Probably not.
I saw Iron Man 3 last week (like everyone else) and I enjoyed it a lot, but the ending to the movie struck me in an unexpected way. I suppose I need to get my thoughts out on paper, especially before everyone forgets everything (which has probably already happened).
Spoilers for the ending of Iron Man 3 to follow.
I really hate the state of “busy”. I am sick of telling people that I cannot do things because I am busy, I am sick of having people tell me the same.
You are not busy. You are choosing to do something else.
We all choose how to spend our time and you make time for the things you want to do. “Busy” is an excuse and it is a shitty one. It is a crutch we all rely on too much, it is too convenient because we all understand. We are all too busy with our modern lives.
I am not talking about the things you have to do. Yes, you have to go to work and yes you have to take care of your kids or your aging parents. I am talking about the things you choose to do.
Your time is zero-sum and you are always deciding what to do with it. If you are unhappy with this, make better choices.
But do not tell me you are too “busy” to do something. Saying that is a slap in the face.
Note: This post will spoil the ending of Series Four of the rebooted Doctor Who. I doubt anyone cares since that aired almost five years ago, but here is your warning.
When I started watching Doctor Who, I knew that it was fun and a lot of my friends were into it but was not expecting much more than that.
On the other side of it, all I can say is that I have not felt the kind of emotional attachment to fictional characters that Doctor Who has created in me from any other TV show or book or movie. I was obsessed with Star Wars and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine for years but I never felt this strongly about the characters in those stories the way I do about Doctor Who.
After watching the fourth season of Doctor Who I felt emotionally wrecked. I was not sure I could ever feel that level of attachment to anything again, so severe was my heartbreak and wrought were my emotions.
And it all has to do with Donna Noble. Because I am Donna Noble.
I am putting aside the portion of the plot where Donna is a lady who believes she is nobody special only to be plucked by the dashing hero and proven to be someone truly unique and special and worthwhile, because that is the same journey every companion in Doctor Who goes on (and every hero, thanks for nothing Joseph Campbell). That is entry-level shit.
I am Donna Noble because I am the friend. I am not the one you fall in love with, I am the one who is there for you. Right from when she is re-introduced in series four, she makes it explicitly clear she is not romantically interested in the Doctor, nor is he in her.
Aside from the fact that this makes a very nice break from the cycle of the new companion coming and falling in love with the Doctor only to be rebuked and settle down with a nice human boy, this means that Donna can be more of the companion that the Doctor needs. She can yell and joke and be close in a way friends can when there is no sexual tension.
I know this because I am that friend. That is my role. I am the one driving you to the airport, not the one you want to fuck. And I do not want to fuck you either. That is how it works with me and you, and that is how it worked with The Doctor and Donna.
And by the end of the series the two of them were a great team. At least until the shit goes down and she has to give up everything. And this is why I love Donna and why it hurt me so much to see what happens to her.
I fundamentally believe that you cannot have what you want. That everything is just a time-bomb waiting to go off. That my life is going to come crashing down, probably by my own hand, and it is only a matter of time.
So for Donna to receive what she wanted, the ability to live travel forever with the Doctor as his best friend, she only has it for a brief moment before she loses it forever. Even worse, she can never remember any of her adventures with the Doctor at all. In that way, she has the worst fate a companion can have, even worse than death in my opinion. Rose gets her meta-crisis Doctor, Martha gets Mickey, Amy still has Rory, River got to spend countless nights with the Doctor before meeting her own tragic end, but Donna gets nothing. She does not even get to keep the confidence she found in herself.
And of course it had to happen this way. Because you cannot have what you want.
Nevermind the series of atrocities that Donna has to endure, including being given a fantasy life where she has a loving husband and children who disappear in a flash without giving her time to recognize they were not real. And then almost immediately she is taken to the alternate reality where after enduring a series of increasingly horrible conditions, she has to sacrifice herself, literally kill herself, to make things right, and in her dying moments is told that it still is not enough. Ignoring all of those things, which I think are still more than any companion had to deal with let alone back-to-back, it still pales in comparsion to her final fate.
When I was nearing the end of series four I did not want to continue because I knew at the end of it, David Tennant’s Doctor would die and I was not ready for that. But after what happened to Donna in Journey’s End, that did not matter to me any more. The tenth Doctor could live or die for all I cared, because there was no way to bring Donna back and nothing mattered.
As I have continued watching I was very cold to Matt Smith’s Doctor and the Ponds at first, but have warmed over two series. That all three leads have an incredible amount of charisma help a lot, but I have finally moved on and recognize the differences in tone between the two. In this way I am grateful, if there had been another series with Tennant picking up another cute girl who would fall in love with him I am not sure I would have been able to handle it. That there was the shift to a new Doctor and a new direction for the show was healing for me.
In Donna we see that you can be brilliant, and the exact right person for the job and still be ignored and passed over. You can get everything you want, but only for a minute, before it is taken away and you have to start back over from the beginning. That life is cruel and there is nothing we can do but endure.
