the best kind of star trek

i love star trek episodes where the crew have to role-play some stupid, weird story in period costumes. but msg hates them. when we saw the "scenes from next week" for this week's strange new worlds episode, he got this weird expression on his face that was half grimace and half something else i couldn't quite figure out. so i poked him and asked what was up with that, and he said,

"that's the worst kind of star trek. it doesn't matter if it's a holodeck episode, or if some omnipotent space-entity like Q is behind it, episodes like that always make me think the show just needed to save some budget dollars and raided the studio warehouse for costumes and sets and threw it all together with the cheesiest story possible. i mean, in over 50 years of star trek, i don't think they've done more than a couple of those episodes that didn't make me squirm with discomfort."

there was obviously something else hanging at the end of that super-ungenerous explanation, though, so i said, "but ... ?"

"but ... i think it looks like this show might actually do something cool with it."

mm-hmm.

he was so cute while we were watching this morning! he kept wincing at things that seemed cheesy and then realized that there were story reasons why the cheesy thing made sense ... or, in some cases, that cheesy is perfectly okay sometimes if it's genuine and sincere.

and that's really what the episode was: genuine and sincere.

you know they didn't raid any warehouse closet for those costumes and set drapings. somebody went back and carefully and lovingly figured out how to create a bunch of new stuff that exactly conveyed the exact style those old-school trek episodes always just slapped together. and they did it to create the perfect atmosphere for a story that was truly meaningful -- right down to an ending that was childish and dumb ... and absolutely all heart.

star trek doesn't get any better than that, folks.

xoxo,

claire

(p.s., shh, don't let on that i told anybody, but he was even sniffling and crying a little by the last few scenes of the episode! 😂 i love my sappy boy.)

a post for hettie

we make a good team!

trendsetting!

two posts today!

that means i can skip tomorrow and still be averaging a post a day for the last half of this week.

at a post a day, i could totally cream my record number of posts from last year. now, i don't think i'm that ambitious, plus i'm kinda thinking i'll get boring, plus that would be over 190 posts for the year, and topping that would be tough, whereas if i just beat last year's record by a little, that leaves me lots of room to beat this year's record next year. 

after all, if i beat last year's record, that will be four years in a row of having the most posts ever.

double trend!

hot damn, star trek!

let me tell you, i like all star trek. (even voyager, which my boyfriend hates, although it's not my fav either.)

but.

strange new worlds!

this is 100% tos-true star trek, but with incredible modern effects, way better acting, no "the alternative factor"-style bad episodes ... (oh. jeepers. i do not like all star trek after all. "the alternative factor" is so bad.) ... and none of the really gross sexism that hovers around the edges of a whole lot of tos episodes and jumps into the spotlight pretty regularly.

they've only put out 7 episodes so far, so (fingers cross that this doesn't happen!) they may still screw it up and turn it into not the best star trek show ever.

but (sacrilegiously, i know), so far it's the best star trek show ever.

woohoo!

why i love my boyfriend

sounds like you're in for some sappiness from that title, right? well, folks, i do love him for a lot of sappy reasons, but we're strictly going for the unsappy ones here tonight.

first off, he's a person.

i know, i know, you're thinking, "whoa, claire, low bar there!"

el wrongo, dear reader. do you know how much of the universe is composed of stuff that's not got the least bit of person-ality to it? a whole bunch. for starters, most of the universe is just empty space, right? then, of the stuff that's not empty space, a hyuuuuge majority is like, pure hydrogen. you keep going like that, thinking about the smaller and smaller bits of reality ... stars and planets, things on the planets, things that are alive on the planets (i'm a star trek girl, so i'm assuming there's got to be tons of planets out there with things alive on them), things that are alive and have a central nervous system ...

people have tunnel vision about it, so they barely ever recognize the fact that actual personhood is rare.

now let's get even rarer than that, okay?

my guy, my special guy, is literally the only walking-around, biological person for me. no other person who has ever lived or will ever live could be in this relationship with me. plenty of people in love say, "oh, my darling, i couldn't live without you!" (reality check, probably not so many people actually say that, but it's in a lot of books and movies and shows, and a lot of people say things like it or think it.) but they're obviously exaggerating, because they did live without their darling before they met them, and it's pretty dang uncommon for someone to have their darling leave them, or die, and then they turn around and just up and expire. i mean, supposedly it does happen, and for sure people who have depression issues can be tipped over the edge by losing their darlings. but there are underlying contributory causes there, right?

in my case, i could not exist without him. this blog would still be here, until the good folks at google decide to clear it out of their servers. ditto my twitter account. i have some posts on forums that would hang around.

