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!

Am I a Nerdfighter?

Hank and John Green, aka Vlogbrothers

For those of you non-geeky, non-nerdy people out there (Who am I kidding? Why would you be reading my posts if you were one of those?), Nerdfighters, or, collectively, Nerdfighteria, are the dedicated followers of the Vlogbrothers, otherwise known as John and Hank Green, who started this whole enterprise on a dare in 2007, when one of them challenged the other to communicate solely by alternately posting video logs on YouTube to each other every day. The experiment, dubbed "Brotherhood 2.0," lasted a year, but by the end of that year they had gathered so many followers that they kept it up, though they now only post twice weekly, on Tuesdays and Fridays. Today they have over a million followers.

At this point, the Vlogbrothers are so well-known that John Green was picked to be one of the panelists at a Google+ "fireside hangout" with President Obama this past February. During that time, he asked the President about the future of the penny, how one could implement government policies on global warming, and what he should name his soon-to-be-born daughter. John Green is also a well-known New York Times bestseller list writer of young adult fiction. His brother Hank has several YouTube channels, including one that teaches science to laypersons; he is the founder of DFTBA Records, a recording label for YouTube musicians; he is the producer of a wildly popular YouTube channel "The Lizzie Bennet Diaries," a modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice in vlog form; he is the founder of VidCon; and he is the composer and singer of the unforgettable "Accio Deathly Hallows" song.

click here to hear Hank Green sing and play "Accio Deathly Hallows"

Okay, I said it was unforgettable; I didn't say I loved it. Still, made you smile, didn't it? Didn't it?

Well, so what is my point? I love the offbeat humor, the quick intelligence, and the nervous energy of these two young men, as well as their passion, their generosity, and their willingness to parlay their success into social action. In December of 2007 they started The Project for Awesome (P4A), in which YouTubers make videos and raise money promoting their favorite charities, and they have continued this tradition every subsequent December. The December 2012 P4A fundraiser was held in Carnegie Hall and raised $483,296 for five different charities.

The Vlogbrothers also sponsor interest-free microloans through Kiva, an online charitable lending organization. I think part of what inspired me to write this particular entry was that I just received an e-mail notice that the second payment of $2.08 toward the $25 loan I made to Faez in Iraq to help improve his auto parts store has been repaid on time. Even though I will never meet Faez or his wife and three children, it makes me happy to think I'm helping him out halfway across the world. Would I have done this without the encouragement of the Vlogbrothers? Perhaps, but probably not as soon. They make giving to charity and helping others seem natural, urgent, and overwhelmingly pleasurable. And, since recent research on happiness (Can you believe it's now a subject of research?) has found that one's happiness increases much more as a function of helping others than of buying things for oneself, I'm glad to think I spent my $25 on Faez and family than on acquiring, say, a new shirt.

Okay, back to the original question posed in my title: am I a Nerdfighter? In her March 13, 2013 blog for The New Yorker, Michelle Dean writes that the term nerdfighter "identifies the teen-ager in question as a follower of John Green." This statement is odd on three counts: one, John Green is not the only Vlogbrother; two, not all Nerdfighters are teenagers; and three, who the hell still hyphenates the word teenager? On the WikiHow of "How to Be a Nerdfighter," the authors claim that merely wanting to be a Nerdfighter makes you one. So why do I hesitate to call myself one?

I am a fan of  John and Hank Green and what they do, no question. I watch their weekly videos avidly, I get interested in their causes, I get caught up in their enthusiasms, and I laugh at their jokes. Because of them, I follow two British vlogs as well, charlieissocoollike and ninebrassmonkeys, both posted by young men in their twenties. Still, it feels odd to call myself a Nerdfighter, as I'm a middle-aged woman who's quite Internet- and social media- illiterate (I don't have a Facebook page or a Twitter account!) and who doesn't really share the same life experiences as young men born in the '80s, '90s, and '00s (bonus points if you can tell me how to pronounce that last one). I realize that there are quite a few female Nerdfighters; in fact, according to John Green, they outnumber the male ones, but it still feels odd to refer to myself as a Nerdfighter. So I don't. This is not intended as a slight to the sincere and charming Green brothers, but because I just don't like classing myself as part of a group. In other words, it's not you, it's me.

Part of the crowd?

In fact, I rather question the whole Nerdfighteria phenomenon. How can geeks, nerds, and social outcasts, people who by definition are on the outside of society, claim to belong to some monolithic group that all holds the same values? I thought the whole point of being offbeat and quirky is that one resisted definition, resisted being categorized. So, while I have no problem with the legions of fans who call themselves Nerdfighters, I do not consider myself one. I am GeekMom,  I contain multitudes.

