Doctor What? Learning to love science fiction

The Whovian adjusts her hair in a tube station.

A few years ago I tried to watch Doctor Who for the first time. Netflixing the first Christopher Eccleston episode (the premiere episode of the first series in the revamped version of the show), I sat at my computer perplexed, disturbed and slightly annoyed by the fact that the graphics almost looked like Rose and The Doctor were hanging out on the set of All My Children.

Soft hues created a halo effect leaving me wondering if I was really trying my hand at watching Sci-Fi or if this was some sort of soap opera masquerading as a program about aliens and time travel.

But I was wrong. I was so so wrong.

Fast forward a few years and I'm in London on vacation with my dad. Fate intertwines with my insatiable need to be in the United Kingdom and I'm sitting in front of my hotel room TV in the evening on a Saturday watching the BBC with my dad. We are two lazy bums unwilling to get up and eat at a restaurant, so we've brought food in to munch on while we sit like sedentary fatsos watching the telly.

Then the weirdest music comes on...wee-woo-waaa (I'm sure you know it all too well if you're a Whovian) and we're both captivated and confused. My dad's half paying attention, half pretending he's too cool to be watching this show that is clearly not a genre he's ever seen anything akin to other than perhaps in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. But by a few minutes in, we're both staring at the itty bitty 15 inch screen mounted eight feet in the air, mouths gaping open, eyes wide and unblinking. Matt Smith is running around on a space ship with Amy Pond and as incomprehensible as this particular episode is to a couple of new fans, we can't get over the Raggedy Doctor.

"That was so good."

The next week before we left to return home to California, we carved another evening out of London just to sit in the hotel and watch another episode of Doctor Who. We grew obsessed together, craving more episodes even when we returned home to the Who-less United States. (Note: At this time, Doctor Who was not as big a deal yet in the US. The joy of that parade was yet to come.)

Over the next year, I watched Doctor Who religiously. I caught up on episodes online, went through Netflix to catch up on every episode from the earlier four seasons.


When we returned to London, we were both equally enthusiastic fans. My dad, reluctant at first to admit to liking a show whose main characters is a "Time Lord" (non-Whovians say "what?"), was now watching new episodes on BBC America like the rest of the newly converted American Whovian population.

We devoted entire days to Who-related adventures. Hours were spent at the box office of Wyndham's Theatre to try and snag lottery seats to see David Tennant and Catherine Tate in Much Ado About Nothing. We took the Hammersmith & City Line (doesn't sound so unusual, but for us it is) to the Doctor Who Experience exhibit. We bought a David Tennant action figure at Camden Market and bantered with the proprietor of the stall about how awesome his Ood doll was.

It's weird to get caught up in these things. For two people who pride themselves in being elitists of the art world - going to museums and talking like Thurston and Lovey Howell about how J.M.W. Turner is just a bit too wistful for our tastes - being fascinated by a cultural phenomenon, especially a science fiction one, like Doctor Who was not on the agenda.

But in the years that have passed since that trip to London which so fortuitously coincided with the airing of the first few episodes of the fifth series of Matt Smith's Doctor, I have learned that expectations for yourself don't necessarily coincide with reality.

Since then I have put a few more random things on my entertainment to-do and have-done lists. I've read The Hunger Games, an occasionally gruesome fantasy novel that I've grown to appreciate. I've watched video game playthroughs of Portal and re-opened my old Super Nintendo despite feeling slightly too old for the thing. I've gone to a YouTube convention and met musicians who play music about Doctor Who.

I've bypassed my own biased standards.

One day while talking with a friend of mine, he mentioned I should watch a show called Firefly. I'd never heard of it at the time (though since then I've heard of it a bit more than I'd like). He told me I reminded him of a character named Kaylee and that since I love Doctor Who for its characters, Firefly was a natural progression.

Now, many months after that initial comparison, I looked up some more information about Kaylee. Pleased by the comparison, I've decided the next adventure on my "what I never thought I'd do, but will do anyway" list is to watch Firefly.

If it's anything like Doctor Who, then I'm in for some happily defeated expectations.

Art is my religion - I could die for that

When I worry that I'm wasting life being too introspective, thinking too much about the meaning behind art, I comfort myself in knowing that if this is all there is at least I'll have experienced the greatest joy on earth.

