Category: tv

Following up

I am under the weather and under the deadline gun today, but I wanted to post two quick links clarifying the record on various things.

First, Christian posted a long explanation of the “If you meet Ianto Jones on the road, kill him” buttons. That search string directs a lot of people to this journal, but those interested in that, should visit him. I loved this essay like burning and it let me roll around in a lot of fictional joy and grief. Christian has also cross-posted this at his Livejournal, where a lot of great discussion has ensued.

Second, in what may be the last addendum to the “Buffy bullying incident at Gally,” I just got a comment providing more information on What Really Happened. Which is to say, not a minor (sorry about that; I look really young for my age too, and I know that while people tell you it’s flattering, it can also be annoying, so my apologies!) and not, apparently and thankfully, someone who wound up upset by what happened. All of which underscores that fact that when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me; but also that stuff that isn’t meant to hurt can hurt people, even people on the periphery of the situation, like myself. It’s given me, and I hope all of us, a lot to think about. The comment is fantastic both as a followup and in terms of considering some other fannish phenomena. If you’ve been following this story, I urge you to click on the link.

butch isn’t ugly

Butch Lab Symposium is a blog carnival/round-up where participants blog independently on a monthly theme related to butch identity, and then later post a list of other participants’ pieces.

This month’s question, “What do people think ‘butch’ means? What are the stereotypes around being butch? What do people assume is true about you [or the masculine of center folks in your life], but actually isn’t? What image or concept do you constantly have to correct or fight against? How do you feel about these misconceptions? How do you deal with them? Do you respond to these stereotypes or cliches? How?” seemed particularly on point for me.

In my essay in Whedonistas I talk a good deal about how hard I find it to identify with the women of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel the Series. I don’t look, or feel, like them by default. Yes, sometimes I wear dresses and present femininely, and, when I do, I can be quite good at it. Sometimes it feels comfortable and sometimes it doesn’t.

My life as a boy, meanwhile, is very much the same way, and, and the end of the day, it’s hard for me to have a word for what I am because there are such rigid definitions, not just of male and female, but of butch and femme. Sure, I have the de rigueur short hair, but the fussy suits make people questions my masculinity cred in the queer community as surely as they make some people questions the masculinity of foppish men in the world of more mainstream gender roles (see: my off-hand remark about Wesley Wyndham-Price in my Whedonistas piece).

As far as I can tell, most people think butch means a whole lot of things that don’t really have very much to do with me. Of course, there’s the role of the butch/femme dynamic in the lesbian community past and present, and I’ll confess I have some affection for its cultural presence in my world, even if it’s largely worked against me and mine (I’m not just butch, my partner wouldn’t define as femme (again, check Whedonistas for more, but she keeps a pick-axe under our sink), and a whole lot of femmes I know that have dated each other are really sick of explaining to people, that yes, really, two femmes can be together!).

But more than that, there are just all these cultural expectations of masculinity that get bound up in butchness that make me really uncomfortable, not just because in a lot of ways I’ll never measure up, but because in a lot of ways, I don’t want to. Because gender is often defined through others (the “a man is a man because of how a man responds to a woman” theory of gender), butchness often seems to become about what it’s not, and as such, often seems to engender a great deal of rhetoric that is covertly, if not overly, misogynist.

Being butch doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, mean I have to have certain interests (e.g., sports, which I largely don’t care for), skills (e.g., Patty changes lightbulbs and deals with tools because I am largely useless at these things), and social and sexual roles (my own being unnecessary to describe for the sake of this entry). And it certainly shouldn’t require me to be misogynist, which is something I see more and more gay women complaining about lately — butches that assert their butchness by denigrating femmes in all the same ways that women get denigrated by men in het culture.

But, if I reject the external assumptions of what a butch is, what’s left to define me as butch, at least on the days where I would consider myself such? The answer, is, simply, that I don’t know. This is striking, not, however, because of any need to self-define a role in the community of gay women, but because of what it says about gender on a wider scale. If there is nothing that is essential to butchness (although I’m sure a lot of us, probably even me, would say we know it when we see it), then there is, also arguably, nothing that is essential to masculinity.

