toby Whithouse

So, what exactly is the appeal of this quirky show? The writing, mainly, by the brainy, inspired, and mad Toby Whithouse. Each episode focuses on one of the main characters in turn, at the same time weaving in continuing plotlines for the other two, and each season has its own story arc. Rules get changed along the way (for example, in Season 1 a vampire threatens to bite the werewolf when he's in human form, whereas in Season 3 it's given out that werewolf blood is deadly poison to vampires), and there are minor inconsistencies here and there (for example, the inscription on Annie's gravestone changes), but for the most part the whole structure coheres beautifully. The show is by turns poignant, terrifying, hilarious, gory, creepy, uplifting, and tragic. And Whithouse leaves little room for transition: the shifting tones pile one on top of the other like waves on a beach. While I have seen it described in one place as a drama, and in another as comedy, the show evades all efforts to categorize it as one genre or another. In Season 1, episode 5, "Where the Wild Things Are," the final 10 minutes are a roller coaster of slapstick, white-knuckle chase scenes, tragedy, mysticism, low humor, surprise, and violence, ending in a cliffhanger that must have given the original viewers a week of agonizing suspense (sorry to be so enigmatic here, but I don't want to give anything away) before the ultimate resolution in episode 6.

Aidan Turner, Lenora Crichlow, Russell Tovey

Then there are the amazing actors. In the first three seasons, these consisted of: Lenora Crichlow playing Annie, the sweet, relentlessly upbeat ghost whose generosity of spirit manifests itself in the brewing of copious mugs of tea (none of which she can drink, as she's a ghost); Russell Tovey playing George, the jumpy, histrionic, fastidious werewolf who is in denial over his "condition" as he delicately calls it; and Aidan Turner playing Mitchell, the brooding, sexy Irish vampire with a dark and violent past who has sworn off blood and is making an effort to join the human race. Hence the title, "Being Human." The entire series is a reflection on what it means to be human, what it means to be a "monster," how we rationalize our actions, how much we can help what we do when it is part of our nature. Mitchell is constantly being criticized by his fellow vampires as acting counter to nature in his renunciation of blood; in "Being Human," this questioning of what is "natural" is the whole point of what it means to be a moral being. These monsters are social misfits, outsiders looking enviously in at the rest of society.

According to an interview by U.K. blogger Jason Arnopp, Whithouse claimed that he was originally asked to make a show about a group of friends who buy a house together. He wasn't terribly thrilled with the idea, but he started work on it, making the three characters a shy agoraphobe, a fastidious prig who loves order, and a recovering sex addict. After several months of frustrated tinkering with the script, he decided to give it a supernatural twist. Thus, the shy person became a ghost, the fastidious one a werewolf who is trying to distance himself to the thing that happens to him when the moon is full, and the sex addict a vampire who has abjured blood.

Original cast of "Being Human" in pilot

The pilot was one of six commissioned by BBC3, and it was rejected in favor of another show, "Phoo Attack" (I have no idea, either). Quick note here: since the Beeb is governmentally owned and is a public service entity, it can't just make pilots that are shopped around privately as the networks in the U.S. do. These six pilots were all publicly aired, and one was selected to be serialized. This show that "won" ended up not being very popular and was dropped early on. In the meantime, there had been growing enthusiasm for the "Being Human" pilot, with people writing in to the BBC and signing petitions, so BBC3 replaced "Phoo Attack" with "Being Human." Two of the original actors, Guy Flanagan as the vampire Mitchell and Andrea Riseborough as the ghost Annie, were either dropped or unavailable, and, thankfully, Turner and Crichlow replaced them. Tovey as George remained, for which I am grateful: George is the stable, decent center around which the troubled Mitchell and the flighty Annie revolve. The pilot seems to be completely unavailable for viewing, except for snippets that fans have uploaded to YouTube.

Season 5 cast: Tom, Alex, and Hal

In Season 2, Nina, a nurse turned werewolf, evolved from minor role to principal character, but then she, George, and Mitchell all vanished by the second episode of Season 4, and a new werewolf and vampire were added. Finally, Annie left at the end of Season 4, and a new ghost who entered the series near the end of Season 4 completed the (unholy) Trinity in Season 5. So the fifth and final season contained none of the original cast. Such overwhelming changes are usually indicators of the imminent death of a popular series; in this case, there was a sort of refreshing renewal. None of the new characters were pale imitations of the earlier ones; they were originals in their own right. The new cast comprised Damien Molony as Hal, the "posh," handsome, courtly vampire with OCD tendencies whose youthful appearance belies his 500-year-old medieval origins; Michael Socha as Tom, the caterpillar-browed, moody teenage werewolf with a nearly impenetrable Derby accent (at one point Hal even comments: "Are there subtitles for this conversation?"); and Kate Bracken as Alex, the cheeky Scottish tomboy, stuck forever in the girly clothes she died in, trying to make sense of her brutally shortened life.