I've had a lot of doubts about faith. When my mom had a stroke I was only 11 and my first thought was to turn to God. My sister gave me a small token and told me to pray on it and things would improve. I believed her. And for the most part she was right.

Before my mom's passing when I was 15, my life returned to relative normalcy and even after she passed away I was able to fall back into a comfortable routine with a doting father and other loving relatives. But somewhere in those four years from losing my mom to a stroke to losing her permanently, I lost something else. I lost belief.

In exchange for organized religion, I embraced a new kind of belief system - I believed in the beauty and necessity of art. I started watching movies and television programs religiously. I took afternoons and evenings to lie back in my bed and listen to music, letting it transport me to another world that was miles away from my pampered Orange County existence.

My photo of John Keats' statue at Guy's Hospital in London.

My favorite poet, John Keats, once said, "The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate."

In my years of transition from childhood to teen-dom, I took this concept in all seriousness. In doing so, I discovered how Keats had summed up all that I felt about the world.

When I'm sad, depressed, lonely, upset, angry, or even ecstatically happy, the complement to my feelings is always a song. I make playlists with names of moods. YouTube and iTunes are filled with random conglomerations of music and videos with titles like "Over It," "Dance Dance,"or "Rain Music." According to my mood (anger, enthusiasm and calm respectively), these are some of the mixes of my days.

Great art can make me feel the way religion never could. God may have been a comfort to me in the worst moments of my life, but as time went on the effect grew weaker and less visceral. My heart no longer swelled with the intense passion of belief when I prayed.

That feeling that reciting prayers gave me as an elementary schooler was replaced by the emotions that welled up when I heard songs like "What I Did For Love?" from A Chorus Line, and those feelings were no longer comparable.

Regardless of how I feel now, what I listen to, or the value of religion in my life, my true belief system resides in the way that art makes me feel. I now feel that belief in the unknown resides in the senses, not necessarily that you can hear or see it, but that you can feel it in your heart.

I asked my dad over winter break if he ever gets the feeling that his heart is sinking when he listens to a song. After a moment of reflection, he admitted he'd never felt that way.

Half of what I know about myself is controlled by my feelings, not my mind. When I'm nervous, I shake and grow cold. When I'm jealous, a chill runs down my spine. When I feel passion, belief and least resistance, my heart sinks.

Art is one of the very few parts of life that ever makes my heart sink. And while I refuse to make any final decisions about anything concerning an afterlife, I do concede to knowing that if there is meaning to this world that it resides somewhere in that feeling.

John Keats wrote in a letter to the love of his life, Fanny Brawne, "Love is my religion - I could die for that." I may never find a love for whom I would willingly be martyred, but if anything, art is my religion - I could die for that.

Make 'em laugh...but not too much

Do you ever wonder why we can't just laugh all the time?

It's on evenings like this, after I've returned from an event where laughter was not only part of the agenda, but part of the protocol, that I realize how very lost I would feel without comedy in my life.

I think part of this comes from my dad. I was raised by a mother who didn't understand jokes and a father who was full of oddball humor. He's the kind of guy who with no provocation will start singing a song about monkeys or telling you a story about a duck. When you're in a good mood he'll automatically complement it with a nonchalant random comment. And when you're in a terrible mood he'll bother you until you have to tell him to shut up so you stop laughing.

I've never been funny or particularly quick-witted. I have a biting humor mainly consisting of sarcasm and lacking in every other style. I'm not exactly a stranger to the joke, but I just fail massively at the execution.

It reminds me of the scene in Finding Nemo where Marlin trys to tell a joke about a mollusk and bombs miserably when he has to keep repeating himself. I am no Ellen Degeneres as Dory, I am the person who has to reiterate to his acquaintances "that's a common misconception. Clownfish are no funnier than any other fish." I am a clownfish who is no clown.

Marlin tells his wonderful joke about mollusks.

And it's not something I've ever even thought about fixing.

Yet over the years I've taken a liking to the kind of humor that I have never been able to achieve. I became a fan of shows like Friends and Arrested Development and would say random quotes like "Gum would be perfection" or "There's money in the banana stand." I started making pop culture references like Lorelai Gilmore. I wanted to be clever so I stole cleverness from those who are far far better than me.

And it worked.

