219. balmy

I’ve decided to work on achieving the next level of my Doctor Who nerd cred that I’ve been meaning to do for some time, especially after the Doctor Who convention in May: the Big Finish audio adventures.

This is an aspect of the series that not a lot of fans know about or get into – especially newer fans of the 2005 reboot who have debates over whether David Tennant or Matt Smith is the best Doctor evaaaah.

Personally, I’m a fan of the Third Doctor, Jon Pertwee. A lot of people aren’t crazy about him. They find him cold, condescending, and even callous. But he’s the scientist Doctor. There is no mystery he can’t solve by using calm logic and deductive reasoning. And when all else fails, there’s always Venusian aikido.

So back to Big Finish.

The British company was founded in 1996, and they started releasing Doctor Who stories in 1999. Basically, they’re audio plays that follow the first eight incarnations of the Doctor and his companions outside of the TV show.

I got into radio plays as a teenager with the Focus on the Family radio theater productions of The Chronicles of Narnia, which I still think are the best adaptations of those stories. Radio is a different medium than television or film. The action takes place in your imagination. It’s so much more engaging, in my opinion.

So yesterday, I downloaded my first Doctor Who story: Zagreus (2003). In short, the Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann) and the TARDIS are exposed to anti-time after an explosion and he is taken over by Zagreus, a creature from an ancient Gallifreyan nursery rhyme. There are quite a few references to Alice in Wonderland, which in several places feels a bit silly. The Third, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Doctors are pulled into the story and help Eight regain power over himself and defeat Rassilon. Rassilon is one of the founders of the Time Lords who turned out to be something of a psychopath and even a shadow of Josef Mengele after he experimented with Time Lord physiology to give the race its thirteen regenerations.

There was a moment at the very end of the story though that took me by surprise. Leela, the “savage” companion of the Fourth Doctor, made an appearance. I love Leela, partly because she’s one of the strongest female characters in the entire series, and is probably the most capable and independent of all the companions.

Her weapon of choice in her first episodes is the Janis thorn, a plant from Leela’s home world that causes paralysis and death in victims, something the Fourth Doctor finds so disturbing that he forbids her from using it anymore.

She doesn’t hesitate to fight or to kill, and shows no fear of death or dying. In one episode, The Horror of Fang Rock (1977), Leela is temporarily blinded by a flash and asks the Doctor to kill her. “It is the fate of the old and crippled!” she says. In The Image of the Fendahl (1977), she says to the Doctor, “There is a guard. I shall kill him.” He tells her not to, explaining that it’ll disturb K-9 (his robotic dog).

In The Sun Makers (1977), Leela is about to preemptively kill a guard. The Doctor stops her, saying that he hasn’t done her any harm. She replies, “Then I shall kill him before he does!”

At the end of Zagreus, the Doctor has told Charley (Charlotte Pollard) that she can’t come with him into another universe; that it’s too dangerous and that he doesn’t trust that he’s entirely free of Zagreus. She and Leela are sitting outside the TARDIS.

Leela: You are crying, Charlotte Pollard.
Charley: I am not.
Leela: Not on the outside. In my tribe, a witch-woman grieves on behalf of us all. Better that than for an enemy to witness a warrior’s tears.
Charley: I am not crying, all right!
Leela: Then let me cry for you.

It was a moment that really took me by surprise for how moving it was. Leela is a woman of action. She doesn’t hesitate to fight, to kill, to charge into battle. And here, we see that she is also a woman of deep feeling, that she can also allow herself to take on and feel the grief of another person.

That is notion of grieving with and for another person is something that, in the United States at least, is a very foreign idea. We don’t do very well with “negative” emotions as Americans. We try to get through them as quickly and privately as possible. We slap a smiley face on everything to pretend that it’s all okay.

It’s a practice that is also common in many other cultures and parts of the world. When someone is killed in, say, the Middle East, the entire community turns out to mourn. Men and women wail and weep loudly. To our emotionally repressed Western eyes, it’s something that’s distasteful, unseemly, immodest — savage, even.

Community is not something that we do well in the Western world. There’s more a sense of communal living in places like Europe. But we Americans like our space, independence, and freedom. We lock ourselves away in our houses, in cars as we drive to and from those houses. We have offices and cubicles at work that we stake out as “ours.”

“Let me cry for you.”

Grief is an intensely private thing. Rather than let others join with us in experiencing and mourning loss, we shut them out. We gather with close family and friends, but for the most part we cry alone. And we heal alone.

A friend of mine recently lost his grandmother. He got the news that she was dying during one of our recent band practices for Sunday Assembly, and a few days ago she died. We had a discussion that night about community, and how we deal with grief and death as atheists.