And that’s when people in the heterosexual and heteronormative world, especially if they’re politicians it seems, start getting really scared. If masculinity or femininity — if butchness or femmeness — only exists in the eyes of others, how can you ever really be sure you are what you say you are? Is it too much to ask that people be that self-assured of their gender identity, whether it is consciously constructed or not? And is this challenge to the idea of gender certitude why the idea of gender as flexible and self-defined makes some people so angry? Or why trans and gender non-conforming people are so often in so much danger?

On this theme, I was struck particularly by Rachel Maddow’s segment last night on political truth. In passing in that segment (it’s towards the end, for those of you not wanting to watch the whole thing), she mentions the way that people try to insult her when these arguments about political truth come up — they say that she’s gay and that she looks like a man.

Now, I don’t know whether Maddow identifies as butch or not, but I do know that in her off-camera presentation she reads so much more masculinely to me than she does on camera (and effectively admits to same in the segment, although even more briefly). I imagine, based on my own experiences, that that’s a hard bargain to make every night. It’s a moment she doesn’t linger on in the piece, but it points the way to one clear thing: “looking like a man” is, apparently, for many people, one of the worst things a woman can do.

But for some women, that’s not an insult. Hell, it can be the best thing we’ve ever damn heard. Which gets me to the misconception about butchness — whether my butchness meets some butch standard or not — that aggravates me the most: butch isn’t ugly. It’s not a presentation that derives out of some failed femininity. It’s not this thing we do because we were bad at what we’re supposed to do. It’s just this thing we do.

On the list of preconceptions about butchness that come from both inside and outside the queer community, this one is, I recognize, seemingly trivial. But, using people’s self-definition as a slur is a nasty business, and defining butchness as ugliness is a special type of misogyny that is restrictive and vicious for all women, regardless of whether butchness is even anywhere on the map of their world.

today’s acafen problems

These may amuse you, because even as I grapple with them, they are amusing me:

1. I realize that Jones is a ridiculously common surname, especially in the UK and especially in Wales. But generally when I’m writing academic articles, I mention the character’s whole name the first time I refer to them, and then refer to them by their last name throughout the rest of the article. Which is all well and good, until you’re writing an article about the Whoniverse that necessarily must mention both Harriet Jones and Ianto Jones and may mention Martha Jones, and I don’t really want to go traipsing about in scholarship being all familiar with these folks and calling them by their given names, but the constant use of their full names is remarkably awkward (although probably what I’m stuck with — I simply cannot refer to even a fictional prime minister by her first name). Meanwhile, on Twitter someone tells me that in Wales it is common to deal with the problem of Joneses by referring to them with reference to what they do. So, Jones the companion? Jones the … whatever it is we think Ianto does at Torchwood? Jones the PM? Somehow, that gets even more awkward in terms of construction, despite being infinitely more hilarious.

2. The Face of Boe presents a similar problem. Do I reference him continually as the Face of Boe, or do I, after the first mention, shorten that? And if so, do I shorten it to the Face or Boe? If I shorten it, I’m leaning towards the Face. That said, on Twitter, this provoked amusing levels of varied opinion and raised the issue of appropriate pronouns for the thing/person/tentacle monster/Face/Jack. Help me, Internets, help me!

3. Apparently, according to the Sherlock commentary tracks, everyone does this, but I keep writing (in a different article than the DW one mentioned above) “Sherlock and Watson” when I meant to write “Holmes and Watson.” This is an entirely aggravating up-hill battle that I shouldn’t even need to be having.

I have these sorts of problems a lot, and recently felt sort of embarrassed that on some of the HPA stuff I’ve been doing about gender and bullying I keep referring to Snape as Severus, as if he’s an old friend. But of course, for me, fictional characters are old friends, even if that’s inappropriate to disclose in most scholarly settings (of which the HPA isn’t one).

I even tried to determine if I get the most antsy about first name/last name issues around characters about whom I’ve done transformative work (fanfiction, for those of us who aren’t being delicate about it), but that really doesn’t seem to be it either (although, it’s surely the case regarding both Snape and Ianto Jones). I suppose that it’s just, as it often is in my writing, mostly about cadence.

