By Jeffrey Skinner
Why do you keep returning,
alive, able to walk and gesture as you could not at the end,
your movements sketchy, more holographic
than warm? Thanksgiving dinner with all the relatives
and I alone with the suspicion I cannot speak:
You should be elsewhere.
Heavy drinking, as always. The newest baby
passed around like a contagious glow. Same teasing of the strong,
same muffled terror of the uncertain.
All the while you, at the head of the table like a signal
carried by a frayed wire—there, gone, there—raising a glass
to toast, the rim never touching your lips.
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I had a bit of a hectic Friday the Thirteenth, though a pretty good one. I got up earlier than I meant to because I knew Paul was going to the post office and wanted to send some stuff with him, but he ended up leaving even earlier than I expected, so I had to stop at the post office in the mall myself when I took Adam for an orthodontist appointment after school. In between, I had lunch with Gblvr at Lebanese Taverna and we wandered into our usual stops in the area, As Kindred Spirits and Ulta, where I tried on some kind of vanilla perfume that stuck with me all day and smells so good I might have to figure out what it was and get some if it's not expensive.
The Friday Five: Scholarship
1. If you were to have a scholarship created in your honor, what qualities would you look for in applicants (leadership, service, GPA, etc.)? Demonstrable passion for area of study and desire to teach.
2. Who would be eligible to apply for your scholarship (members of a certain major, ethnic group, sexuality, etc.)? Adult students -- over 30.
3. Would it be need-based or not? Why? Yes.
4. What would you call it? Live and Learn.
5. If you made applicants write an essay, what would the topic be? What I Want To Be When I Grow Up.
Fannish 5: Name five non-canonical couples that you would like - or would have liked - to see get together in canon.
For the purposes of this, I'm going for couples who might actually have happened in canon -- not couples I'd love to have seen but never would have gotten in a million years, like Aragorn/Boromir.
1. Kira/Damar, Deep Space Nine
2. Morgana/Uther, Merlin
3. Shirley/Paul, Boston Legal
4. Rollin/Cinnamon, Mission: Impossible
5. Jack/Nine, Doctor Who
After the orthodontist, I came home to write a review of "First Contact", an episode lots of people seem to find underrated but I find overrated and was attempting to explain why without directly pointing out how sexist it is, just for a change. We didn't have dinner with my parents because my mother has a horrible cold (probably the same horrible cold that our kids have taken turns having), but my father stopped by with cupcakes that they had bought for Valentine's Day and we exchanged cards. Then we watched the new Fox Friday, which Fox is advertising as Hot Chicks Who Do Whatever You Want, so even though it's Summer Glau and Eliza Dushku, I'm not enthralled. Dollhouse was okay -- didn't hate it but didn't love it -- and Terminator had a terrific episode but I'm not sure I like where this is going. And then there was BS-Gee!
Spoilers: In general I liked seeing Sarah interact with Kyle, even if it was ghost!fantasy!Kyle, but I did NOT like the implication at the end that they were setting her and Derek up as a couple with ghost!fantasy!Kyle's blessing. This is one case of UST that should remain UST for as long as the series runs with no hope of consummation, please. And I am completely enamored of John Henry with Bionicles! He knows who the Makuta are! My son, who has created gigantic Bionicles, was laughing aloud, and when John Henry complained that God made a mistake not making humans with more rotating sockets, we all howled. Hey, Ellison: this is the problem with teaching creationism instead of evolution! I was delighted to see Connor Trinneer, too, though I am bummed he turned out to be a minor nasty man and didn't survive the episode. I was hoping he'd be back, and be a good guy.
I don't have much to say about Dollhouse -- it reminds me of La Femme Nikita a bit, but that show sometimes was content to let style stand in for substance and that final shot of the programmable people being zipped up in their designer bedroom made me nervous that we'd get a lot of that same crap here too. It's a terrific cast of actors I've liked in other things, but the dialogue is stilted and except for Dushku, everyone seems to be overacting. The previews also suggest that they'll be revealing too much before we even know what the conspiracy's about. Unlike 99 percent of people reading this, I'm not particularly a Joss Whedon fan, so he's going to have to give me more to go on that what's in this first episode.
I keep getting unfriended by longtime acquaintances over my lack of appreciation for MooreRon, too, so let me just say that BS-Gee! made me laugh inappropriately in several places. So the Final Five were in fact the Original Five, only Cavil was smarter (or more evil or more green-eyed monstrous, I can't bear to remember that dialogue) and killed them all and wiped their memories! Yeah, this makes total sense, except inasmuch as it makes no sense. It's nice to know, though, that it appears I was right when I first watched this show and said I bet they're all Cylons and they killed the actual biological humans generations ago. Also, how sweet that Kara loves Sammy again now that he's dying and telling her not to worry, she's not a skin job. I see that the next MooreRon murder is going to be Galactica herself! Poor Lee, first he decides that he's not a Caprican any more, since they're Galacticans or Colonials or whatever, and now all the Galacticans are going to need a new planet, pronto.
Happy Valentine's Day -- my favorite e-cards are here.
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