Blog Restart

I'm starting this up again because I'm doing a lot of reading and thinking about stuff for my Star Trek 1020, and mostly I just need a place to put it all. I posted a note to my FB profile talking about the connection between ST:TOS episode "The Paradise Syndrome," my favorite episode as a kid, and Avatar, my favorite recent movie. I thought of a few other favorite stories, both books and movies that share that theme--protagonist falls in with less complex/more ethically groovy culture and falls in love with beautiful member of same. This causes protagonist to rethink whole worldview. Examples that came to mind immediately were Dances With Wolves, Last of the Mohicans, Last Samurai, The Bounty/Mutiny on the Bounty, Twilight, Harry Potter, The Matrix. Asked for other examples and tagged a bunch of people. Got lots and lots of great responses, many from my dear friend, Jonathan Darby. I spent some time processing those last night.



1) Amy Barwick

• Blue Sword by Robin McKinley


• Dune by Frank Herbert

2) Jon Darby

• Northern Exposure--TV Show 1990-1995


• Little Big Man by Thomas Berger
• Dances with Wolves by Michael Blake

3) Mandy Kaufman

• My Fair Lady
• Pretty Woman

4) Amie Rogala Hartnett

• Reality Bites
• Knocked Up
• Notting Hill

5) Jon Darby

• Hawaii by James A. Michener
• At Play in the Fields of the Lord--Peter Matthiessen
• The Man Who Would Be King--Rudyard Kipling
• Lawrence of Arabia--

6) Frances Smith

• Pocahontas
• The New World--Terence Malick, 2005

7) Kim Wilson Owen

• "you can never go home again but you can't stay here."

8) Jon Darby

• Ride the Wind by Lucia St. Clair Robson (story of Cynthia Ann Parker)

9) Mike Adams

• LOST

10) Jon Darby

• World War Z--Max Brooks--Dystopian Variant
• Tales From The South Pacific--James A. Michener
• My Cousin Vinny--Jonathan Lynn, 1992
• Somewhere in Time--Richard Matheson
• ST:TNG--"The Inner Light"
• Shogun--James Clavell
• Apocalypse Now--Francis Ford Coppola, 1979
• Stranger in a Strange Land--Robert Heinlein
• I Love You, Alice B. Toklas--Hy Averback, 1968

11) Kevin Black

• Razor's Edge--Somerset Maughan

12) Elizabeth Doyle

• Odysseus and Calypso

Halloween

I guess you would call the place I grew up a subdivision. It called itself the Village of Marchwood. It was a suburban housing development. It was pretty nice though. There were a lot of trees and sidewalks for just about every street. The sidewalks are crucial to a successful Halloween, at least for smaller kids. Very few residents opted out of Halloween by turning off their porch lights and generally giving off a stay away vibe. Being in your house to give out candy on Halloween seemed like civic duty. There was definitely none of the car-based trick-or-treating that you have now, where you have to drive a long way between houses just to find one with the lights on. Occasionally parents would drive kids to another neighborhood entirely and let them loose at the entrance. In Marchwood my dad and and Christal's dad would alternate years taking us when we were very small. Then we went with older kids, then by ourselves. I remember one year I was staying with my friend Megan in Westtown and we trick-or-treated in her neighborhood. We were eleven or so, so we went by ourselves.

Good Advice

Stay away from the hospital for as long as you can.

My friend Kim told me this early in my pregnancy. I was in a group of my hippie mom friends, some of whom had given birth in their homes. I had taken a childbirth class, so I knew more or less what to expect, but of course it's different for each person. I've known women who went to a hospital at the first contraction and were told to turn around and go home until the contractions got closer together. I've known women who were admitted to the hospital and strapped to the bed with a drip in their arm for hours before anything really got going. I wanted to avoid that last, if I could. I was all gung ho to have a natural childbirth. I ended up with 16 hours of unmedicated labor and a C-Section anyway. It wasn't horrible though. I didn't feel violated like some of those women in the book did by their C-Sections. The first four or five hours were at home, in my comfy rocking chair in my own favorite raunchy giant t-shirt. That made me a lot less panicky than being at the hospital, on the world's most uncomfortable beds in one of those paper gowns that snap together. We went to the hospital right about when we should have, if we'd waited much longer, we'd might have had to call an ambulance.

