Honk honk, Time Lord Mothers

I think my mom would be the worst possible Time Lord. Well, of course, cos she's a woman. But she'd also make a pretty shitty Time Lady. She's the sort of person who, seconds after an irrevocable decision X has been made and executed, immediately wonders aloud, "Damn it, maybe we should have done decision Y..." Had Julius Caesar been in the company of my mom when he crossed the Rubicon, she would have followed this un-undoable breach of the boundaries of Rome by its own soldiers on active duty with the words, "Damn it, we shouldn't have crossed the Rubicon." My point is that if this woman were a Time Lady and therefore able to harness the awesome time-traveling abilities of a TARDIS...the world would be a terrifying place. Mostly because we'd be stuck in one moment for all of eternity. Time would cease to progress, one moment would repeat itself over and over again, until finally G-d would be like, "Shit, this is boring" and then end the universe. I mean, that's how I imagine the end of the universe: G-d just gets bored and turns it off.

What I mean is that, if this woman had a TARDIS, she would make one decision and then immediately regret it and then go back and change the situation. I don't know which decision specifically...does it really matter? It could be something as stupid as "Damn it, I shouldn't have eaten that fry," or something more serious like, "Damn it, I should have sent you kids to public school." But then she'd go back in her TARDIS and change the situation...but then immediately afterward decide that she should have changed the situation in a different way. So she'll go back and change it again. And so on and so on for hundreds of years and hundreds of regenerations, going back to the same moment. The universe would never progress! Gaaaaaaa!!!!!

Anyway...

Today I was driving around LA and I was in the right lane stopped at a red light. I decided to keep going straight and not to turn right, but since this was NOT a right turn only lane it wasn't a big deal. Or so I thought. Next thing I know I hear a horn behind me angrily honking, so I turn around and:



Holy shit! Emperor Palpatine is in the car behind me! And he's making angry gestures at me! Apparently he has an urgent meeting on the Death Star with Darth Vader, and he's pissed that he can't make a turn on this red light because the person in front of him (who obviously must be part of the Rebel Alliance) has to wait for a green light to move.

But then I realize...wait a minute. This isn't Emperor Palpatine. He isn't on his way to an important budgetary meeting with Darth Vader followed by luncheon with Grand Moff Tarkin. It's just a really old man. Who apparently is furious with me for doing something totally legal. I stare at him in my mirror, this guy who looks so old that his skin is practically falling off his face like cake batter dripping off a spoon, and he just keeps making angry gestures--not frantic or panicked gestures, but rather gestures that convey the idea that he can't believe what a total bitch I am for not running this red light.

I have to wonder what the rush is all about. Does the Crypt Keeper have a day job that he was rushing to? No, this guy has probably been retired since the early 1950's, the last time he had to clock in at work his coworkers were wearing "I like Ike" pins, there's no fucking way he was on his way to work. Perhaps he was late for his appointment with Death. Dunno.

Anyway. That's just what happened today. Oh yeah...well, there was that part where the light turned green, and I rolled down my window, stuck my head out and turned around. Then I gave him a backwards V-sign and yelled in the midst of LA traffic, "Fuck you, Palpatine!" and drove off singing the Star Wars theme.

Sometimes I love road rage.

Doctor Who Now?

I'm still recovering from this past weekend's Doctor Who marathon. It pretty much made me lose all sense of reality, and I've learned my lesson to never again watch 15 hours of sci fi or ANY one tv show, because it got to the point where I was on the verge of believing that a Cybermen or Dalek invasion was a question of when rather than if, and even my dreams were about being the Doctor. I feel more disoriented as I try to recover from this weekend than I would if I were recovering from lethal quantities of beer. That's exactly it, I feel drunk. I'm trying to counter the effects of Doctor Who poisoning by trying to read as much news as possible. I'm even trying to watch Prime Minister's Questions, even though I'm not British, because I feel that I need to be reminded that boring things happen in London, too. Things like government overspending, welfare reform and the placing of park benches... and not just massive alien invasions that put the very existence of all dimensions in the universe at stake.

Before I move on from Doctor Who, I just gotta say: I love that the Doctor is non-violent and that the most aggressive thing in his arsenal is a thing called a "sonic screwdriver," which, with a light at the tip instead of a point, is even less threatening than a plastic Fisher Price screwdriver used by small children pretending to be Bob the Builder. Having said that, however, I feel that I must also point out that it seems like the vast majority of the villains in Doctor Who are villains from previous episodes that the Doctor was too much of a pussy to kill off. And so they come back, stronger than ever and now aware that at the very worst the Doctor will blink them with a tiny, non-lethal light bulb. I'm all for giving villains a second chance, maybe even a third one, but when the Daleks invade for the gazillionth time, I think it's time to start kicking ass and taking names. I mean, for fuck's sake, the man has a spaceship/time machine. Maybe this proves that it's all for the best that I'm not a Time Lord and that I've only got the one heart, but if I had that kind of technology I'd have traveled to a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away and stolen some weaponry from the Star Wars world. If the TARDIS has towed Planet Earth in the past, I'm sure it could tow the Death Star. No Dalek is going to want to mess with a man wielding the power of Darth Vader. Are lasers too violent for the Doctor? Fine then, he has all the time in the world, he could spend a regeneration learning Jedi mind tricks and learn to choke people without actually touching them. Heck, even if the Doctor didn't want to go to the trouble of towing the Death Star or spending years under the tutelage of a wrinkly little green thing that speaks English with Latin syntax, he could still just grab himself a couple of lightsabers and start wailing on some Dalek ass. He'd like that, I'm sure, because lightsabers are kind of like his trusty sonic screwdriver, as both emit light. But unlike the Doctor's trusty sonic screwdriver, lightsabers can do so much more than just unlock shit.