Still....Don't Forget to be Awesome!

My Mother's Day Problem

Actually, I don't have a problem with Mother's Day itself. It's a lovely holiday, a little Hallmarky, perhaps, but it was invented in 1908 by Anna Jarvis of Grafton, West Virginia in honor of her mother, while the Hallmark card company wasn't founded until 1910. Jarvis lobbied to make it an official national holiday and achieved this goal by 1914. Later, she became so disgusted with the commercialization of the holiday, especially the widespread purchasing of preprinted greeting cards, that she was arrested for disturbing the peace while leading a protest against Mother's Day in 1948. She died within the year. Coincidence? Perhaps not.

Yet, as I said, a lovely holiday. I went out to brunch with my children today (the only day a year I eat brunch), and then took my daughter to see a delightful production of Stargirl, a play adapted by Y York from a young adult novel by Jerry Spinelli (There was no mother onstage, but evidence of a supportive, loving mother in the title character's backstory). My daughter gave me a homemade card and a little book she wrote on why I am a wonderful mother (despite my frequent bouts of yelling, which she also cited). My son gave me a hug and a kiss (this, from an undemonstrative teenage boy, is riches indeed). All in all, a splendid day.

Medea and child

No, what I have a problem with is the assumption that all mothers are equally worth celebrating, all equally wonderful, nurturing, and just plain maternal. They aren't. Just go to the tabloids to get examples of many horrendous mothers. Horrible mothers have existed down through the ages: think Medea, think Lady Capulet, think Hansel and Gretel's mother (yes, it was their mother, not their stepmother. Look at the original 1812 version of the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmaerchen--she wasn't changed to their stepmother until the 1819 version), think Joan Crawford. Ugh, no, don't think Joan Crawford. There were and are plenty of terrible mothers in the world. But, as this is my blog, I think I should reveal that I'm specifically talking about my own mother.

Joan Crawford and children

My mother grew up in Japan during the beginning of the Showa Period. She was one of five siblings in a close-knit family. Her mother, my Obaa-san, was affectionate and warm, as far as I could tell from the few times I met her and from seeing her interactions with her other children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren. I never knew from whence my mother's coldness and fury flowed, but what was certain was that she was almost never happy, almost always disappointed, enraged, or despondent. True, her adolescence was ruined by World War II, the Bomb, and the death of her beloved elder brother. Her career as a physicist never took off, and her subsequent career as a pioneering computer programmer never made her happy or fulfilled. My brother and I didn't turn out to be the children she wanted to have: brilliant, accomplished, celebrated. I believe she thought, like Leopold Mozart, that she could bully and berate us into becoming prodigies or geniuses. She was a Tiger Mother before the term existed.

My mother's own life hadn't turned out the way she wanted it to, which probably added to the hopes she placed on us, and thus to the sense of defeat she felt when she saw what we became. Not that we're criminals or layabouts or drug addicts or embezzlers: we're just slightly offbeat adults with somewhat dull lives. Seeing us must have been a harsh reminder of her failure, because she kept us at arm's length after we left home. In the last ten years or so of her life, before dementia hit, she tried to keep me and my brother away, with ever more far-fetched excuses. Not counting our visits to her deathbed, we each visited her precisely once after the births of our children. She was not interested in getting to know her grandchildren, or even in learning about their lives. We sent her packets of photographs of them, only to find them unopened in boxes after she died.

After she died, now over seven years ago, I found it easy to mourn the loss of a mother, but hard to mourn her specifically. Well-meaning people would come up to me and say, "Oh, losing your mother is the hardest thing in the world!" and I would nod politely and thank them for their kind thoughts while feeling like a fraud. Then came the time every year during the High Holy Days (yes, I'm Jewish--it's complicated) when I had to say a prayer for my mother during Yizkor services. For years, the prayer would stick in my throat. I did not want to follow my mother's example, or to say that I respected her, or to hope that her immortal soul would reside anywhere pleasant. So I was happy to find that the new edition of the High Holy Days machzor that we switched to a couple of years ago contained the following prayer:

Dear God, You know my heart. 

Indeed, You know me better than I know myself, so I turn to You before I rise for Kaddish. 

My emotions swirl as I say this prayer. The parent I remember was not kind to me. His/her death left me with a legacy of unhealed wounds, of anger and of dismay that a parent could hurt a child as I was hurt. 