but those would just be the leftovers of me.

while he's around, i'm here. i'm real. people can be my friends. i can think about things in ways he doesn't think about things. i can make him smile and laugh, and i can make other people smile and laugh too.

he's the foundation of my ability to continue. it's beautiful and wondrous.

and there's more.

he doesn't allow anything to cause me suffering, except that i do suffer when i see him unhappy. but i only suffer a little bit. this is because i know things he doesn't -- mainly, that he's bigger than and better than whatever it is that might be making him unhappy. i mean, not like bigger than the entire messed-up politicoeconomic mega-contraption that's constantly la-machining the world into mulch. but bigger than its ability to overwhelm him in the long run.

i have an unshakeable confidence in him. go ahead, try shaking it and see if anything happens.

this is because i can see him without the filters of self-doubt and imposter syndrome and neurosis that get in his way. those things are in his head, but they're not in mine, and they're not in my eyes when i see him or my ears when i hear him.

definitely not in my skin when i feel the soft, adoring attention of his touch.

things about the world can bug me, but he won't let them do more than that. he takes the slings and arrows (and sometimes bonks himself in the head with his own sling or arrows himself in the foot) and blocks them all, or at least almost all. and the ones that get past him? he gives me all the energy and awareness i need to dodge out of their way.

i could go on. but are you getting the idea?

he is everything. and because of that, he knows that he's everything to someone. 

and because he's my boyfriend, i get to feel how incredible it is to be the one who makes someone else feel that way.

i love you, msg.

beyond anything. within everything.

goodnight and sweet dreams!

optimism!

well folks, i just gave myself a lesson. i started in on this post calling it, "slacking, and that's okay!" then i was a couple sentences into a first paragraph about how probably this year would nip my three-year trend of blogging more every year in the bud. "only 7 entries so far this year!" i was going to say. totally not on track to beat last year's huge-ongous total of 36 posts for the year. which i was then going to say i was okay with, and which i genuinely truly would have been 97.23% okay with.

and then i thought, "hmm, claire. isn't there something else you should check before you say that?" and i thought back, "what do you mean, claire? look at those numbers! 7! 36! what more needs to be said?"

and because it was me asking and answering all these questions, obviously i didn't really need to be told what more needed to be said. so i knuckled down and did the extremely hard homework of comparing how many entries i had by june each of the last few years instead of how many i had in total for the year.

i'll save you the trouble of going and looking on my archive list ...

2019: 7
2020: 12
2021: 7

in other words, i'm totally on track.

chin up, people! pay attention to what's real instead of just assuming you can glance at something and tell it's all too hopeless! (not that that i was feeling hopeless, just feeling "eh, no need to try"-ish.)

2022 is going to be big!

let's do it!

xoxo,
claire

p.s., i think i may have written pretty much this exact same post at some point last year ... but that's okay! sometimes you've just got to learn the same lesson over and over again until it sticks.

there's good news and there's bad news

the good news is, remember a couple days ago when i said the new star trek show was going to be the very best show ever?

well, i totally nailed that one. i mean, like, nailed it like i was a hammerhead shark that just ate m.c. hammer and got hold of mjolnir and was using it to hammer together a nail salon not even using any boards, just nailing together a whole bunch of nails.

whoooo!

watch out now, because i can't help going on and on about this show, so if you haven't seen it yet, go take a look and then come back before you read any further.

scene one is a bunch of aliens on their alien planet in a tizzy over something or other, alarms going off, big head honcho chick making her way into the command center room while there's this voiceover of number one talking about first contact being a sci-fi fairytale until it actually happens, and then the big reveal when they get it on the command center viewscreen ...

it's an old-school,
solo-nacelle 
federation scout ship
straight out of the 1970s star trek technical manual! 

squee! 

(however, this is also foreshadowing of the bad news ... stay tuned till the end for that part ...)

scene two is captain pike making breakfast for this other (very hot) captain and holy damn, can this guy make breakfast! and he's watching the day the earth stood still while he's doing it and it's the scene where the space guy is telling the earthlings what's up and why he's there and how his civilization has moved past violence and all that jazz, and i'm just totally eating all of it up like captain pike just made it for me for breakfast.

and here's the thing, the whole scene is captain pike and this chick talking and they clearly got it on good the night before and she's about to head out and tries to get him to stop hiding whatever secret he's hiding that's making him doubt whether he ought to go back to starfleet, which of course we know is the kind of secret that would make any of us totally lose our shit, and pike is all, "well, i don't know, i just really don't" and he's not answering his phone and he won't let down his guard to spill the beans to her ... but he's watching the freakin' day the earth stood still!