Injuries. My daughter is obsessed with injuries. I can only hope that means she's going to be some sort of medical professional. When she falls down or is hurt in anyway, she is more angry than anything else. She reminds me of the Russian mafia; she would pobably like to have all witnesses killed. She's taken to jumping right back up and saying, I'm ok! so that no one will have a chance to express any concern or sympathy or say anything like, "Poor Leah!" She HATES poor Leah. Lately she's been asking my husband and I about the various times we have been injured. My husband has a lot more of these stories to tell since he was a high school football player and just I have always been a cautious sort. Well, cautious but clueless. Some of my injuries have come when I was just walking along, singing a song, enjoying a sunny day, and not looking at the path ahead of me. I've been telling my daughter that story recently. When I was a freshman in college and it was a bright sunny day and I was walking along with an armfull of book and suddenly there was a large bumblebee nearby. I had a visceral reaction to the bumblebee and stumbled sideways off the concrete sidewalk and into a concealed hole in the ground. Fell headlong, threw my books forward and sprained my ankle. More later.
The rest of the story . . . So there I was, sprawled on my then not so considerable belly, trying not to cry. This guy named Andrew came by. I had met him in the greek service organization, APO, Alpha Phi Omega. Since I was allergic to all things Greek, I was creeped out even by APO initiation rituals, which were very mild and normal by Greek standards. I chickened out of joining. I think the only reason I even thought about joing was the same reason most other people thought about joining which was to meet people. But Andrew was pretty nice. So here comes Andrew, the Good Samaratin. He probably joined APO for genuinely altruistic reasons, not because he wanted to meet girls. Anyway, he sees me on the ground, not crying, and he stops to help. I asked him if he would go get Wayne, who I knew to be in the student lounge studying. Wayne told me later that he was sleeping. Wayne had joined APO two years ago, for the same reason most people join, so he knew Andrew. Anyway Andrew goes to get Wayne, Wayne arrives to save me, and I really did start crying at that point. Together he helps me hobble off to Student Health. Twenty-one years later, here we are.

50 Things I'll Never Do

Never be a soldier in a war.
Never skydive
Never bungee jump
Probably never mountainclimb
Never win the Nobel Prize for Physics, Math, Chemistry.
Never go on a Reality Show.
Never be in a Hollywood movie
Never have 19 children like Michelle Duggar
Never quit my job, movie to South America and become an Anthropologist.
Never eat roadkill. (Short of some sort of disaster)
Probably never move back to Pennsylvania.
Probably never be a size 2, 4, 6, 8 . . .
Never have really short hair.
Never dye my hair (short of the witness protection program)
Never get a tatoo
Or a piercing
Take up smoking

Describing My House

I suppose I know my house better than just about anybody. At least three other families have lived there since it was built in 1914, but we have lived there since 1996. I remember pretty vividly the day I went to see it when the previous owner was having an open house. The first thing I noticed was the enormous tree in the front yard. I grew up in an area with lots of very tall oak trees, and went to college in a city with wonderful wooded parks. Montgomery seemed pretty treeless to me when I first moved here. A whole different ecosystem. So the tree in the front yard of this potential house was a big draw. Also I had seen the Miyazaki movie Princess Mononoke pretty recently and one of my favorite parts featured the kodama, little spirits that inhabit big old trees in the heart of the forest. Their health was an indicator of the health of tree and the health of the forest. So the tree had a lot of signifigance to me even before I got inside the house. When I got inside the house the first thing I saw was the marble mantle over the fireplace. That evoked The Serapeum, my group of friends that met for book discussions and so much more. I had visions of a library! The walls were dark red. I was in love.
More Anon.

Free Speech at Villa

If I were in charge of my high school . . . hmmm. Well, I've been back to visit my high school a number of times since I graduated in 1987, and a lot of the changes I would have made *have* been made since then. They built that new fabulous arts center in the mid-nineties. It's central feature is a theater space and quite a lot of audience seating. I remember there were also music practice rooms, and places to do things like pottery and sculpture and painting. That was one not so great thing about Villa in the 70's and 80's. They didn't exactly have a wide variety of course offerings or extracurricular offerings. If you weren't a big sports fan, there wasn't a lot left over.

One of my friends from high school currently works at Villa as head of Information Systems. One of her jobs is to get on Facebook and make sure Villa girls aren't posting naked pictures. When she told me that it made me wonder about the rights of younger people in regards to technology. Where do the obligations of adults to protect young people in their care run into the free speech rights of young people? Does the Principal of Villa have the right to curtail free speech rights of the young people in her care just to protect the school's reputation? Well, probably, yes. It would constitute slander and slander is one of the limits of free speech.