One of the great sadnesses of my life is that I have never been quick on my own feet, but I am quick to recall things that I have heard once before. So since then my outlet has been absorbing other comedy. And while I do not necessarily spew it out like I do those few key lines from some of my favorite television programs, I have grown to love it in any form I can get it.

Last year (when I inexplicably had no work to do and had time to watch YouTube videos all day long), I watched all the material I could find of Demetri Martin performing stand-up. I loved his comedy even when he repeated the same joke in various venues. I loved his drawings and his music and his weird skits.

But most of all I loved that when I felt stressed I could turn to throwing his name into the search box on YouTube and come out with hours of hilarity and mind-free entertainment.

Comedy is truly one of the few ways that we have to get our minds completely off the mundane and stressful day-to-day dealings of our lives. As I sat watching several improv groups perform tonight, not once until the final group was taking their bows did I think about how much work I have to do this weekend. All that existed for an hour and a half was the stage, the performers, the jokes and my own resounding laughter.

It's the scarcity of having a chuckle build up in your chest that makes it so wonderful, I think. If we laughed at everything, not only would we be fooling ourselves, but we'd be annoying the people around us. Because as nice as it would be to laugh all the time, being so amused as to viscerally produce a response to it says something more distinct and more rare than a casual pity laugh produces.

The truth is I actually very rarely laugh naturally. The few times I do, it becomes an immense problem because once I've started I can no longer control myself and I become hysterical. But when it does happen, I have a feeling of ecstasy that is incomparable to any other feeling in this world.

And that's why we can't just laugh all the time. Because then that feeling would be comparable to something. It would be comparable to every other moment of life. And in my opinion, half of comedy is realizing when and where repetition works and alternatively when and where it must end (this is an issue that the writers on Family Guy have yet to figure out).

I become hysterical because laughter is so organic and rare. It's not ubiquitous, therefore it is truly something special. And more than anything, it is something worth waiting for.

In just no time at all

My goal is to write this blog in 15 minutes or less. Starting at 12:15. GO.

Time management is one skill I absolutely, positively do not possess. In any form. My whole life I've had to use clocks, alarms, stopwatches, anything really to measure time. Because I have no sense of it.

I blame my generation.

I was born in an era of consumption - of mass media and the constant blare of the TV in the background whenever I have done anything. When I was little I used to fall asleep watching the telly in the evenings and my mom would have to carry me to my bed. It became such a problem that once I got a television in my room I required it to be on to help me fall asleep. Unlike Simon and Garfunkel, I never worshipped (or even appreciated) the "Sounds of Silence."

Instead I began wasting time from an early age, watching TV or movies or videos whenever I could and never taking a breather to actually absorb something that didn't make my brain figuratively melt into goo.

I lasted all of three weeks in college without a television in my room. By the time my dad returned to visit for a weekend (due to my intense separation anxiety), I had grown so tired of silence that I asked him to pick me up a TV and take it out of my college fund.

He did and now I have my beautiful little baby TV that sits on my desk proudly. It is from this television that I have watched the Royal Wedding, hours and hours of The Today Show (groan) and numerous episodes of The Office and Glee.


It's not my addiction to the boob tube that I necessarily despise. It's the fact that my dependence on simultaneous auditory and visual stimulation has made me have trouble either absorbing information from one or the other, or actually going longer than 15 minutes without being entertained by a medium that appeals to those senses.

The problem has cut into other parts of life. When reading for class I often get distracted and feel the need to turn on music. But because I can't compartmentalize my thoughts and focus on the reading rather than the music, it becomes more than white noise and I can't concentrate.

So I try divvying up my time. I read a page, reward myself with a song, read a page, reward with a song. The cycle continues.

But then it breaks. And then I find myself on Facebook with my iTunes blaring in the background for hours doing who knows what.

It's weird how smooth the transition is from spending time productively to wasting oodles of hours. The transition back is not so smooth.

It is now 12:23. I have written a ridiculous amount of words for the time I have sat here cranking this out.

Perhaps this can be attributed to the fact that I am not listening to music. All of my attention is focused on writing alone. While I'm writing is really the only time - out of utter necessity - that I can actually sit in silence. It is impossible for me to write with most sounds in the background, therefore it is the one activity I can actually complete quickly and efficiently.

So where does that leave the rest of my time? To be honest, I don't know. It gets lost in the space vortex between my iPod and my stack of textbooks, never to be found again.