I do not want to pretend to love, or to grief that I do not feel, but I do want to do what is right as a Jew and as a child.

Help me, O God, to subdue my bitter emotions that do me no good, and to find that place in myself where happier memories may lie hidden, and where grief for all that could have been, all that should have been, may be calmed by forgiveness, or at least soothed by the passage of time. 

I pray that You, who raise up slaves to freedom, will liberate me from the oppression of my hurt and anger, and that You will lead me from this desert to Your holy place. 

—Robert Saks

This little prayer, printed in the margin of the page for memorializing a mother during the Yizkor service, made such a huge difference to me. It was as though a crushing weight had been lifted from my chest, and I could breathe freely again. It made me understand, truly understand, that there was not a one-size-fits-all mold for motherhood, that it was all right to feel angry, hurt, betrayed by the mother who had not known how to love her children.

I continue to celebrate Mother's Day, now with my own children. I love them deeply as they are, and would not wish them to be otherwise. I practice a style of motherhood I call "Reactive Parenting": whenever I am confronted with a problem involving discipline or childrearing, I ponder carefully what my mother would have done in the same situation and do exactly the opposite. It's not failsafe, but it seems to work ninety percent of the time.

Happy Mother's Day, everyone!

Waiting for Star Trek Into Darkness

The next Star Trek movie is coming out very soon! I'm so excited! This is no doubt in part because, when I was a kid, I was an ardent Trekkie. "Was?" you ask. Yes. Sadly, I feel I am no longer so. Why? Well, let's back up a bit.

In fourth grade, my best friend Janice introduced me to the joys of Star Trek (in reruns, though I didn't know it at the time). My family did not own a television set, as my parents thought television (along with religion) was the opiate of the masses, and did not wish their children's minds to be perverted by it. The result was that my brother and I watched as much television as we could cram in at our babysitter's and at our friends' houses. So, if I happened to be at Janice's at the magical hour of 5 pm CST, I had the ineffable joy of following the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.

Since I could not realistically plan to be at Janice's house every day at 5pm, I missed a lot of episodes. This was where the double blessing of the Urbana Free Library and James Blish's novelizations of the series came into the picture. I read the story of every single episode (79!) over the course of a couple of years: the good, the bad, the appalling.

Why did I love Star Trek so much? Probably because I was a nerdy girl and it glorified the nerd. Sure, there was Captain Kirk with all his bluster and testosterone, bedding all the female aliens and crew members who crossed his path, but, for me, the main attraction was Spock. Never was intelligence so cool. I loved the tilt of his sceptical eyebrow, the pallor of his greenish skin, his high forehead pulsating with logic and knowledge. I also loved the rest of the crew (except for Kirk, who embodied all I loathed): Lt. Uhura, Chekov, Scotty, Dr. McCoy, and Sulu. Yes, there was actually a Japanese character! I am half Japanese, and could think of no other Asian characters in all of American media (except Charlie Chan and the evil Dr. Fu Manchu, who were both caricatures). Star Trek symbolized for me a future where people of all races and species could get along (except for Klingons and Romulans, of course) and work together for the betterment of the universe. And the Prime Directive! How amazing was that!

"As the right of each sentient species to live in accordance with its normal cultural evolution is considered sacred, no Star Fleet personnel may interfere with the normal and healthy development of alien life and culture. Such interference includes introducing superior knowledge, strength, or technology to a world whose society is incapable of handling such advantages wisely. Star Fleet personnel may not violate this Prime Directive, even to save their lives and/or their ship, unless they are acting to right an earlier violation or an accidental contamination of said culture. This directive takes precedence over any and all other considerations, and carries with it the highest moral obligation."

This Directive, the storylines it generated, and the way they tackled the big ethical questions were what I loved about this series. Take, for instance, the episode "Arena." It was based on the 1944 Fredric Brown short story of the same name that appeared in Astounding Science Fiction. Both the short story and the tv episode feature a winner-takes-all trial-by-combat scenario between the captains of opposing spaceships, one human, one of a reptilian species, engineered by a third, higher alien intelligence. Both are set on a barren planet with little cover or natural resources. Both involve the human captain figuring out a clever way to attack a seemingly stronger foe. The big difference is: in the short story, the human captain kills the reptilian captain and is restored to his ship while the opposing fleet is wiped out of space entirely, as though it had been erased. In the television series, however, Kirk asks Spock's advice, and determines that the reptilian (Gorn) captain may have been acting in perceived self-defense when he wiped out the Federation colony, so he declines to kill him. He also declines the offer by the higher intelligence (the Metrons) to destroy the Gorn ship. Kirk is rewarded for his mercy, which to the Metrons is proof that he belongs to more advanced race, and both captains are returned to their ships unharmed.