For the other folks out there doing scholarly work, what weird problems do you have of this ilk? Because it surely can’t just be me. And I need some amusement while I stare at the 50 pages I need to write in the next few days while also moving my office.

the activism trap

Being an activist can really suck. Let me show you how.

I’m engaged with anti-bullying efforts for a bunch of reasons. This includes the fact that I was severely bullied as a kid, as a teen, during university, and periodically as an adult on the wonder that is the Internet; that I find working on anti-bullying initiatives healing; and that I believe my way with words and openness can help the cause.

But at core, the reason I want to stop bullying is so that people who are awesome have the space to do awesome stuff. It’s hard to make art, do research, be an awesome friend, teach kids, help animals, strive for political reform, provide awesome customer service or do whatever it is you do if you’re being bullied and recovering from being bullied. The best reason to support anti-bullying is so that more people have the space to be the most awesome versions of themselves they can be.

The thing is, when I spend all my time talking about stopping bullying or anti-gay harassment or sexism or transphobia or whatever thing I feel its critical to speak out about (and feel capable of speaking out about — there are lots of issues I support where it’s probably better for me to let other people speak while I keep learning), I don’t have time to do my awesome stuff. And then it’s a little bit like the bullies have won, because they’ve forced me to abandon my agenda and will for the purpose of responding to their actions and arguments.

This really sucks. And it’s emblematic of something I think most activists face at various times. From feminist advocacy to fighting poverty to stopping racism — when you have to be an activist all the time, it’s easy to lose the benefits you’re supposed to enjoy from that activism helping to make the world better. Balance is key, but, in a cruel world, pretty hard to come by.

Which is why I really want to stop talking about the Buffy thing (here, have a summary from someone who was there and isn’t me), because I feel that particular activism trap closing in around me. But, that said, there are a few remaining things I do want to address.

First, thank you for keeping it civil. While a few comments here have made me angry or upset, and while I disagree with some opinions I’ve seen expressed, no one really crossed the line in discourse here. That’s awesome, and I totally appreciate it.

Next, about that argument where you say, “Well, I want to take this person at her word, but she sounds awfully emotional, and therefore I can’t.” — That argument is a misogynistic rhetorical device that often gets pulled out against women who are upset and not against men who are angry. It’s happened in various branches of this discussion (which is now happening across Whedonesque, several blogs, and Livejournal). It’s an effective rhetorical device due to the way we treat women in this world, but it’s not actually good argumentation. It’s also angry-making. Please knock it off.

Additionally, I am really trying to avoid making a post about the whole “toughen up” thing and why it’s so problematic, as, again, I don’t want to get sucked into the negative self-impact activism trap I described in the opening of this post. However, it’s important to me that you understand the following things: First, there is no universal standard of appropriate emotional feeling; just as the Goblin King asks Sarah in Labyrinth what her basis of comparison is when she declares, “It’s not fair,” I would ask you what yours is when you say someone is over-sensitive. Second, it is my sensitivity that allows me to do what I do for a living — writing stories, examining pop-culture, performing, and eroding the artificial boundaries we’ve set up between scholarship and sentimentality. (A theoretical excess of) feeling, just like anything else, can be a tool, an advantage, and a weapon; it’s certainly one of mine. Trying to stamp it out or devalue it, isn’t just nasty, it’s illogical.

Finally, stop with the “free speech” and “censorship” noises. I’m a trained journalist. I give to the ACLU, and I am, like Rachel Maddow, an absolutist about free speech in the legal sense. Wanting to have as little government regulation of speech as possible is not, however, inconsistent with wanting people not to be egregious to each other; encouraging people to be civil in public; telling people to knock it off when I’m offended; and using the tools I have available to me to manage speech in the online venues that I host. Arguments to the contrary are disingenuous, and beyond this statement, I will not engage them.