Michael Socha, Damien Molony, Kate Bracken

So why do I love this show so much? Because it's mind-blowingly awesome! the fangirl in me wants to scream. But I'll try to give a more dignified and reasoned response. I love it because of the care that went into every line of dialogue, because of the show's schizophrenic nature–it can't decide whether it wants to be horror, sitcom, thriller, or morality play–because of how much the actors embrace their roles, especially Tovey, whose tortured screams and contorted, naked body signify both the physical torment and vulnerability he undergoes in his transformations to werewolf, as well as the mental anguish that leaving his humanity behind entails. Molony, too, with his endless obsessive rituals and twitching facial muscles to show the sheer effort it takes to keep the bloodlust in check, completely inhabits the character of Hal. When he finally does give in to his dark side, it's both terrifying and comic. Whithouse gives him a macabre, funny scene singing an Irving Berlin song as he converts a pub full of people he has just killed to vampires:

Hal sings "Puttin' on the Ritz" (mild spoiler)

Andrew Gower as Cutler

Even the villains are masterpieces of complexity: by turns charming, oily, pedantic, sadistic, pathetic, creepy, or just plain violent, but never one-dimensional or predictable. My personal favorite is Nick Cutler, the slimy solicitor vampire with a tragic back-story who tries to stage a PR coup for the vampires. He even sets up a focus group to bounce his ideas off of–genius! Unfortunately, the other vampires, lacking his vision, eat his focus group before he can collect enough data. One doesn't know whether to laugh uproariously as he tries to decipher the responses on the blood-spattered clipboards or to turn away in horror from the savaged corpses lying near their overturned plastic folding chairs. Both, I guess.

The final season is currently running on BBC America, but I don't have cable, so I'm waiting for the preordered discs that are supposed to ship some time in mid-August. It's bittersweet anticipation, because I know the series has been cancelled. Nonetheless, I'm readying my fangirl squeals of delight for the final showdown between good and evil. Or is it between the ordinary evil we can understand and ultimate, unfathomable evil? Is the condition of being human inevitably and inextricably bound up in causing harm to others, or can we emulate the monsters in this show and try to evade our own worser natures? The virtue lies in the trying, rather than in the succeeding.

[One final note: do not watch the American version of this show (SyFy channel), except for purposes of mockery. Although Toby Whithouse is named as one of the co-producers of that program, it's terrible in the writing and only adequate in the acting. After four episodes I couldn't bear to watch any further. Feel free to disagree with me, but you're wrong.]

The Nature of Desire

Archetype of Desire

Okay, not a terribly geeky subject, but even geeks have longings, right? Actually, what inspired this post is a book I just read by young adult writer and gay novelist David Levithan. Or perhaps I should say, novelist David Levithan, who writes mainly for young adults and happens to be gay. Thus his book combines two realms of the geek world I inhabit: young adult fiction and science fiction. So where does desire come into the picture? Well, I suppose there is always the perennial geek question: Why does no one desire me? But that risks sounding whiny and self-pitying, so we move on to the more interesting and universal questions:  Whence comes desire? And how is desire related to love?

David Levithan

 Levithan's first novel, Boy Meets Boy (2003), took the standard teen love story and gave it a gay twist. Perhaps his most well-known book, a collaboration with Rachel Cohn, was Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2006), which was made into a mildly popular indie movie of the same name in 2008, starring Michael Cera and Kat Dennings as the eponymous leads. The book I just read, every day (2012), is science fiction, of a sort.

In every day, the protagonist, A, is a being who inhabits a different person's body every day, for exactly 24 hours, then moves on to another body without any control of where he/she/it will end up (this problem with pronouns is a major crux of the book, but more on that later). No explanation is given for A's condition, and A her/himself is ignorant of her/his parentage and origins.

The only rules governing A's condition seem to be:

1. A will end up within a certain geographical radius–no more than a four-hour drive–of the last body.

2. A will land in a body that approximates A's actual age; so, for instance, when A was an infant, (s)he ended up in infant bodies; now that (s)he's a teen, in teenage bodies.

3. The body inhabited by A will only vaguely remember the events of the missing day, and A can control what those memories will be to some extent.

4. A can access memories of the current body (s)he is inhabiting, as well as her/his own memories, and A possesses to a limited extent all the skills and knowledge of the body (s)he is inhabiting.

