Tuesday, March 23, 2010


Daydreams and other things

So, what you might not know about me is that I daydream constantly. I used to be somewhat embarrassed by this. After all, normal well-adjusted people live for the NOW! What are you doing wasting time fantasizing about saving the library from super-villains? (Fast fact: if you ever chance upon me in the library with a vague satisfied look on my face, I've just protected a helpless child/the entire reference collection from the Legion of Doom (No, really). Some people might think that all this daydreaming is something to do with getting older, losing sight of one's real hopes and dreams. Nope. Not true at all. I've been daydreaming my entire life.

When I was little, I didn't have an imaginary friend, per se, but I did invent all kinds of situations with me and my pretend identical twin sister. I say she wasn't an imaginary friend only because I was completely aware of the fact that she wasn't real. Like, I didn't make people not sit on the chair next to me because she was sitting there or something. In fact, I don't know if anybody ever knew that I spent many an hour imagining in my bedroom about all the kinds of things me and my sister could do. I was fascinated by the idea of identical twins (switching places, etc..) but mostly, I was fascinated by the idea of having a sister, which to somebody who was an only child until she was almost 9 seemed just as strange and unusual. This imaginary sister fantasy evolved somehow over time to daydreams about really being from a magical world where I was a princess or something (my twin sister was obviously a princess too, but I was born first and therefore heir to the throne). Mostly, these imaginings had to do with my birthmark which looks exactly like the letter "J" stamped on my right butt cheek. TMI? I don't think so. Anyway, because my lovely birthmark was so perfectly formed, I constantly imagined that it could be a sign that I was really royalty/an alien/ a royal alien. Little kids are always coming up with the funniest situations, right? Of course right after I grew out of the royal alien thing, which if we are being honest didn't happen until I was about 12, I read Dune. I mentioned this a few weeks ago when I was talking about rereading books, but I was crazy crazy obsessed with Dune when I was in middle school. Like I even made a little concoction with sugar, cinnamon, and cumin or something and called it Spice and I would pretend to be the kwisatz haderach. Yeah... I was a weird little kid. I always justify my strangeness by emphasizing the fact that I knew that I was playing a game and didn't actually think any of these things, but it was still pretty weird for a 13 year old girl to daydream about a David Lynch movie.

By the time I entered high school, my imaginings had evolved into far less fantastical versions of their former selves. Instead of Dune, I became strangely obsessed with World War II and would watch History Channel documentaries when I came home from school. My dream man was Steve McQueen from The Great Escape and I had his picture up on the wall of my bedroom when other girls had Leonardo DiCaprio. I daydreamed about killing Nazis and Hitler and winning the war in some kind of bizarro past (Yes, this is why Inglorious Basterds was my favorite movie last year. It's like somebody looked into my dreams and put it on the screen). But by this point I had started to become self conscious about my daydreams. I started to realize that I was getting a bit old to be fantasizing about things. That is, of course, until we read The Secret Life of Walter Mitty in 9th grade English class. People sometimes think of the Mitty character with scorn, but for me, he was a hero. Well, not so much a hero, but proof at least that grown ups can still daydream. And so I never stopped. I don't think the story convinced me to keep on daydreaming, but at least it didn't tell me that I shouldn't.

Here we are years later, and I still daydream. I daydream about meeting famous people or being famous, I daydream about living in other times or on other worlds or being a man or nonhuman. Many of my daydreams are informed by TV shows and movies (lately Doctor Who, duh!), though some are purely random flights of fantasy. I should add that in addition to daydreaming, my regular nightly dreams are always wonderfully vivid and generally exciting. I never have those typical dreams of coming to school naked or missing a test or running into an ex boyfriend. Last week I had a particularly odd dream where me and Zach Galifianakis were out on a date at the Louvre when we were attacked by Velociraptors, if that's any indication.