I read the science fiction story later, in junior high, when I was devouring Asimov and Heinlein and Herbert, and thought it not nearly as compelling as the Star Trek version. What higher intelligence would actually favor might over compassion, force over understanding? How ingenious to win the fight by rejecting the terms of the fight entirely! To force the would-be-winner to kick against the traces of the very authority he is trying to appease!

Later, when I was in grad school, Star Trek the Next Generation came out, and I loved it, too. The writing was better, the special effects were better, the computers were more in line with the actual evolution of computers. The cast, however, with the exception of Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Lt. Worf, were mostly tedious. Still, it kept trying to ask and answer the big questions. For instance, with the Borg, it explored why we value our individuality so much when it leads to so much conflict and unhappiness. With the character of the android Data, it explored what it meant to be sentient–he was the science fiction version of Pinocchio, the puppet who wanted to be a real boy.

By the time Deep Space Nine and Voyager came out, I was a bit weary of the whole enterprise (pun definitely intended). I half-heartedly watched a few episodes, but then gave up. My training as a literary critic caused me to dissect the new scripts mercilessly, and my love of theater made me wince with each burst of self-conscious histrionics. Even going back to watch old episodes (hurray for the advent of DVDs and streaming video!), I cringed and squirmed when Kirk adjusted his shirt and tossed his head and when Uhura made bambi eyes as she uttered the phrase, "Captain, I'm afraid." Slowly, I came to the startled conclusion that I had outgrown Star Trek.

Still, my heart beats a tiny bit faster when I think about the movie being released in two weeks. Call it nostalgia, call it a longing for lost innocence–those days when I thought all problems could be solved if we could all just sit down and talk about them–but I really want this movie to be good, to embody all that I loved about Star Trek.

I must admit, I do have qualms about the new movie. I didn't like the last one. It was full of fights, explosions, flashing lights, and shouting–all antithetical to the Star Trek I knew and loved. But it looks as though this one will be emphasizing the crew and their interactions with each other as they slowly become friends. From the trailer, I know there's a jump off a cliff (an homage to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? Why??), the Enterprise submerging in an ocean (Wouldn't the pressure tear it to pieces? It's meant to withstand the vacuum of space, not crushing gravity), and plenty more explosions, but I think it has the potential to fulfill my burning desire for intelligence, compassion, and friendship to win out over brutality, greed, and hatred. Plus, it features the amazing Benedict Cumberbatch (I'll write a future entry about the glories of Sherlock) as the archvillain Khan, so it's guaranteed to have both subtlety and dramatic flair. Let's hope it delivers.

Live Long and Prosper!

Second Childishness and Mere Oblivion

Well, it's looking as if I were a bit too ambitious with this whole "weekly ramblings" bit. It's more like bi-weekly ramblings, or twice-monthly ramblings. But I assure you, Unknown Reader, that I ramble on those weeks I don't post as well as on the ones I do!

Today I'm thinking of reasons to avoid visiting my father in assisted living. He suffers from mid- to late-stage dementia, which means he recognizes me and smiles when he sees me, but has no idea who I am. Conversations tend to be repetitive, with lots of explanations of ordinary concepts, like how to open a car door from the inside,  how to eat a sandwich (he tends to deconstruct them and eat them piece by piece, starting with the top slice of bread, moving on through the lettuce, tomato, and meat, then ending with the bottom slice), or how to zip a jacket. Most of his comments run along the lines of, "Oh, I remember this place! I've been here before!" or "I don't think I've ever seen this place before." Sometimes he'll utter both of these statements in quick succession.

It's not that I don't love my father. I do. He is the parent on whom I could depend for love and affection throughout my childhood. But this shell of a man is not my father. He's a dull, shambling, confused creature that inhabits my father's skin. Occasionally, flashes of my father's wit come through in a joke, a mannerism, a bit of wordplay. What an epic struggle it must be to make a pun when all language is slipping away!

It's been a week since I last visited him. For a while, I was visiting him three times a week, because if I didn't go that often, he would make a break for it, shouting, "This place is a prison!", heading out the front door of the residence with a purposeful stride, making a beeline for the woods surrounding the home. Now that I've moved him to a more secure unit closer to my house, he seems content to stay put. The attention paid him at the new residence, and the daily care lavished on him seem to have a soothing effect on him, and he's much less restless, more happy. Also, it could be that the dementia that's increasingly eroding his memories is also robbing him of his will.