5. A is helpless to prevent the change of bodies, or to direct where (s)he'll next end up.

So, interesting premise, right? It's actually quite bewildering for the reader; A helps us out by titling each chapter with the number of the day in her/his life, and by introducing us to the body for the day, complete with physical description and personality traits.

Still, that's not what's interesting about the book. The trouble starts when A falls in love, and has to convince the object of her/his love, a teenage girl named Rhiannon, that (s)he is the same person with each new encounter. Now, I don't want to give too much away, so I'll break away from the plot of every day and talk about the problem in the abstract.

When we fall in love, we fall in love with both a personality and a body, with both soul and physicality. It is generally accepted that the shallower among us fall in love with appearance only, the deeper with their beloved's essence. Yet can we separate those so readily? Many tales recount the story of how a young woman has to look beyond her lover's hideous exterior to discover the beautiful soul within: Beaumont's "Beauty and the Beast," the Grimms' "The Frog Prince," or the Greek myth of Psyche, where she believes herself to be visited at night by a hideous serpent to whom she's been given as wife, when in reality it is the god of love himself, Eros.

There are also the stories of the monstrous or ugly men who cannot find love, despite their kind and virtuous natures: Quasimodo of Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's monster, Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac.

Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady

There are some stories with the roles reversed, though fewer: Geoffrey Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale," with the knight of King Arthur's court promising to marry the hag, the "loathly lady" who helps him solve the riddle that will save his life; the closely related 15th-century poem,  "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle," with a similar story; and a modern version, Stephen Sondheim's "Passion," with its sickly, homely heroine Fosca who with the force of her relentless love finally convinces the handsome soldier Giorgio to fall in love with her before literally dying of her passion.

What is the point of these stories? That the protagonists learn to see the inner beauty of their mate and thus learn to appreciate true love? No. In a few cases, they do indeed come to love their hideous partner; in others, they merely go through the motions of devotion (sharing food, a kiss, lying in the same bed together, going through with a marriage ceremony), but then the spell is broken (or, in the case of Eros, the truth revealed), and they are rewarded with the transformation of their partner into a beautiful form. In the less fantastical stories, the ugly guy doesn't get the girl (poor Quasimodo only gets to clasp Esmeralda in his arms after she's been hanged; Cyrano hears Roxane's avowal of love just before dying of blunt force trauma).The point seems to be that, while we shouldn't be quick to judge by outer appearance, the true reward for such selflessness is what we all secretly desire: beauty.

Innate desire or choice?

When we add sexuality into the mix, it gets far more complicated. Why do some of us gravitate toward one gender and not the other? The complicated answer seems to be that it's not completely genetic, and it's not completely choice. I won't go into the reams of research that have been done in the field of human sexuality, but reliable experts agree that homosexuality is not aberrant, as originally thought, but part of a natural spectrum of human desire, with approximately ten percent of the population at one end defining themselves as completely homosexual, the rest either as completely heterosexual or bisexual, though this last term is often what conflicted homosexuals use to describe themselves in order to avoid categorizing themselves as gay. Dr. Loren Olson, a blogger for Psychology Today, gives a much more nuanced picture of bisexuality than I can within this post. But there do seem to be people who can fall in love with a person's essence, regardless of gender or physical form.

So A's problem–or, actually, Rhiannon's problem–is how to keep love constant when the object of one's desire keeps changing bodies, from average to gorgeous to gangly to homely, from petite to huge, from Caucasian to African to Asian, from male to female to transgender. Rhiannon's primary struggle seems to be trying to figure out a gender for A, and she frustrates A by spending so much time fretting about it. For A, who has no body and thus no gender, it seems like a trivial concern; for Rhiannon, it's huge. She can bring herself to kiss or hold hands when A is an attractive or even average-looking teenage boy, but she has trouble when A is a sexy African-American girl. She loves A, but she can't always bring herself to desire the body that A is currently inhabiting.

If A has no body, can A even exist as the object of desire (okay, within the bounds of this novel, clearly, yes)? Doesn't the noun "object" imply physicality? Can one be physically attracted to an essence? If so, is this attraction to essence what we call romantic love? Or is love just the high-sounding name we give to desire, not possible without a physical entity to attach it to?

This novel made me ponder how much what I personally am attracted to depends on the body that houses it, and how much doesn't. So far, I haven't reached any profound conclusions, but the answer seems to be that it's far more tied to the physical package than the ideal me would like to admit. Can I transcend my human, evolutionary instinct to be drawn to physical beauty? Can I transcend my preference for the opposite sex? If I were to meet my own version of A, how would I react? Would I be able to feel romantic love independent of physical desire? It's a fascinating thought experiment, one that Levithan encourages us to perform.