That is not to say I haven't made strides in the effort of time management. The first year I did all of my English readings without fail was my senior year of high school, certainly an improvement from the years of skimming, skipping and occasional (dare I say it) Cliff's Notes-ing.

The path to betterment is a long, winding road filled with obstacles. But just as I try now to write a blog in 15 minutes, I hope to write out similar expectations for myself in reading. In studying. In essay writing.

And it'll happen. Even if it takes me another 13 years of schooling.

I could be perfect

I battle with feelings of inadequacy a lot more than I show. So many times in my life, I've been placed in a situation where I don't feel intelligent when compared to my peers. Sometimes I even feel stupid.

In class today I had to participate in a role playing experiment where half the class pretended to be political candidates and the other half debate moderators. I was one of a three person group pretending to be Newt Gingrich.

I know a little about Newt. I've read up on his campaign, watched clips of him in debates and seen him in interviews and covered on shows like The Daily Show. The nonsense of his campaign does not evade me.

Yet when I have to impersonate someone that strange and (strangely enough) complex while trying to remember what his talking points are and effectively not stumbling over my own words (a problem I have when I'm playing myself much less some trained political leader), I freeze. I falter, using made up words like "Muslimism." I fail. I feel stupid.

I really have no reason to complain. I go to one of the most prestigious universities in the United States. I'm majoring in journalism which is a difficult study and practice in itself. I write tons of articles, do lots of adequately performed school work and try as hard as I can to learn outside of the classroom.

One of my favorite ways of learning is the BBC Two program QI (or Quite Interesting) which asks a group of panelists questions and then rewards their knowledge (and occasional lack thereof) with the full facts answering the question that was asked. It is hosted by a proper posh Englishman named Stephen Fry who is in equal parts hilarious and totally genius. When I watch the show, I marvel at his eloquence even beyond his recitation of facts (which I'm sure he's memorized before the show). He has such a knowledge of history, art, language, etc. and I can barely imagine having that much intelligence in my brain.

Because the truth is, hard as I try, I often feel way in over my head. Somehow I crank out articles and papers, receive adequate grades on tests, but how it happens I don't really know. Half the time I don't even know what I'm talking about, or at least I feel I don't.

I think part of the reason I've been able to work through these feelings for years is that I always try to be perfect. It reminds me of this song I really love from a musical known among theater majors but not so much by anyone else. Incidentally, it's called "Perfect."

The song is sung by a girl addressing her significant other who has treated her like an imbecile and made her feel unworthy and unintelligent. In her final pleas for him to not break up with her, she sings "It's true I don't know enough, don't really get the stuff they say on CNN. But I'll work, get so much smarter, I can try harder. If I mess up I'll try again."

Whitney Bashor singing "Perfect" from Edges.

I enjoy CNN, but in other ways I sympathize with the protagonist who sings this lyric. She is an ordinary girl, not particularly fluent in witticisms and cleverness, but no idiot either. Yet she can't help but feel the glares of her peers. "My waiter watched me read my book, he gave that look like 'how pathetic'," she sings.

Even though I am reasonably academically proficient and I try insanely hard to be intelligent outside of school, sometimes I feel this way too. I make comments in class and my cheeks turn hot and blood red because I feel like I'm rambling like a dim-witted high schooler.

I know most of this is in my head. Like the girl in the song, paranoia and fear is probably more involved with my feelings than my actual intellectual level is.

But I feel this way just the same.

The other day I decided to test my reading speed because I've always considered myself a very very slow reader. I read all the text aloud in my head which is considered a sign of deficiency in literary comprehension. When I checked the number of words I read per minute, I was unsurprised to find out I am a pretty slow reader.

It was hard to come to terms with that, so I started trying to read without saying the words aloud in my head.

But these little tricks and tips don't always work. We have to put in a lot of practice to truly be "perfect" by our own standards. And even then, we'll never really be exactly where we want to be.

I think I'll always have the problem of considering myself less than others. Whether it's in intelligence, beauty, social ability or anything else, it's easy to compare yourself against anyone who is superior to you. But everyone is different, everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses and feeling stupid does not necessarily equate with actually being stupid.

Inadequacies and words like "Muslimism" aside, I'm still above average. And even when I hate myself for doing dumb things, sometimes I just need to slap myself in the face and realize I'm pretty perfect as I am.