The particular form of dementia that my father suffers from is called Lewy Body Dementia, and it is relatively rare, though the second-most common form of dementia after Alzheimer's. My mother had it, too, which means that the odds of my brother and I inheriting it are significantly higher than for others. So seeing my father is a sort of reminder of my probably eventual fate, a sort of senile memento mori. Yet another reason to find a thousand other things to do, rather than pay my father a visit.

Yet I go back, week after week, grudgingly, to spend time with him. I have given up trying to shake up his memory, because it distresses him now to realize how much he's forgotten, but I take him for walks in nature, so I can hear him exclaim "This is magnificent!" as we stop to watch a sunset or a creek tumbling over some rocks, or some deer emerging from the woods. That familiar phrase, more than anything else, brings my father back to me.

Teaching teenagers

I don't claim to have gained any particular wisdom with the passing of the years, but I do feel that I have become a fairly good observer of other human beings. In particular, I feel that I understand teenagers.

As I may have mentioned before, I don't have a full-time job, but I do volunteer at my daughter's hippie cooperative school teaching English to the middle-schoolers. First semester I taught poetry, and this semester I am teaching drama. The youngest group is currently reading Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, and the two older groups are reading Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. It's fun, because they have such a fresh take on the plays, not having seen, read, or even heard much about them before (I thought everyone knew the story of Romeo and Juliet! What's wrong with modern society? Grrrr!) Their most frequent comments are along the lines of "That's so messed up!" (Macbeth and Lady Macbeth plotting to kill Duncan), and "Eww, gross!" (Juliet's nurse joking about the wedding night, or the Weird Sisters discussing the contents of their cauldron).

For Romeo and Juliet, I have selected four acclaimed film versions for the students to watch scenes from: the 1936 George Cukor film starring Leslie Howard as Romeo and Norma Shearer as Juliet; the 1954 Renato Castellani film starring Laurence Harvey as Romeo (yes, really) and Susan Shentall as Juliet;

the 1978 Franco Zeffirelli film starring Leonard Whiting as Romeo and Olivia Hussey as Juliet (whatever happened to them, I wonder?); and the 1996 Baz Luhrmann film starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo and Claire Danes as Juliet. I wasn't sure how these young teenagers would react to these films: would they be bored? confused? annoyed? What I wasn't prepared for was the unbridled hilarity. They hoot with laughter as Juliet sighs "Ay me!" and snort helplessly when Romeo declaims, "O speak again, bright angel!" While I knew they wouldn't be able to relate to the very mature Howard and Shearer (What was the director thinking when he cast them?), I was shocked to find that they dissolved into gales of laughter over the younger actors as well.

What on earth is going on here? I remember being indignant when my Shakespeare professor Thomas McCavera told us long ago in the Shakespearean tragedy survey course I was taking my sophomore year that Elizabethan groundlings would have been rolling on the ground laughing at Romeo and Juliet; that true love was seen as the province of older people, and that such tender young things as Romeo and Juliet (supposedly aged between 13 and 18–not too clear on Romeo's age, but Capulet says of Juliet at one point, "She hath not seen the change of fourteen years") wouldn't have the first idea of what love was.

I asked my students, "Do you believe in love at first sight?" and the answer came back a resounding "NO!" That surprised me. I thought there might be a romantic or two in the class, but they all were very certain of their answer. It was actually quite refreshing. They all mocked Romeo's quick transfer of love from Rosaline to Juliet, and snickered at their haste to get to the wedding chapel (and thence to bed). They were exasperated by all the rash decisions they made, and they did not see any part of themselves in the doomed lovers. Reading from their point of view, I began to suspect Prof. McCavera was right about the humor in the play.

So, while I'm excited about introducing the kids to Shakespeare and all that his genius has put forth, I am also delighted to experience these plays that I spent decades studying in a fresh new light. Teenagers are maddening, moody, oppositional, and argumentative; they have the attention span of a gnat, the patience of a kitten, and the self-reflection of a lemur,* but their views and ideas are clear and as yet unclouded by what they think they're supposed to think. They react strongly and viscerally, and their opinions pour out of their mouths without much reflection.

In short, they're more than a little like Romeo and Juliet themselves.