Reunions

I went to my college reunion a month ago. Not a milestone reunion, but a general one for those who graduated in the '80s. I was hoping to see a lot of my friends from the years above and below me, but turnout was low, except for the Class of '88, which was having its 25th reunion. Only 6 from my year (from a class of under 300, but still....), but it was wonderful fun nonetheless. I hung out in the dorm, walked around campus, chatted with old friends and old classmates, found out who had a wonderful career, who had a wonderful marriage, who had started over in a totally different profession, who was getting divorced. I don't know why I get such a kick out of all this. It's not like I dwell fondly on most of these people during the course of my normal day. Or week. Or at all, come to think of it.

I know there are people who never go to reunions, some of my friends among them, and I don't understand it, not really. I've gone to all of my college reunions and most of my high school ones. The people who don't go explain that they see their real friends all the time, and aren't interested in the others. Or they're ashamed that they aren't successful. Or that they don't have a career. Or that they don't have a spouse. Or children. Or a new book coming out. I find that they are laboring under the delusion that reunions are for showing off.

Sure, there must be some people who come to reunions to show off, especially if they felt underappreciated in their undergraduate/high school years. But that is not my experience in general. My former classmates are happy to see me, sympathetic to my life struggles, my lack of accomplishments, and supportive about my small triumphs and my plans for turning my life around. I think many people go to reunions to recapture their youth: the cameraderie, the intensity, the seriousness of purpose, the sense of seeing the future opening wide before us. It's bittersweet, of course, because that vista has been steadily narrowing over the years. Still, there are the shreds of shared hopes and dreams waving raggedly in an amber light...

Not my classmates, but I did attend an all-female college.

I guess what I'm talking about is nostalgia, a dangerous emotion. Nostalgia comes from the Greek nostos, "to return home" and algos, "pain" or "ache," so nostalgia could be defined as the pain of homecoming. Originally, it was a medical term, coined by Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer in 1688 to describe the symptoms of Swiss mercenaries longing for their homeland. These men were literally dying to return home. When we think of nostalgia today, however, we think of getting a bit weepy, a bit maudlin about fondly remembered events in the past, but I don't believe most of us think of pain or sickness. Yet pain is the source of those tears–the pain that that time can never be visited again. Hell, Proust wrote an entire epic eight novels on this theme! So, why do I call nostalgia dangerous? Because it refers back to a hazy past that might not actually exist. Unlike those Swiss soldiers who were missing their very real homeland, when we experience nostalgia, we are pining for an imagined past that seems better than our cold and harsh present. It may well have been better, but nostalgia implies a sort of over-emotional idealization of that time, as seen in its definition as "a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition" (Merriam-Webster). So the modern definition of nostalgia involves a displacement in time, rather than in space. And what are college days if not an irrecoverable condition of the past?

Oliver Sacks, professor of neurology and psychology, puts it a different way. He writes about the "paradox that lies at the heart of nostalgia–for nostalgia is about a fantasy that never takes place, one that maintains itself by not being fulfilled.... All of us, finally, are exiles from the past" ("The Landscape of His Dreams" in An Anthropologist on Mars,  (Vintage Books, 1995). It is the fantasy of those college days that holds me in thrall, not the reality.

I know that my time in college had its rough patches, and that there were times when I was quite miserable. Especially when it was 2 a.m., I was jittery from unaccustomed amounts of coffee, out of Wite-Out, and I had two papers to write by 9 a.m., plus a calculus test to study for. There were times I became filled with dread at the formless mass that was my future, and there were times that I thought I would never, ever have a boyfriend (attending a women's college might have had more than a little to do with that), and that I would die old and alone in some book-crammed, dusty apartment with no one to notice I had gone until the stench wafted into the hallway. Still, even as I record these more somber memories, nostalgia creeps in, and draws a gauzy curtain over all that angst.

But why shouldn't we give in to nostalgia once in a while? It's better than smoking opium, right? I loved being at reunion and giving in to the onrush of feelings evoked by those familiar stone buildings, those well-trod paths, that computer center–wait a minute! Computer center? Where did that come from? That wasn't there in my day! And we segue immediately into curmudgeonry.

Well, my real reunion (30th!) comes up in two years, and I fully intend to go and wallow in all that nostalgia. By then, I hope I'll have a little more direction to my life. It will be fun to compare notes with my classmates, not in a competitive way, but to see what odd and quirky directions our lives have taken. You can go home again; you just can't stay.

Okay, back to being more reliable: I promise to post once a week from now on. End of the school year and its concomitant madness put me off my stride. Also, I like to procrastinate.... Hey, that could be a topic for a future blog!