I've often wondered what my dreams mean. Am I simply projecting an idealized Mary Sue version of myself into mental fan fiction in an attempt to live out unrequited desires? Eh, sometimes. However, I would also like to add that some lot of the time I put myself into fantastical situations without the benefit of vast wisdom or magical powers, which I think just means I'm bored. I also don't really see any difference in daydreaming and people watching a TV show or movie, except I write all the characters and they say just what I want them to. So yeah, I guess that's all I have to say about daydreams. I have an active imagination. Sue me.

Monday, March 15, 2010


Yeah... Yeah.. you know what this post is about already

My Journey Watching Doctor Who continued/ concluded...

So guess what, gang! I've finished season 4 of Doctor Who. Now I just have 2 weeks to watch the specials and I'll be all caught up for the new (and probably not as good) 11th Doctor. I really really enjoyed season 4, mostly because I liked the character of Donna quite a bit. At first, in the Christmas episode from last season, I found her rather shrill, but she has grown on me. Of all the companions, I found that Donna was the one who had the strongest personality. While she was not always sure of herself, the fact that she wasn't madly in love with the Doctor made her able to question him a lot more than Martha or even Rose. I really liked that about her. It also helped considerably that Catherine Tate is older than David Tennant by a few years. Donna is no chippy clinging on the Doctor's arm. She is a grown woman who consciously makes the decision to find and travel with the Doctor (after rejecting him in the Christmas episode), not a girl with stars in her eyes mooning over a bloke with gorgeous hair. She teases the Doctor, she banters with him. Donna is a fast talker who likes to talk a lot, which is in considerable contrast to Martha who seemed to just wait around for the Doctor to explain things. Sometimes you wish she would just shut up, but at least she serves a clearly defined purpose.

This season was pretty strong in terms of writing, though I still think that the writing was strongest during the third season even though Martha was the weaker character. The finale though! Wow! They really threw the kitchen sink at that thing, didn't they? I mean they managed to bring back (spoilers) every freaking character that has ever been on the show! Dang! Really, really brilliant. I am sort of upset with myself that I have rushed through this thing, though. While I did want to finish all the episodes before the new season starts, I definitely missed out on that feeling of anticipation that comes from long delays between seasons. I have never watched a show this compulsively since I discovered Red Dwarf and Farscape back in college and downloaded all the seasons. British people are just more interesting in space. I mean, British people are more interesting than Americans. Anyway, I will totally watch the new season/series whatever they call it in the UK, but I don't think it will ever be the same. I've read on the internet that the first Doctor you watch is always "your" Doctor. I guess David Tennant will always be mine. I definitely can never forget this mad month that I spent with him, watching early in the morning before I left for work and on the off days during the week when there were no other shows on. It has been a seriously crazy ride. Probably won't blog about the 3 specials so this will wrap up my Doctor Who coverage until the new season next month.

Allons-y Alonzo

Sunday, March 07, 2010


I HAVE GONE WHO-CRAZY!!

My Journey Watching All 4 Seasons of Doctor Who Part Two


So this past week, I've watched even MORE episodes of Doctor Who and finished the third season. I also went back and watched all the eps from Season 1 with Captain Jack in them so that I could start watching Torchwood too and discovered that John Barrowman is crazy good looking (like I'm the first person to figure that one out). I'm finding that the 3rd season is a bit darker than the 2nd, and certainly deals with more complex themes. In particular the Human Nature/ Family of Blood two part episode set in 1913 was really brilliant in its depictions of prewar England, the horrors of war, and the power of ordinary individuals. Doctor is still the Doctor, but I am finding that without Rose he lacks that sort of emotional core to the show that was so essential to the second season. Martha really does seem like she's tagging along and I do genuinely wonder what good she actually is. Rose was a bit of chav, but at least she seemed to stabilize the Doctor's personality and since she had been with him a while, had a much better idea of what was going on. It took Martha till basically the last episodes to really come into her own as a character, though I still felt that she was relatively weak.

I find myself daydreaming about this show a lot now that I've seen like 30 hours of it in a 3 week span. It really is the perfect sort of show for daydreaming, I think. Also for writing fan fiction, which I will never ever do I promise. Now that I've finished the 3rd season I think I'll take at least a few day break until I start the 4th. Need to pace myself and all. For my sanity anyway