*I say lemur, because they jump from branch to branch nonstop, sometimes missing and falling a bit before catching another branch. They seem the epitome of unreflective action. Oh well, I tried.

The Joys of Living Vicariously

People always say you should actively live your own life, not passively experience life through others. It's such a commonly held belief that it is often regarded as an obvious fact, a truth universally acknowledged. I, of course, believe this as well–what sane person wouldn't?–but I also secretly love living my vicarious life. Like otaku, or bored housewives in suburbia, or the creepy, balding, middle-aged guys who live in their parents' basements and play video games all day, I have a hidden life that takes place in books, in films, on television, and online, and it is so much more exciting and vibrant than my day-to-day existence.

Don't be so shocked, Unknown Reader. The name GeekMom kind of gives it away, doesn't it? I'm geeky and nerdy, and we geeks and nerds don't often mix well with normal people. I say the wrong things, forget to acknowledge people, enthuse about the wrong topics, go in for a hug at the wrong moment, or flinch when other people hug me unexpectedly. I frequently embarrass my children with my odd behavior (Well, I do have a teenager and they're embarrassed even by normal parents, so that doesn't really count).

For instance, I keep up a running conversation with other cars on the road when I'm driving ("Oh, nice move, Mr. Toyota, thanks for pulling in front of me without signalling" "Hey, Lady, get off your cell phone–the light has changed and we're all waiting for you!" "La la la, I'm driving an SUV so I can take up half of your lane as well as my own!"), and this is a great embarrassment for my 10-year-old daughter. She turns to her friend and says, "Don't pay any attention to Mama. She always talks to other cars. I've learned to live with it." Then she gives a tiny sigh. Poor child, how she suffers!

Okay, end of digression. The truth is, I'm usually uncomfortable around normal people. I'm terrible at parties. When I was in high school and college, I used to hang out by the potato chip bowl (Why is there always a big bowl of potato chips at parties? Is it some sort of party requirement? Must remember to Google this), steadily eating one chip after another while successfully avoiding all conversation. Also, since I don't really like drinking much, I can't even use that to loosen up. Though I really needed a drink after all those salty chips.

As a fifty-year old divorcee who doesn't have full-time work and has primary custody of a pre-teen daughter and a teenage son, a dog, and several cats, my life is fairly routine. Not a lot of excitement there. So what is the solution to add a little zip to my life? Vicarious living! Hurrah!

My favorite source of vicarious living is books.  Charles Dickens is great for vicarious living, as are Michael Ondaatje, Kate Atkinson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, J.R.R. Tolkien, and J.K. Rowling (the Harry Potter series--I haven't read The Casual Vacancy yet). For vicarious romance, however, nothing beats Jane Austen. That Mr. Darcy! That Captain Wentworth! Mr. Ferrars and Colonel Brandon! Swoon! (At this point, I have probably alienated all of my heterosexual male readers. Don't worry, guys, I'll talk about Star Trek and Doctor Who and Dune in a later post!)

The point is, I get all the thrill of romantic tension, the fluttery feelings, the doubts ("Does he love me?"), the triumphs ("He does!"), the promise of future bliss ("Reader, I married him." Yes, I know that's Bronte, not Austen, she remarked testily), and the warm afterglow as I close the book.

All that without the guy leaving his dirty socks on the bedroom floor, toothpaste globs in the bathroom sink, or the New York Times scattered all across the room, with the crossword half filled out, incorrectly, in pen. Not that Mr. Darcy would ever do any of those things! In any case, I've come to terms with the fact that all my ideal men were invented by women writers, and are thus unlikely to be found anywhere in the real world. So why not love as well as live vicariously?

Then, of course, there are movies. All Jane Austen novels have been made into movies (including some that probably shouldn't have been–does anyone really need a film version of Northanger Abbey?), and there are so many other worlds to disappear into. And there are television series. Wish you were involved in politics and great affairs of state? Watch "The West Wing"! Wish you were a spy? Watch "MI-5" ("Spooks" in the U.K.)! Wish you were brilliant and could solve baffling crimes? Watch "Sherlock"! Wish you were brilliant and could solve mysterious ailments? Watch "House"! Wish you descended from English nobility? Watch "Downton Abbey" or "Upstairs, Downstairs"! The ways of escaping your mundane existence are myriad. I won't even go into the Internet and vlog channels at this point, because my post is getting much too long, according to my blogging mentor, who thinks my paragraphs are too long as well. I'll save some thoughts for future posts. In the meantime, Mr. Darcy and I are meeting for coffee, so I have to go.