the way onward

In January 2005 I was in Australia at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum when an announcement came over the PA system there to head to the auditorium if we wanted to see the first transmissions from Titan as they came in. I burst into tears.

Australia, where I had gone to study acting, was good but difficult for me. And Titan and I have always had a special relationship because of a film called Gattaca, which is about the highly stylized astronaut dreams of a guy named Eugene, born disadvantaged in a genetically engineered society because his parents decided to leave his form and function to chance and have a “faith birth.”

Eventually, through a business transaction and a subsequent friendship, Eugene is able to forge his identity as someone superiorly genetically engineered and so achieves his dream of going to Titan. His leaving scene at the end of the film, his secrets exposed to someone disinclined to stop him, always makes me sob. Because, while the film never tells us Titan is a one way trip, it’s quite clear that Eugene isn’t coming back. It’s in the music and the cinematography and the metaphor woven throughout of the way Eugene used to beat his genetically engineered younger brother at swimming races as a child; When asked how he did what he should not have been able to do, Eugene says, breathless and near drowning, “I never saved anything for the way back.”

For a lot of my life, I felt a lot like Eugene. There was all this stuff I wasn’t supposed to be good at — not with the funny teeth and awkward limbs, not with the heart murmur or the glasses or the wonky social skills. But I got wrathful in my ambition young, and the truth is, I’m actually pretty good at a lot of stuff. But that’s often been a hard thing for me to believe, and so Eugene and his borrowed identity of Jerome and the story of Gattaca has been a talisman to me since I saw it alone in a theater the night it came out. I have never saved anything for the way back — this is just one remark from the stories of men that’s become a tenet in the story of me. Eugene borrowed genetic material to be what he already was. Me? I suppose I borrow stories.

If you’re reading this now as I post it, you probably know me from Livejournal, and you’ve probably heard this story before. But this time part of the story is about why I’m choosing to tell it over here. Livejournal is, and has been, an awesome place for me. I’ve met friends there, and my partner, and done a hell of a lot of accidental networking that’s allowed me to parlay my obsessive interest in a whole bunch of pop-culture things (many of them of the SF/F variety, hence one of the reasons for the name of this blog) into professional work as an essayist, scholar, and con guest. In short: Livejournal is great for a lot of stuff.

Unfortunately, that’s somehow inspired a culture on Livejournal that’s often about excelling at things on Livejournal and cutting down people who excel at things off Livejournal. The first part of that’s not a terrible thing in and of itself — and not even relevant to the bulk of people who use LJ as a place to hang out with their friends, vent about their days, and connect with others who share common interests — but for me, lately, particularly in light of the second part, it’s become a little bit stifling. Being good at writing on Livejournal or excelling at social justice on Livejournal or having networking skills on Livejournal aren’t goalposts that are working for me right now. In some cases, because I’ve met those goals; in other cases, because I simply don’t know how to anymore if I ever did.

So, welcome to a new blog where I don’t do exciting link dumps (you’ll have to visit the LJ for that, as I doubt I could give my voracious reading and pasting a rest) or write fanfiction (again, something that’ll stay on LJ because that’s where the relevant community is), but where I do, do things like talk for more than three paragraphs at a time about politics and television and film and writing and making art and being queer and having a thing for custom tailoring and having grown up in a rapidly vanishing New York.

This place is named Letters from Titan because SF/F topics are both a professional and personal specialty of mine. And it’s named Letters from Titan because my life is more than a little bit My Life on the Geek List because of people I know, cons I go to, and speaking engagements I get to do. It’s also named Letters from Titan because I was once Eugene, because it’s colder closer to the stars, and because I am not ashamed of excellence any more than I am afraid of the terrible affair that seems to exist between those who are told they are nothing and ambition. It is not, however, named Letters from Titan because I am in any way related to a mythological giant who eats babies, but that can be a matter for debate if you’d like.

My name’s Racheline. My friends call me Rach. If you only know me from public online communications, you should probably call me RM. I do a lot of stuff. I’m pretty good at most of it. I’m also a slob and a procrastinator and full of self-doubt. But I believe in me and I believe in the future, all because I once burst into tears in the middle of a museum on the other side of the world.

I write these letters home to remind myself that I’m okay.

It’s nice to meet you.

Be grand.