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!

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.