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June 15, 2004

more than this

Like any long term relationship, my relationship with Star Trek has its ups and its downs, and there are times when it's easy to forget why I love it.

If you've read Dancing Barefoot, you may recall a scene where I remember all the things that made Star Trek wonderful.

This is one of the things that keeps it wonderful, and makes me feel proud to have been a part of it.

A Love Letter To Star Trek

This is too soon to write this. I should wait a few months, maybe a year, take time and coffee and dreams and let it finish whirling around my neural net. But Star Trek is all about the temporal anomalies so here I sit.

One year and a couple months ago, on Star Date something-or-other, my sons and I started a family tradition by accident. We rented the first disk of what seemed like an endless set of Star Trek: The Next Generation DVDs. When Star Trek played in real life I was busy trying to make a dead-end marriage work and my two young sons didn't exist. I didn't watch television then, but if I had, I wouldn't have watched a sci-fi soap opera about humans and aliens chasing time.

[. . .]

I can't explain the hold it had on my sons, and then on me. I don't remember the episodes the way they do. I'm sitting here crying while I type this, searching for a way to tell you how it transformed them into something a little bit better, how they started recognizing the world news for the first time and asking me when would our people stop fighting, start working together as one planet - simple ideas, good ideas, too simple for people who crave power. One day, a bad bad day, when many soldiers lost lives in that distant senseless war, my middle son stood with barefeet on the cold tile floor of the kitchen, listening to NPR, and clenched his fists in frustration.

"Why don't they stop fighting? We're never going to join a Federation of Planets if this continues. Don't they know that? Why don't they want to help end starvation instead? I wish we lived in the future."

Read the rest of the story here

(Thanks to WWdN reader Mathieu for sending me this story!)

I want to add something to this entry, mostly for myself, so I don't miss out on a great lesson: I was talking with Anne about Weslsy Crusher few days ago. I told her that I'm really tired of feeling like I still have to defend Wesley (and myself) to people from time to time. Perfect example: when my column in Dungeon was announced, a lot of people started complaining about me writing for the magazine. Did they talk about the quality of my writing? Did they try to find out what my credentials as a gamer were? Of course not. They just bitched and complained that "Wesley" was writing anything.

How incredibly stupid is that? How incredibly stupid is it that it really upset me? I have -- more or less -- come to terms with Wesley Crusher and what he means to me . . . and I am so over dealing with jerks who are holding on to some stupid problem they had with a character I played eighteen years ago.

Even though I *intellectually* know that it's not my problem, it's a challenge to ignore the *emotional* response that comments like that elicit. It's sort of Newton's Third Emotional Law, I guess.

Anyway, because of that irrational emotional response, I've been feeling sort of "down" on Wesley, and that is a big part of that Fear I wrote about yesterday . . . then, I read this woman's story this morning, and I had a wonderful "light bulb" moment: I didn't make Star Trek for jerks who want to complain and nit-pick and project their own insecurities onto an actor they've never met. I made it for people like her, and her children.

I don't know why I keep losing that perspective. Maybe it's because, for so many years, the voice of jerks fed my personal Voice of Self Doubt. It was louder than any other voice, and it's still the easiest voice to listen to.

I hope that I don't ever forget how I felt when I read that blog this morning, and how incredibly OBVIOUS it was to me then that touching *one* person like this should outweigh a thousand jerks.

It's all part of The Journey.

Posted by wil at June 15, 2004 07:42 AM

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