What would I love to see going forward? I’d love to see more discussion, in general. Just hearing all these viewpoints (which are not split into two camps, but run a wide gamut) is, I think, valuable to everyone. I’d also like to see, as Chip from Two-minute Time Lord and I discussed late one night at this year’s Gally, con panels that have historically been about fans behaving badly branch out into discussions of how we can make things better.

I would also like to see discussion from activists of all stripes talk on how we can work hard, avoid burnout, and reap the benefits of the change we are trying to create in the world while continuing to be activists. It’s hard stuff, and we’re all still learning.

Now I’m going back to explaining why Sarah Jane Smith’s status as a journalist proves that the Doctor is real.

Buffy bullying incident follow-up: gender and character bashing

I’m on my flight back to New York (pro tip: American Airlines may have in-flight Internet, but it doesn’t have power outlets in coach), and thought I’d take time that’s unlikely to be productive in any other way to respond and follow up on the Buffy singalong situation of the other day.

First, I don’t care if you like Dawn or not. No, really. I’m pretty ambivalent about her myself. And, I recognize that being late to the fandom (that’s one of the things my essay in Whedonistas is about) means that I experienced the show differently — I wasn’t waiting a week between episodes, and I wasn’t in that discussion hothouse that happens when shows are aired for the first time.

I’m actually totally okay with the fact that many, possibly even most, of the commenters on my first post about this got (and gosh, there sure were a lot of you — this blog had previously gotten about 1,000 hits on its busiest day; thanks to Whedonesque it was over 5,500) side-tracked on how they feel about Dawn. I actually often like digressive conversations, and it was interesting.

However, my post really, really wasn’t about Dawn, and it felt like a lot of people missed that. It was about someone who may well have fit the legal definition of a child being bullied by a room full of adults because she stuck up for a character based both around her own affection for that character and the wishes of the show’s creator. This wasn’t, despite the fact that I am someone who often feels the need to defend the honor and memory of characters, about bullying Dawn. This was about bullying a fan, in the room, who was at a power disadvantage to those doing that bullying.

Character hate and character bashing can be weird. We get it a lot in Doctor Who and Torchwood fandom too, where, I suspect, the most common targets are Rose (DW) and Gwen (TW).

What’s character bashing? Lots of things qualify, but I can think of two easy, obvious and common examples: when fans, for no narrative reason, hold characters to a higher standard than other characters with comparable storytelling purposes; and when characters are portrayed in transformative work (e.g., fanfiction) in a way that exaggerates their perceived negative qualities in a way that’s aggressive, punishing, shaming and non-satirical (i.e., a character who has an extramarital affair appears in fanfiction as sleeping with a different person every night, being abusive to their spouse, and being relentlessly mocked for their sexual behavior by their colleagues in a story with A- and B- plots related to none of these things. It’s just the bullying of a fictional character as filler).

Character bashing is one of those things I really don’t get, and I don’t really study it, and so hesitate to make any sweeping conclusions about it. Certainly, there’s got to be a certain level of catharsis in getting out one’s irritation about a character that drives you mad (I, certainly, am not above shouting at the TV when I find Connor particularly irritating on Angel — I loathe that character, and often resented having to watch him, even as his presence was necessary to facilitate what’s one of my favorite arcs in all of television).

But one thing I have noticed is the way in which gender tends to be central to character bashing and the way in which character bashing often seems to provide a framework for bullying (i.e., of other fans who disagree), or, somewhat more subtly, a surrogate target for bullying.

Now, you’d think I could get behind at least the surrogate target thing. That at least prevents real people from getting bullied, right? Wrong. When people are shouting out things like “I hope you get raped” at group screening events (something I’ve now heard happens at some OMWF screenings, but at least did not happen at the one I reported on), that has an impact on real people. As does when female characters are vilified for being sexual, flawed, attractive, popular and/or successful. Or, when male characters are aggressively and relentlessly ridiculed for their performance (or rather non-performance) of masculinity.

So did gender come into play with what happened at the OMWF singalong at Gallifrey One? You bet. And it was as vivid and fascinating as it was awful.