This is week 26 of Probably Never which means it has been going for six months. If I were less committed to doing at least a full year, the last three weeks (#24 through #26) have been some of my strongest work so far and would have been a great way to go out. I am going to need to work extra hard in the back-half.
Between week #13 and #26 my readership has doubled, which still seems crazy to me. I got a large boost after coming back from the cruise and at this point most of the people signing up are either people I am not directly familiar with which would lead me to believe that word-of-mouth is working. As I mentioned in the post about the cruise, I was told that I need to be more up-front about my ambitions for this project and desire for more readers. I will figure out how to self-promote without bugging myself too much and I will do it. Maybe not in another 13 weeks, but by August I will double my readership again.
In general the work has been getting better, at least as far as I can tell. The ratio of hits to misses in the last 13 has been pretty good and I have hopes for the stuff that is coming down the pipe. One thing I feel has been getting worse is the proof-reading and editing. I keep finding glaring mistakes in the final emails that bothers me to no end.
I just realized I have not given much in the way of life updates (though the Cruise was my life for the past couple months) and I should probably do that if only to help the person who finds this post in five years.
My name is Alice and I am still living in New York.
My writing project, Probably Never, has its six-month anniversary this week. There will be another quarterly report shortly thereafter.
I have two different podcasts:
– Girlfriend Mode is a video game podcast where Lindsay Pavlas and I talk about what games we have been playing. It is released once per month and is only 30 minutes long!
– Ladysplaining is Sara Chicazul’s podcast where she explains things. I produce and co-host.
I continue to use Twitter and Tumblr.
I guess that is all I have for now, I need to work harder!
JoCoCruiseCrazy has somehow conjured the right magic to make it an event that transcends being a nerd convention or simple fan cruise, instead being this floating paradise of creativity and nerdery. I spent a lot of time thinking about why that is and if we could take that magic and apply it to the other 51 weeks of our lives. Sadly the conclusion I came to is not initially encouraging. The thesis goes something like this:
Many of the people who come on JoCoCruiseCrazy are the sort of people who want to do more with their lives. They are inspired by Jonathan Coulton’s “quit software job to become internet rockstar” story, or the message of his song A Talk With George resonates with them. So by bringing all of these people together in one place, the ones who are already very motivated will inspire the others, which creates a positive feedback loop so large that it encompasses even the performers. Everyone wants to see people succeed, and so they withhold judgement or snark and are encouraging instead.
This year many of the performers went out on a limb and tried out brand new material for the Seamonkey audience because JCCC is a safe space for fostering new creativity. Wil Wheaton tried doing stand-up comedy for the first time, John Roderick wrote and performed a new song just for the cruise. Nevermind the numerous seamonkeys who are performing or trying new things for the first time because nobody is going to point and laugh. Over the course of three cruises people have quit their jobs to pursue their dreams.
So that is all well and good, but why does it work so well at this one event? The more I think about it, the more I realize that the fact that the event is on a cruise has so much to do with it.
Consider that it is a closed environment, meaning intimacy can grow easily without external factors to stop it. There is very little internet access or contact with the outside world to distract people, meaning we have to talk to one another. It is only a week long, meaning we barely have time to get sick of one another by the end, and being on a cruise means all the dumb little life things that normally distract us are taken care of. Without having to cook meals or do chores we have time to be together and foster creativity.
Which basically means that this sort of environment is impossible, or at least very difficult, to replicate elsewhere. For one week out of the year, we create a floating utopia that cannot easily exist in any other place (which is not to say the cruise is easy to put on, Lord knows it is so much work and the organizers work incredibly hard). It is Hogwarts, or Narnia, and you cannot stay forever. It is unsustainable.
I think that means that those of us who participate and want to get more out of it have to work especially hard to keep the sentiment going while not on the cruise. It is very easy to fall back to our old routines now that the real world has ripped us from paradise, and maybe it will only be a pale imitation of the love and support you can feel during JoCoCruiseCrazy, but I think we have to try.
I am still trying to figure out what this all means and if there are any ways we, as a subset of the community, can do more (especially to be inclusive for those of who going on a luxury cruise is not feasible) but I wanted to maybe start this discussion while the event is still fresh in people’s minds. Because I do believe that JoCoCruiseCrazy is more than just hot tubs and a constant flow of alcohol, and since I feel like being on JCCC2 has helped me grow as a creative person so much I can only want to give that gift to as many people as I possibly can.
JoCoCruiseCrazy 3 was easily the best week of my life and an order of magnitude greater than JCCC2 was. There were so many amazing things that happened to me, both large and small, that there is no way I can recount all of them. I am going to try to hit the big points and hopefully not write a full novel about all the wonderful things that happened.
As this is being posted I am hanging out on JoCoCruiseCrazy 3. So I thought it might be fitting to include videos from some of the musicians I will be seeing on said cruise.
All LaBlogotheque edition!
