🔖📺🖖 Hrisoula Gatzogiannis’s The Only Work Ethic I Care About Is the One on Star Trek details what Picard explains in the TNG episode “The Neutral Zone.” A 20th century man asks “What’s the challenge?” & Picard says “To improve yourself… enrich yourself.”

Oh hey I got so excited about becoming Dr. Hirsh that I forgot to share photos of my Data make-up test on my non-cosplay accounts. Here you go! 🖖🏻#Trekkie #StarTrek #StarTrekTNG

Told y’all I was going all-in on Trek. 🖖🏻📚

Exhausted from defense & migrainey because PCOS, so it’s time to settle in with some #StarTrekTNG. I’m doing a very slow rewatch. Today: “Samaritan Snare.” 🖖🏻📺

Me, when Wesley Crusher tells Guinan he always gets As:

Really? We’re still grading things in the 24th century?

🖖🏻📺

I have decided to go all-in on Star Trek. Especially TNG of course, but for the time being, I’m making Trek writ large my primary fandom.

I’m not saying I’m just saying I kind of wish the Season 2 finale of Picard would be Picard and Q’s wedding is all. 🖖🏻📺

Don’t mind me, I’m just over here flailing in response to the Picard Season 2 Teaser Trailer. 🖖🏻📺🔖

Okay TNG friends. I made it through “Skin of Evil.” It’s all uphill from here (except that I really like Tasha Yar). 🖖

I put in a grocery order so now it’s time to crochet and watch TNG, yeah? I woke up this morning full of the belief that I was ready to do a thing but now I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll have a better sense after I eat.

Which characters feel like friends to you?

A little over a year ago, M. and I were in Atlanta to accompany W., who was attending an organizational meeting there. On our second full day in the city, we visited the Center for Puppetry Arts and their Worlds of Puppetry museum. They have a Jim Henson gallery there, and there’s a video tour of it on their Facebook page.

You enter through a lovely entrance and move through spaces dedicated to Jim’s early life, his office and earliest work, and Sesame Street. There’s a really cool Sesame Street-style set that you can actually work on yourself, with monitors so other people with you can watch your performance. And then leaving that space, you turn a corner and directly in front of you is…

Kermit the Frog

Yes, Kermit.

M. and I turned that corner and my breath caught in my throat. “Hello, friend!” I wanted to say. It felt like seeing a dear friend you hadn’t seen in a long time, which was something I had done the day before, so I had a very recent memory to draw on. I wish I could have hugged Kermit, but you can’t really, through that plexiglass or whatever it is box. But I could look at him and smile. It was such a feeling of homecoming. Somehow, though he is but felt and foam, I feel like Kermit gets me.

Lately, I’ve been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. It also feels like visiting with old friends, in the moments when I’m not amazed by my own new middle-aged-woman lust for Jean-Luc Picard. (And that’s all I’ll say about that.)

Geordi. Riker. Troi. Not Data, because I am Data. Data knows so much and always shares more than is useful. Why wouldn’t you want to know the intricacies of how this ship is constructed, or the details of that culture’s expectations surrounding honor? Oh, right, because we’re all about to die, or at least one of us has been abducted, and you probably would rather only have the information you need to handle the situation. Oops.

Yes. Data and I are one.

But the others, they feel like my friends, in the same way Kermit does. When Jonathan Frakes showed up on Patrick Stewart’s Sonnet-a-Day video, I was like, “YES! FRIENDS! Let’s all sit outside and read Shakespeare, MY FRIENDS!” (And also know, I was not imagining them as Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes. Sorry, my dudes. You inhabit those other guys in my heart forever. And reading Shakespeare together is totally a thing your characters would do.)

I’ve been wondering about why I feel this way about these imaginary people/frog, and why I don’t feel quite the same way anymore. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is my favorite show, and I wrote a Self-Insertion Mary Sue expressly so I could imagine what it would be like to be friends with the characters on it, but when I watch it, it doesn’t feel like visiting old friends, or even seeing people I visit with daily. It feels like watching a TV show I love. Same thing with 30 Rock, New Girl, How I Met Your Mother, Difficult People, and Happy Endings. Is the difference that I encountered The Muppets and ST:TNG as a kid? I don’t know.

Was I a lonely kid? I’m not sure. I changed schools about every two years until high school, when I stayed at the same school the whole time. I had good friends from 6th grade on. I was verbally bullied and came home crying almost every day in 5th grade. I don’t know. Maybe these characters feel like my friends because they were there for me in those times?

Regardless of why, I think I’m just going to lean into it and embrace it. As I’ve mentioned before, our family is all-in on Muppets these days, and I’m loving TNG. It’s nice to visit old friends.