The people yelling “Shut up, Dawn!” which is what started the whole thing, seemed to be mostly women. Women showing disdain for a young female character for speaking. And what was Dawn saying? Oh, just the truth that revealed the awful crap that Willow was doing to Tara at that point in the narrative. So what was that about? Willow/Tara love? Hatred of a snitch? Contempt for Dawn indirectly calling Willow out on her bad and arguably bullying behavior? Or just resentment for another pretty girl the audience is supposed to have some modicum of sympathy for?

Meanwhile, the people who then started yelling, by insisting both the upset fan and Michelle Trachtenberg “toughen up,” at the girl who spoke up about the anti-Dawn outbursts, seemed to be mostly men.

At this point, a few people yelled out trying to get everyone to knock it off. Which is when the hostility at the young fan escalated (and again, let me remind you — very possibly underage and expressing the wishes of the show creator), and I shouted, “Stop bullying other fans.” That worked (to my relief and surprise), and to me seems to indicate that people knew they were behaving badly.

Which is why when I went up to the fan after the screening and saw her surrounded by several people (somewhere in the 6 – 10 range), I assumed they were there to offer her support or apologies. Nope, they (and again, here, mostly men) were explaining to her why they were correct both in silencing Dawn and in telling this fan that Dawn deserved this and that she is required to “toughen up.”

What was perhaps most remarkable here is that the fan continued at this point, not to defend herself, but to defend Dawn. This is stories mattering in action. There have been so many times in my life where I protected fictional people when I didn’t yet feel ready to openly protect myself. I don’t know this fan, or her internal framework, but I was moved by what seemed like an honorable defense of joy from the moment this mess started.

So let’s recap:

– Women bashed a female character for telling the truth;
– Men then enforced the ability of those women to do that and while mocking a young fan who may have been legally a child;
– Afterward, instead of going to see if the kid was all right (because this is our con, our fandom, our community — Gally is a small con (this is the first year it broke 2,000 people) with a legendarily family atmosphere), people went up to her to reinforce their perception that she and her feelings were wrong and used their status (age and gender) to do so.

After this experience, I think we perhaps need fewer OMWF singalongs and more group showings of “The Pack.”

And if you’re the fan whose defense of Dawn ultimately necessitated this post and the previous one on this subject? I’m so sorry. I’ve been the subject of big discussions on the Internet because I’ve had the audacity to stick up for people or express my opinion. It sucks, and it’s stressful, and the last thing I EVER wanted to do here is contribute to your bad day. Because I didn’t get to watch Buffy until I was 38, it didn’t really get a chance to change my life or make me brave. But among other things, I’m a woman who fights, and I am so glad this show and the community that should exist around it means so much to you. I hope this hasn’t put you off either Buffy fandom or the Whoniverse. Despite what happened on Saturday night, I promise you, most of us do believe that intellect and romance should trump brute force and cynicism.

Thank you for helping fight that fight.

ETA 2/23/2010: A few final thoughts about the discussion this has engendered.

tell me that you’ll wait for me

Every year, without fail, my favorite thing about Gallifrey One is the closing ceremonies. I know that’s a little strange, but I have an innately melancholy nature, and I’m also very cognisant of the degree to which it is often the case that it is only in loss that it is acceptable to speak of love.

Doctor Who is about a lot of things. It’s about the wonder of the universe. It’s about ordinary people getting to be heroes, sometimes at extraordinary cost. And it’s about love, often in ways that are remarkable; Doctor Who often decouples romanticism from sexuality and tends not to privilege any particular type of relationship (familial, friend, business, romantic, sexual) over any other.

All those things make the Whoniverse deeply appealing, not just for the narrative of the the Other reasons much SF/F is often popular, but specifically because it’s often a direct acknowledgment of the complexities of family, longing, and ambition that many other properties simply don’t address (Buffy and Harry Potter, for example, may both be choose your family properties but they are less successful at focusing on interpersonal narratives more often ignored).

