Leave it to a Season Premiere to Make Me Realize Important Things

“The Impossible Astronaut” originally aired while I was halfway across the country at college. My campus is extremely small (roughly 1,000 students) and there is only one TV available for common use. I checked it out about an hour before the episode was supposed to air and discovered it got BBC America. Even better, no one was using it! I would be able to watch the series 6 permire on a decent television screen!

Excitedly, I texted my Doctor Who-fan suitemates and told them of my amazing discovery. We could watch this momentous episode together! I settled back to watch the recap of series 5 that was playing before the premiere.

About 20 minutes before the episode started, I got a text back and found out that neither they nor any of my other friends were interested in coming to watch it with me. They were busy (with D&D I assume), and would watch it the following day, as a friend was going to have it on her laptop.

I was pretty disappointed but I sat there and watched that gut-wrenching, pants-wetting episode all on my own. I sat alone in that dark lobby with a circle of empty couches around me. I wept by myself when the Doctor died, and had no one to cling to when the Silents came on screen. I realized I was sadder about having to watch it alone than I realized.

A week or so later (they didn’t actually watch the episode for quite a few days after it aired) I heard my friends discussing the episode. None of them liked it very much. One mentioned that “The Doctor did a lot of the same things he always does.” They agreed that it was fairly sub-par.

…

What.

“The Impossible Astronaut” is brilliant. I’m not going to take the time to break it down and explain why. Most of you reading this  know already (which makes me pretty happy, by the way!).

All in all,

They 1) wouldn’t come watch the season premiere with me and 2) thought it wasn’t really very good.

It’s only the first thing that really bugs me. I shouldn’t be that put out by it, I guess, but it’s not an isolated incident. The group of friends I’ve acquired at college really only aggravate me in countless ways—I can’t ever be myself around them for fear of offending someone or other, and I often get excluded from a lot of their events and information. (Additionally, they all seem to think they’re part of Lord of the Rings or epic heroes or secret royalty or something. I’m an unapologetic cynic so this drives me up the wall.)

So even though my options for company are slim at my school, thinking back on all this made me realize it might be time to take MBMBaM’s oft-given advice and turn my friends into other friends. I’m out!

Emotions

 

Right now, my heart hurts almost more than I can bear. I’m no longer mad at my boyfriend even though he broke up with me. We talked, and he apologized for the rude way he did it. We still aren’t going to get back together though.

Now I have no anger to hide behind. I don’t even have defiance. It’s all just cold, gut-wrenching sadness. I lost the person I loved and who loved me for almost six years now. I would give anything just to have him care about me again.

In the midst of crying the tears I should have cried a week ago, I remembered something. I remembered Doctor Who. The Doctor revels in emotions. He encourages them because they’re what make humans human. He felt anger and rage at injustice, and yet never lifted a gun to simply kill off his problems. He let himself feel, because it is right and good to have emotions, even ones that shatter you to the very center of your bones and make your soul quake.

 

Thank you, Doctor.

 

Silver Lining

I just realized that there’s a very real upside to being broken up with: I am now free to date the Doctor! He can sonic me anytime.

Dear Blood: Stay in Body, Please

You know what’s unwelcome at four in the morning? Blood. It’s a real pain. I was trying to fall asleep one minute, and the next was astonished to find wet, sticky liquid pouring from my nose. It made me wonder if the universe really is out to get me after all.

Granted, seeing blood is usually a negative experience. (With the possible exception of emergency blood bags arriving for a shark bite victim.) But coming from your nose? Body, that’s gross. Why would you inflict upon me such unpleasantries? That’s your life source spilling out everywhere. What a waste. For some reason the inside of my nose resembles a cracked desert mud flat with blood vessels near the surface eager to explode. Couldn’t you help out and either strengthen those vessels or pump more water up there? I do my part—I take fish oil pills religiously every night, I drink upwards of thee liters of water every day, and (most importantly) I embarrass myself when I have to shove petroleum jelly up my nose. Often I have no choice but to do this in public. Stick my fingertip up my nose or bleed all over everybody—that’s a beast of an ultimatum. I thought we were on the same team, body. Cease this tyranny, and then we can talk.

Funny what you remember

Last night I had a dream that David Tennant and I saved Hong Kong, and then we went grocery shopping. I don’t know why Hong Kong needed saving, but I do know that in the grocery store we saw haggis but didn’t buy any, and that he was wearing that muscle shirt he had on in Hamlet. We may or may not have bought a head of cabbage though.

The Greatest Blog Ever Made

Word Vomit in the TARDIS

Doctor Who and Mean Girls.

End of story

The Cutting Room Floor

I’d hoped that reading the works of expert storytellers would help me improve my own writing skills. I’m not sure that’s going to be the case. After reading “The White Album” by Joan Didion, I can’t say I took away very much at all. I understood her point about life not always fitting into a neat narrative, but the way she chose to tell it seemed unconvincing and arbitrary. Perhaps it’s just the difference between a memoir and a personal essay that’s putting me off, but at the end of the essay I just kept thinking “Wow. There had to be a more streamlined way to get that point across. Then again, if her goal was to prove her point by demonstrating the disjointed nature of personal experience by leaving the reader disoriented, she certainly accomplished it.

While I didn’t care for her particular style, I did see her point. Not every event in your life will be worthy of inclusion in your “life story.” There are bits that just aren’t important. Perhaps they were at the time, but after the fact they may as well be forgotten and no one is worse off for it. But as human beings it behooves us to construct a narrative arc for our lives; as Didion says, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” And although our lives are real, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an element of fiction in our memories. It’s like we’re the editor of our own reality TV series, constructing storylines that are completely fictional (but completely self-contained, with a beginning, middle, and end!).

In writing stories about my personal thoughts and experiences I don’t want to include all of the superfluous material that Didion assures us exists, nor do I want to end up with a mostly made up story-in-a-can, conveniently packaged and tied with a bow. How do I make my stories true to life yet well constructed? The key, I think, is knowing what to emphasize and what to exclude–the latter being the more difficult. I’ll have to learn to tune my brain to just the right setting. My mind, after all, is the filter through which reality becomes either fantasy or memoir.