I wonder: how would it be if we could cry for each other?

215. mélange

Blërg. I hate moving. I hate the nuisance of packing up the contents of one’s life and transporting them to a new place. On the one hand, it’s a good exercise in taking stock of what one owns and how much one actually needs. On the other, it’s just annoying.

This past weekend was CONsole Room, the long-awaited (at least for some) return of a Doctor Who convention to Minneapolis. The last dedicated Doctor Who convention in Minnesota was over twenty years ago. There were over 500 attendees, which is a fantastic turnout for a first convention!

As an introvert, I struggle with large events like these. While I enjoy being around members of my Whovian tribe, it’s also exhausting. Three consecutive days of other human beings left me drained of energy. Last night, after a brief stop by my apartment to check mail and box up a few books, I headed home, crawled into bed, and promptly passed out.

Something I wasn’t expecting to deal with at the convention was the number of gay couples that I saw there. On Saturday night, a friend of mine pointed out the karaoke DJ, a cute guy in one of those checkered shirts often seen on gay boys and metrosexuals.

Naturally, he was there with his boyfriend.

Needless to say, this activated all of my insecurities about being thirty-one and single, so I spent most of the evening feeling like a crazy person.

Lately, I’ve been working on analyzing my emotional responses when in the presence of couples. As anyone who has read this blog in the past couple months will know this is a frequent subject. Being around couples makes me more keenly aware of my own singleness, my past relationship failures, and all of the qualities about myself that I consider lacking or downright undesirable.

On Saturday, my housemates had another couple, Mark and Nick, over for dinner in celebration of their recent marriage (seeing as it’s now legal in Minnesota). Before I left for the convention that morning, I was asked to proofread the menu for the evening. As expected, it was perfect. But in reading it over, I had to swallow feelings of jealousy and overwhelming otherness that rose up. I wondered—would they ever have occasion to throw such a celebration for me, at what feels like my late stage in life (at least, late for a gay man)?

I got home around midnight, my emotional energy already drained after a day of being around people, and being surrounded by couples at karaoke—or at least, being hyper aware of the presence of couples in the room… the DJ and his boyfriend, Jason and Chaz, and others whose names I didn’t know. The house was dark, and Mark and Nick’s shiny car was in the driveway, where I usually park, clearly crashing at the house for the night. In my mind, that became a metaphor for how invisible and peripheral I often view myself as being. I still joke that when my now brother-in-law started dating my sister, my parents found the son they never had.

Mark and Nick have a fairly new car. Mark is a doctor. I’m not totally sure what Nick does, but he also does well for himself. Pulling up behind their car, in my own car, with a side mirror held on with duck tape and non-functioning wipers, it felt like another metaphor for how shabby and barely-held-together my own life seems to be. Every area of my life looked like an abject failure.

Earlier this month, there was an entry posted to a blog that I follow that started me thinking about the negative (and toxic) way that I view my own life, and relate to others. He wrote:

Having grown up in a very patriarchal environment, I internalized the notion that being gay meant being other. In turn, “other” was translated to mean being “less than.” Oddly enough the effects were two-fold. I set off on a quest to mentally justify my being less than by using every situation I encountered to validate and reinforce those beliefs. Conversely, and this was my saving grace, I took the compensatory route in an effort to correct the (my own) perceived imbalance of worth. In practice, this meant I had an overwhelming (not to say borderline psycho) urge to compete and succeed.

The combination of the two meant intense turmoil, an inclination to depression every time something didn’t go to plan and emotional loss no matter what the result was. If I succeeded I was incapable of internally accepting credit (no matter how much I outwardly announced my credit). If I failed to achieve the standard I was aiming for, that simply reinforced my negative outlook. Lose, lose, lose.

These paragraphs really resonated with me. For as long as I can remember, I’ve compared myself to others, rating my own self-worth against my perception of theirs. I almost always come up short. Even in success, someone else is always just ahead of me. Consequently, I’ve always viewed myself as in direct competition with virtually everyone. It probably goes without saying how exhausting this is.

My rational brain knows how irrational this is, how silly and wasteful. I know my perceptions of others are fairly warped, that my assumptions about their social status are probably overblown. Yet my lizard brain is wrapped up in anxiety over someone having advantages over me, that people are looking down on me, finding me wanting. Everyone else has more financial success, more emotional stability, more sex, more intimacy, more happiness.

I have nothing.

The horrible thing is that part of me hates everyone who I perceive as having the things that I don’t. I’m driven by jealousy of the people around me, obsessed with my inadequacies. And this keeps me isolated from other people, holds me back from connecting, from being accepted.

What bothers me most is that I’m aware of all this, but feel unable to do anything about it…