But Doctor Who is also about melancholy. It’s about loss. It’s about the wonder of the universe being wonderous because you won’t have it forever. One day, you’ll die. Or the Doctor will leave you behind. One day, all that you’ll have left is longing. And memory. But, just as Doctor Who doesn’t inherently privilege one type of interpersonal relationship over another, it also doesn’t inherently privilege one experiential relationship over another. The moment in which you remember the time you saved the universe is just as important on Doctor Who as the moment in which you saved the universe. That moment in which you long? In which you regret? In which you cry in fondness for a love or adventure or friendship or person that once was, is as valuable as the moment you first discovered all those things.

All Times Are Now, my writing partner and I say. Part of that is about our world-building philosophy and the ways in which we like to tell stories — events echo not just forwards, but also backwards, in time. But part of that is also a sort of emotional worldview that tells us a moment of absence can be just as keenly beautiful as a moment of possession. In fact, they are, quite often, nearly the same thing.

I do a lot of creative and scholarly work about mourning. Often, that feels like the most beautiful thing in the world to me. Sometimes, though, it’s just miserable, or a burden of responsibility for holding other people’s stories I am inadequate in the face of.

Doctor Who often provokes me in me the most wonder when Sarah Jane Smith speaks of the life she once had, when Jack Harkness looks for guidance from the man who once abandoned him, and when Amy Pond tells the Doctor just how long she waited for him.

Some stories aren’t exactly real, no matter what the philosophy of my creative work is, and no matter how hard I try to will them into being. I may still check the backs of wardrobes for portals to Narnia, but it is likely I will never quite believe hard enough to find my way into the snowy forests of the White Witch. The Doctor will, I know I am supposed to know, never come for me.

And yet, the Whoniverse tells me that that’s okay. That my life is no smaller for its terrestrialness, for all the things I’ll never get to do, for all the moments that have passed, and for all the things I’ve lost. Which is why I love the closing ceremonies at Gally. Love. Because more than any other moment at the event, they embody exactly what Doctor Who is about.

stop bullying people for caring about stories just as much as you do

So hey, I just went to my first Buffy singalong, which seemed like it was going to be a great way to cap off the Whedonistas launch. But then this thing happened, and I want to talk about it.

Every time Dawn opened her mouth, people in the audience started yelling, “Shut up!” You can defend this by saying it’s the same thing as what we do at Rocky Horror, except that it wasn’t. It wasn’t clever, and it wasn’t directed at all the characters or the property as a whole. It was directed at Dawn.

When a young fan (certainly not older than college-age, probably still a teen, quite possibly under-age) yelled out asking people to stop, people yelled at her. When she tried to explain that this type of action has made the actress who plays Dawn cry and that Joss Whedon had asked people not to do it, people yelled out that both she and the actress needed to toughen up.

In a moment the Buffy singalong had gone from some fans engaging in questionable courtesy to a bunch of fans bullying a young fan because she cares. A lot.

What. The. Fuck?

Being a fan is about love. Sure we argue and debate and rant about People Who Are Wrong on the Internet. But coming to a Doctor Who convention (as Craig Ferguson says, “Intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism”) and bullying a young fan to toughen up because she had a problem with the way the event was going because a Buffy singalong generally does not involve cheering and encouraging the silencing of a young female character whose arc in the episode is such that she is kidnapped, silenced, sexualized and forced into a marriage in Hell?

That was the most uncool thing I’ve seen in fandom in a long time.

Fans need to stop bullying other fans on- and off-line. It’s vile and disgusting and weak. And it makes us so terribly below the heroes we adore.

The Whoniverse is about the people who were never supposed to be heroes choosing to be heroes: shop girls and queer boys from council estates; women who’ve been left behind and men who’ve been forgotten. Secretaries and PAs and temps. People who, that when you hear their stories, you can’t help but hope that at the end of the world the universe might pause for a second and give you just one perfect beautiful moment in which to fix everything.

So in light of that, who the fuck do you think you are to bully some girl for caring about stories just as much as you do?

ETA 2/21/2010: I’ve posted a follow-up to this, addressing some of the comments both here and at Whedonesque and offering a more detailed description of what happened.

