Man, We Were Good Kids

In my day, it was 12 or 15 hours to my grandparents' house, with the kids three across in the back seat, no video equipment or personal electronics, and all three of us subject to car sickness so that even books were out of the question.

Today, I can barely survive 6 hours to Plano even with iPods, Nintendo DSes, and enough elbow room in our minivan for everyone to do the Macarena.

On the other hand, maybe my siblings and I weren't all that much better than my kids. Maybe it was just that my dad reached his breaking point at an early age and taught us all to sing, "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall."

Wishing Bad Luck on People From Afar

Sometimes when I'm out for a jog, I'll look up at the sky and find Orion's belt, and then look to his shoulder where the sullen red star Betelgeuse hangs waiting to explode. Despite being younger than our sun, Betelgeuse is old and near death. This is because high-mass stars have much shorter lives than little dwarves like the one that lights our Earthly days.

Once it exhausts the fuel in its core, Betelgeuse will go supernova, becoming brighter than the full moon for several weeks and easily visible during the day.

It's been my habit, since I learned of this, to occasionally cross my fingers that Betelgeuse lights up at the close end of astronomers' estimates (any day now) rather than the far one (a million years in the future). But earlier this week, while glancing over my shoulder at the faintly scarlet star, it occurred to me how selfish this wish was.

Since Betelgeuse is only about ten million years old, it hasn't had time to develop any advanced life on whatever planets might orbit it. And it's too far away to pose any danger to Earth. So at a glance, its death seems to be a guaranteed spectacle for us and no threat to anyone.

But there could be dozens or hundreds (or even thousands) of other solar systems within lethal range of the radiation Betelgeuse will emit when it explodes, and as a result, I can't be certain that in wishing for its death, I'm not also wishing for the deaths of billions or trillions of living people on planets we will never know of.

That's rather a high price for me to receive a pretty light show.

So from now on, when out for my jog, I intend to look up at that bright star, red and gleaming, and hope that it does not enliven the night anytime soon. Or that if it does, any civilizations within its danger zone have found a means to protect themselves from its nuclear fury.

In the meantime, I can be pleased to know that its brightness and crimson hue tell me about a star so large it would reach almost to Jupiter if placed where our own sun sits. A titan living fast and enormously, blasting out energy on a scale ordinary mortals cannot imagine.

That's a beautiful sight too, and does no one any harm.

A Visionary Quote

I went to the optometrist today, because I started seeing two of everything shortly after getting my last pair of glasses. On her wall, she had a quote, which Google tells me is by Leo Buscaglia:

What you are is God's gift to you
What you make of yourself is your gift to God

Though I'm not traditionally religious, I found this to be a terrific thought. Why? Because it seems to discard dogmatic notions of religious duty and moral obligation in favor of a simple principle: the value of giving.

My optometrist gave me a new prescription, and in a few days, I hope to be seeing the world in a more unified image, one which will not give me splitting headaches. I don't know that I gave her much of anything back, other than saying, "Thank you." I didn't even let her know that I liked the quote on her wall. (To tell the truth, I was somewhat nervous she might tell me the double vision meant I had a brain cloud.)

But perhaps by sharing it here, I'm giving something forward, and perhaps when I go back to get my new lenses next week, I'll remember to tell her about that as well.

Perhaps, too, I'll figure out some small way in which I can make more of myself.

A Better World

My friend Kelly postulated on Facebook that everything would be just a little bit better if Jake Lloyd hadn't been cast as Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace. Of course, my brain immediately took that on as a challenge. I won't bore you with how this would have changed the outcomes of various elections and prevented numerous catastrophes, partly because I've made a New Year's Resolution to avoid politics and partly because it just wouldn't be funny. But here's how the world would be a better place in a Lloydless Phantom Menace Alternate Timeline.

(1) So let's set our stage: instead of casting a wooden, talentless waif indistinguishable from a zillion other playground-hollering little snots, George Lucas finds someone who could plausibly grow up to one day sound like James Earl Jones.

(2) Spending day after day on-set with an elementary-school kid who projects gravitas beyond his years, the rest of TPM's cast has no choice but to up their acting game and project real intensity into every scene.

(3) Even George Lucas isn't crass and shallow enough to put Jar-Jar Binks onscreen beside this razor-eyed tyke. Or maybe he keeps Jar-Jar, but dubs him into alien-speak and runs subtitles under all his dialogue. Either way, a massive improvement.

(4) From that, it naturally follows that moviegoers sit spellbound through TPM thinking, This is a hell of a movie, and Holy crap, this kid's gonna turn into Darth Vader! (As opposed to thinking, didn't this kid dent my car door when his effing razor scooter got away from him?)