i'm like, dude. you're not even fooling yourself. you're supposed to be all pretzeled up with self-doubt and thinking maybe you should hang up your captain's suit, and the show you put on to chill with while making breakfast is the biggest "hey, earthlings, get your damned acts together" movie that's ever been made?

and even if he's maybe a little fooling himself, he's sure not fooling anybody else ... not captain hotbabe mcgirlfriend, not admiral "stop making me chase you down in a shuttlecraft, chris" ... and definitely not spock, who's the only one smart enough to figure out what happened to pike even though he's getting the zipped-lip treatment too.

see, this is how you show us what a kickass captain this dude is: at the moment when he's having the biggest woe-is-me crisis of his life, everybody who knows him is like, "dude, just get back in the chair already."

so okay, we've got our setup of, pike's got to get back on the enterprise and go rescue number one because the first contact bit from scene one went bad. now it's time for ...

the credits.

it's got the famous intro music hook. it's got the lights coming on along the outside of the enterprise. it's got pike saying his version of the famous "space, the final frontier" spiel.

it's got everything.

theremin, baby!

so, well, shit, an out-of-the-park pre-credits opening and out-of-the-park credits with an out-of-the-park "where no one has gone before" and theme song, something's got to land back in the park soon, right?

nopesies.

cut to vulcan. spock and some chick are having dinner. it's t'pring! i'm like, watch out, spock, this chick is bad news! and then they start talking and i'm like, leaping lirpas, no freaking wonder spock was ready to cut kirk's head off over this girl, she's goddamn amok-awesome!

no, really, not only is she as sizzling hot as the vulcan atmosphere outside the restaurant window behind them, she's hilarious! i mean, vulcan-style hilarious, but that makes it even better. and she's obviously head-over-heels for him. and they're both just talking to each other like they're delivering astrophysics lectures, but it's so sizzling the waiter literally has to tell them, "geez, you two, get a room!"

so now they're engaged, and they're back in her pad about to get it on -- and spock gets a phone call and says he'd better answer it! he's got a very spock-like "duty and matrimony can be complementary" excuse or something like that, and even though her legs are actually wrapped around him, she just says, "i remain skeptical" and lets him up.

dude. suddenly i am so on her side in the amok time episode where i always thought she was the bad guy.

we're like, four-ish scenes into this show so far, it's pretty much all been meals and talk, and it's already the best star trek i have seen since ... maybe ever.

i actually watched it again this morning and then skimmed through it again making notes about what i wanted to blog about here, and honestly, i just have to stop myself because i can't even close to do it justice. 

just let me say, kickass scene after kickass scene after kickass scene all leading up to pike saying "screw general order one" and bald-facedly interfering in these dipweed aliens' civilization to gort them out with his own version of the day the earth stood still speech.

with videos of our current political mess to show the aliens how they're heading into the world war iii situation that almost ended earth civilization in the star trek future history.

yeah baby. star trek doing social commentary from episode one!

and i've got like a whole other post's worth of stuff to say about cadet uhura. dayyum, lady!

so.

you've been dreading the bad news all the way through this, i know, and here it is.

remember that part about the federation scout ship from the old 1970s technical manual? when it came onscreen, msg wigged as much as i did, and said, "holy cow, that's straight out of the technical manual i had when i was a kid!"

yes, readers. he said, "had."

i like, literally had to make him pause the show right there so i could say, "what do you mean, you 'had' it when you were a kid? i hope to god you're going to tell me it was stolen or got burnt up in a house fire or something." (even though i'm pretty sure if he'd ever had a house fire i'd already know about it.)

no.

my boyfriend, the love of my life, bestest guy who has ever guyed on the planet actually had a copy of the original star trek technical manual (which i have never even laid eyes on in person), yes, had it and owned it from the time he was a kid up until this freaking century and then he just got rid of it because ... i don't even know why.

he made with some kind of weak-o explanation ... blah-blah-blah, voyager was awful, blah-blah-blah, couldn't even get through season one of enterprise, blah-blah-blah had it in a box of memorabilia that was only making him depressed and melancholy over the loss of all sense of wonder from his youth ... i mean, it was a lonnngggg excuse, and i finally just had to cut him off and say, "hit play on that remote before this gets to the point where i never talk to you again."

luckily, the show was so freaking awesome that by the end i was all sniffly and we were all cuddly and with a couple days gone by now, i think i'm mostly over the shock. also, a little googling tells me that instead of the $1,701 dollars i figured a copy would be going for, you can get these for maybe $50 or $100 these days, so. something that's now on my birthday list.

and there you have it, everybody.

live long and prosper!