ETA 2/23/2010: A few final thoughts about the discussion this has engendered.

cons are awesome

The thing about cons is no matter how much you wake up feeling as if you are in a world of hurt, someone else is way more in a world of hurt than you. That said: jet lag, strange bed, odd hotel temperatures, travel food woes and a bit of alcohol (and, okay, to be fair, gluten-free oreos for breakfast) and I am not really at my best right about now.

Con is excellent. I went went to some programming, which is not something I always get motivated to do. Guest banquet was also fun. Have heard some small trivia regarding the new season of Torchwood that is probably profoundly not important to most people, but that I’m utterly satisfied with. But, clearly it is too early for me to be blogging; I seem low on adjectives and high on adverbs. But I am listening to that Prodigy/Enya mash up. Again.

Today is the exciting Whedonistas launch. I’ve already got my contributor copies in hand. If you’re here at Gally, please drop by at 3pm in the Atlanta room. You can pick up your copy of the book in the dealers room and an autograph session will follow the panel in the autograph area.

Thanks to Christian, many of us are wearing buttons that say If you meet Ianto Jones on the road, kill him. I think we all have different sentiments about them (from philosophical to the mere need to preserve the time line), but they’ve been sort of universally been about love, not flame bait, and that’s been lovely, and, in its own way, deeply sentimental. I suppose it’s a little like agreeing to shoot someone you love in the head if they get bitten by zombies and turned.

Less philosophically, my favorite ribbon of the con, provided by Tony Lee, says, Show me on K9 where the Time Lord touched you.

Meanwhile, I spoke to Patty last night. She may be on her way to another location by the time I speak to her next. All is well at the dig, and she has informed me that it has been decided that the dig that she is a pirate queen and her little assistant that the other girls insist on calling a demon (and Patty calls the assistants in the other trenches demons as well — it’s some competition all the girls started over who can be called a demon the most or something) is her General. No, I don’t know. But it’s very awesome. She sounds very happy, but I really, really miss her. I remain somewhat surprised by how grueling I’ve found this whole travel/away thing we’ve had going on since the fall.

Right now, though, I really, really need some scrambled eggs.

All things are possible. After breakfast.

If you’re a nerd, L.A.’s kind of a weird place for contemplating mortality

Greetings from the late-afternoon LobbyCon at Gallifrey One. Since I arrived I have taken three terrible cab rides, gotten called in for a casting in New York, and reveled in the glory that is In-and-Out Burger. Mostly, though, I am jet-lagged and keenly reminded how much I do not get L.A.

I feel bad about that. A lot of people I know are from L.A. Or love L.A. Or at least get L.A. But me? I’m horrified. I don’t know if it’s an actors phobia, or the disconnect of growing up somewhere where cars are just not on the menu, or an acute reaction to the aesthetic difference between a 19th-century city (New York) and a 20th-century one. But L.A. and I are seriously, seriously not on.

And it’s not just that I’m out here in airport land. I’ve been to other parts of L.A. I spent a few weeks in Beverly Hills about twelve years ago working on a commercial, and I’ve visited friends in Bel Air, but no matter what part of L.A. I’m in, I find it depressing, like some world I am locked out of — whether by appearance or desire or just a general affection for actual seasons.

L.A. is, however, a good place, I find, for my particular brand of melancholy, although we all could have, perhaps, done without the moment when I declared during our one not terrible (despite its bad 90s rock soundtrack) cab ride, that there was a certain unpleasant irony in being at a Doctor Who conference in the land of Wolfram & Hart and feeling forced by the urban landscape at hand to contemplate my own mortality. Although maybe that wasn’t L.A., maybe that was just me missing the feeling of being dressed as Captain Jack Harkness.

Of course, as I told someone on Facebook after the Gogo Inflight finally started working again after I complained copiously about it online, just because I’m not wearing the coat, doesn’t mean I don’t still bring the magic. Although, I’ve gotta say, the jet lag feels like it’s taking years off my TARDIS-induced immortality.

reporting for an audience of one

I was 17-years-old when the Berlin Wall fell. It was my senior year of high school, a year, during which, I had hoped to study abroad, largely to escape the bullying and awkwardness I felt at school and the secrets I was beginning to understand the need to keep at home. But, when I had broached the subject with my parents the year before, it was a subject that had gotten squashed quickly.