(5) Encouraged by the enthusiastic response to Episode I, Lucas proceeds to Episode II with more focus and a dedication to maintaining quality. Despite his natural inclination to let actors get away with shoddy performances, he chooses instead to repeatedly slap Hayden Christensen around during the course of production, saying, "Christ, the ten-year-old was scarier than that in the last movie. Do better, or I'll have Frank Oz stick his hand up your ass and work your mouth for you -- Yoda's CGI in this film, so Frank's got the time to do it, too!"

(6) Attack of the Clones is heralded as cementing the return of Star Wars' greatness. It dominates the box office through the summer of 2002.

(7) Eager to ride the renewed bandwagon of space-based sci-fi, FOX promotes Joss Whedon's Firefly sensibly and runs the episodes in correct order in a good time-slot. Time magazine puts Nathan Fillion on its cover back-to-back with a Han Solo cardboard cutout, over the headline, "Better than Star Wars?"

(8) Faced with sudden competition and also riding the heady wave of two acclaimed Star Wars films in a row, George Lucas works night and day to make Revenge of the Sith the most intense and effective of all the Star Wars movies. This in and of itself might mean nothing, except that Lucas concedes he can't possibly outdo Whedon without help, and actually takes advice from people who know how to write throughout the creative process for Episode III.

(9) Paramount finally recognizes that it can no longer blame the poor ratings for "Enterprise" on some kind of flagging interest in sci-fi. The entire writing staff and all the producers are fired, and replaced with a new creative team focused on good storytelling and exciting plots.

(10) With Firefly and Enterprise duking it out on the small screen and Battlestar Galactica debuting during production as well, Lucas continues to seek all possible collaborative input into making Revenge of the Sith the greatest science fiction movie ever made. It wins Best Picture for 2005, and lands acting Oscars for Natalie Portman, Christopher Lee, and Ewan MacGregor. Hayden Christensen good-naturedly jokes that he'll get his nomination for Episode VII.

(11) Having had so much fun and finally achieved critical acclaim as great as his box office success, Lucas announces his third trilogy will soon go into production, but that he intends to take it easy, letting Ron Moore produce and Ridley Scott direct. Moore is giddy about the project, saying, "When I saw how George wrapped up Episode III, it gave me the balls to avoid ending Galactica with some kind of ambiguous, chicken-sh*t cop-out. I'm certainly not going to let him down now!" Scott is more reserved, but does remark that he'll be pleased to work with Harrison Ford again.

(12) Aglow with optimism and delight at the prospect of a future full of quality Star Wars films, the world has no time for economic downturns, and the allegorical fate of the Trade Federation has scared most of the Bernie Madoffs of the world into hiding anyway, leading to an endless housing boom and a world economy bustling enough to more than support Episode VII's $1 billion budget.

(13) During production of the final Star Wars trilogy, Industrial Light and Magic literally invents magic, and nothing bad ever happens in the world again.

Now admit it, does any of that really sound so far-fetched?

I've Added My Twitter Feed To The Sidebar

Now you can see how unclever I can be in 140 characters or less even if you're not on Twitter!

55 Topical Words

“Sir, the newspapers say you admitted to your housekeeper that you burned your house down for the insurance because your wife ran up your credit cards just before divorcing you for cheating on her with transvestites. Is this true?”

“That story is false!” he expostulated righteously, thinking, I never told the housekeeper they were transvestites!

55

A Place, A Person, A Life In Few Words

I'm in the middle of Catherynne M. Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making right now -- or really not so much the middle as the beginning. I just read Chapter V last night, and it was such a perfect chapter that I couldn't read further.

I've read plenty of good chapters in plenty of good books over the years, and it's not at all uncommon to encounter one so good that I just have to keep reading into the next. And of course it happens much too often that a chapter is so humdrum as to leave me unwilling to put any more energy into reading further, so I set the book aside for later.

But Chapter V of this book struck me as too beautiful to disrespect by rushing on past it. Valente has a marvelous skill throughout the book of putting something deeply moving or wise on almost every page. But she outdid herself in this chapter, with a setting full of wist and heartache and grace, the introduction of a sympathetic and striking minor character, glimpses into the history of Fairyland, intimations of the challenges that our titular protagonist may have ahead of her ...

As a narrative unit, the chapter achieved a real perfection, combining mood and movement and meaning into something much larger than the narrow frame of its pages. And having read such perfection, I had to stop -- in part because I feared that the next chapter might not be as wondrous, but also in part because I did not wish to rush away from that place, which Valente painted with such finesse that it set a hook into my heart and begged me to stay.