Weekly Update: 04/11/20

We just finished up week 4 of staying at home. In one sense, I didn’t have much going on before this; grad school and parenting a young child don’t really leave much space for doing things. But I’m realizing now how I do have even less going on, because I’m not even going on playdate outings or whatever.

We started watching Animaniacs with M, just in time to get excited for new episodes coming sometime ever.

Like so many other people, I’m growing weary of doing all of my communicating with people who don’t live with me via Zoom call. I do like being able to see people’s faces; I hate phone calls. But it’s wearying, right?

I found out that I didn’t get a dissertation completion fellowship from my school. That would have covered my tuition, fees, and health insurance, and given me a (very modest) stipend to cover living expenses. Because life, I have missed the deadlines for all similar awards. (Though I only found 4 I was eligible for anyway.) This has prompted a lot of questions for myself about what comes next, specifically in terms of being able to contribute to my family’s financial wellbeing, which is going to need a lot more help because our childcare costs are more than doubling next year. I’m reluctant to take a (eventually) face-to-face full-time job, because I want to be with my kid in the afternoons. He’ll get out of school at 3:15 and I want to be there to pick him up, not put him in aftercare or delegate that to somebody else.

So, what can I do, that will pay me, lets me work from 9 - 3, and is flexible enough to accommodate both dissertating and chronic illness? I’ve landed on freelance editing, which I did for a few months after getting my MSLS. (And maybe a little writing, but it doesn’t pay as well.) My current assistantship contract ends on May 15; I’m open to taking on new work any time after that. If you need an editor, get in touch. I’m hoping the university will be able to work with me to at least fund my tuition and fees, but tuition doesn’t buy groceries or pay preschool teachers, soooooo…

That was kind of the biggest thing that went down this week. I spent a day moping about it and not feeling like doing much else. But I did read some Internet things. Let me share them with you!

I will be soothed, actually

Why We Turn to Jane Austen in Dark Times I love Jane Austen. This does a great job of explaining how her works are soothing without denying that life is hard sometimes.

I try to check Tumblr’s Week in Review most weeks, because I want to know what people are fans of. When I saw #cottagecore pop up, I was intrigued. It’s kind of like… hygge with more fairy rings and fawns? And also, from what I’m reading, a queer-friendly aesthetic in a way some other Internet aesthetics aren’t.I wanted an explainer, and the Internet gave me one. And then it gave me two more. This has me pondering Internet aesthetics. I’ll let you know what I’m thinking about those as I develop my thoughts further. (But FYI, two of my favorites are vaporwave and [seapunk]aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Seap….)

Also, I’m fairly certain the appeal of cottagecore/farmcore is related to phenomena like the Joy of Missing Out and the general consumerist move toward coziness more broadly. (I even briefly thought, “Maybe I should crochet big cozy blankets and sell them for exorbitant sums.” None of us are immune to this sort of thinking, I fear…) Also I got a little grouchy reading about grandmillenials, who I guess seem to me to be wee babes rediscovering the New Domesticity and sharing it online as though Gen X didn’t already do that over 15 years ago…

Currently

📖: Blue Mind by Wallace J. Nichols, A Conspiracy of Truths by Alexandra Rowland
🎬: ST:TNG in 40 Hours
🦸‍♀️: The Power of X
🎮: Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask, Lego Marvel Superheroes 2

📺 Watched Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 1 episodes 1 & 2, “Encounter at Farpoint.”

As a kid, family viewing of TNG was one of my favorite things. I had an immense crush on Wesley Crusher (and still do on Wil Wheaton) and fancied myself a bit of a Spiner femme. The show aired from when I was 6 to when I was 12, and in middle school my best friend and I plotted a spec script where a teen flautist is the only one who can communicate with the Crystalline Entity and also befriends Data. We never actually wrote or submitted it. At the time, I thought Jean-Luc Picard was very cool, the kind of guy who would be a great mentor.

Now, at 38, I find myself having very different feelings about Picard, specifically that he is possibly the most attractive fictional character ever. I attribute this not only to my middle-aged hormones, but also to the fact that now he reminds me of my husband (the most attractive real person ever, to me, anyway). His blend of calm and intensity is :chefkiss:.

And now I realize too (and actually have for a while now) that Data’s appeal is about the extent to which I identify with him, for I, too, am a walking, talking computer trying to generate algorithms that will make me more human.

Also, Geordi LaForge needs to be my BFF.

I have, um, really different feelings about Jean-Luc Picard on ST:TNG rewatch than I did from 1987 - 1994.