My mother, who is Jewish, was uncomfortable with my desire to study in Germany or Austria, places that fascinated me because of her own love of their art — I grew up looking at women painted by Gustav Klimpt and Egon Shiele, women who looked like me and seemed like home.

In truth, looking back on it all, it may just have been the first thing that it sprung to her mind to say; my parents’ objections were probably more likely about money or my being off somewhere far away from their rules. But with my mother’s reaction being what it was, I didn’t ask a second time. Like all things I longed for, I merely stared at it from afar, lingering on travel ads in the newspapers I was raised to read daily as civic duty, hoping my desire would be obvious and, somehow, magical.

So I didn’t study abroad, and a month after my seventeenth birthday I wasn’t in Germany. I watched the Berlin Wall fall from our dining room table during that surprising week where I was allowed to have the television on during dinner. And each night, as I watched those events, I thought of two things: David Bowie’s “Heroes” (a song which kept me going in high school and that is deeply and complicatedly enmeshed with Berlin Wall mythology) and how I could just get up at 4am, take the can of cash I was hoarding out of the bottom of my closet, steal my mother’s credit card, grab my passport out of the second drawer on the left of her roll-top desk, take a cab to the airport, and run away, to Berlin, so I could be there as the Wall kept coming down.

But I had no nerve. And while I don’t know if it would have worked, I have always regretted that I never tried. 21 years later, I have still never been to Berlin.

Patty is too young to have particularly strong feelings or recollections about the fall of the Berlin Wall. She did not grow up afraid of nuclear war. In terms of scale, her Berlin Wall moment was, probably, sadly, 9/11. And here is this moment in Egypt, and she’s in India, doing what she loves, living without television and without radio she can understand. The news she gets comes on her mobile phone, from me, from friends, from the calls the other people on the dig get.

My academic degree is in journalism, a profession I selected for a host of foolish reasons: needing a respectable job-possible major to get parental assistance (and permission, I was 17) to go to college and wanting to be a war reporter because of fictions (V, the original version) I had loved as a young teen.

I was never a war reporter, but I did work for the AP for a few years in their Computer Assisted Reporting unit back in the mid-90s. When I write non-fiction now it’s scholarship, criticism, analysis, personal essays, or, in the hey-it’s-a-paycheck category, light lifestyle pieces for various online media.

But when I call Patty tomorrow, it’s my job to be a reporter, even if I’m just reporting all the news I watch both because it is my nature and because it is a requirement of my analysis work. I’ve been doing it since the beginning, starting with the Giffords shooting and then since the time I paged her in the middle of the night about Tunisia and Yemen and the beginnings of Egypt. The page didn’t go through right, and she, puzzled as to why I was frantically texting her about Yemen, called me on her lunch break, and I ran everything out as fast as I could.

Since then, it’s been hard to keep up the excitement and intensity and confusion and fear and hope of what’s been going on in Egypt. I’m just one person, without video or images to show her, without direct information, and with a great deal of fatigue from how much these events have upended my own working life. But it’s so important to me that I do a good job, that when she plays Where Were You When games she’ll have more for this than “I was in India, so I sort of missed it.”

I’m a news junkie. Maddeningly so. It’s not just work. It’s a compulsion. Sometimes, she has to tell me to change the damn channel because I’m about to watch the same episode of Rachel Maddow twice in the same evening. She puts up with this with a great deal of amusement, and she’s certainly into current events herself, just in a way that’s a bit less odd. So I hope I’m doing okay. That I’ll do well tomorrow. That she’ll be able to say in response to this entry in the Where Were You When game, “I was in India, and my girlfriend had to tell me about it on this crappy mobile I bought, and we kept getting disconnected and it was like two tin cans on a string and it seemed so strange.”

To me, who has the news on all the time, often on multiple screens and channels, it doesn’t seem like enough. But it sure does seem like something, like paying a debt for the way I once did, and still do, dream of Berlin.