I also understand that Doctor Who is a kids' show, which may explain the Doctor's reluctance to choose violence. And while part of me respects that, I also fear that the Doctor may be teaching kids to simply buy themselves time rather than solve their problems once and for all. Instead, the Doctor teaches kids about procrastination of cosmic proportions, that it's a happy ending if the threat of the annihilation of humankind is put off until tomorrow. Yeah, the Cybermen are going to come back, stronger and angrier than ever (okay, maybe not angrier since Cybermen have emotion inhibitors), but let's not kill them because we can get out of this current mess without doing so, because killing them would be mean.

I also have to wonder about the Doctor. The poor thing has to travel throughout time and space saving people from the same villains, time and time again. Sure, not all of the villains in Doctor Who are repeat offenders, but a large enough percentage of them are, large enough that the Doctor, being the clever Time Lord that he is, has probably noticed. Had he just started EX-TER-MIN-ATE-ing them after maybe the fourth time they tried to destroy Earth, or enslave the human race, or turn the population into pigs, or whatever they're up to this time, then maybe the Doctor could have retired five regenerations ago. Instead of saving the planet from Cybermen or Daleks for the umpteenth time, he could be sipping margaritas on a beach on some distant planet, occasionally coming out of retirement to defeat a new challenger who has creative ideas of how to kill the human race, a challenger who could really push the Doctor's cleverness to its limits.

I mean, who is he trying to be? Jesus? For pete's sake, even G-d smites people from time to time.

Manic Impressive/Anthem for a Doomed Twinkie

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all? -
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

--"Anthem for Doomed Youth" by Wilfred Owen

Knowing that the end is nigh, that my senior+ year of college has begun and that my days of sitting around and having Doctor Who marathons with the tacit approval of society are numbered, I feel that I should reflect. I came to this town an 18 year old, half excited to go off on this next adventure and half devastated that I didn't end up in England or Wales for school, and I'll be leaving a 23 year old finally on her way to school in England (hopefully) and who's had adventures that 18 year old me couldn't have possibly imagined--not that my life adventures were the stuff of legends or whatever, it's just that 18 year old me, given the opportunity, would have chosen to flee to England, and the possibility of going to Israel wouldn't have even dawned on her. And people who meet me and people who know me keep asking me if I regret my choices, whether coming to this school in the first place or whether dropping out to go to Israel. And that's a complicated question.

Okay, be fair, the nearing the end in itself didn't bring this on; rather, looking around my apartment brought this on. A lot of the stuff decorating my walls, residing in my music collection and sitting on my bookshelf are things that I brought with me to this town as an 18 year old. I still have my Liverpool FC sheets and soccer scarves, my Monty Python crap, and a few comforting books like "The Once and Future King," "Pride and Prejudice" and some Little House books. Not everything's the same though: now I have more versions of the Bible than I know what to do with, books in Hebrew, an Israeli flag hanging, and (more recently) enough Doctor Who DVDs to induce a "David Tennant is unbearably hot" coma. Also, most meaningfully, I now have an Israeli passport, ID and draft papers tucked away in a drawer.

What's striking to me is that, as I prepare to finally get my wish of going to school in England and not return to Israel, I've basically come full circle and returned to 18 year old me. The me that was such a passionate Anglophile that she could recite entire episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus, that she made her own Beatles posters, that she forced herself to drink large quantities of tea until she could finally stand the taste, that she would go to pubs in the middle of the night or early in the morning simply to cheer on the English soccer team, that she was obsessed with the Round Table and that she spent an entire year claiming to be Anglican simply because it was English. That version of me wouldn't have recognized the girl who spent so much time at Hillel and (formerly) Chabad, who abandoned everything to live in Jerusalem, and who spent some time running around the Israeli wilderness in an IDF uniform with her face completely covered in mud. "No!" teenage me would have screamed, "If anything your face is supposed to be painted blue, like the Celts!"

Having said that, I am not exactly the same as I was at 18. For a start, I'm fatter. I like hummus now. I can speak Hebrew. I'm no longer an Anglophile, someone who likes things simply because they're English, and instead I simply like a lot of things, many of which just happen to be English or British. But more importantly, I'm less terrified of the world. Okay, that's not true. I'm still absolutely terrified of the world, but I'm better now at just sucking it up. Before I tell you how I coped during my freshman year of college, let me just tell you that it wouldn't have worked during the many times in Israel when I was surrounded by strangers and needed to make a support system for myself immediately.

While in Israel I learned to simply thrust myself into the company of strangers, but in freshman year of college terrified little Sammy carried around a copy of "The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen," a young English soldier in the Great War who died in combat. Absolutely terrified of my new neighbors that I was expected to befriend and dine with, I instead spent mealtimes in the company of good ol' Wilfred. Part of me thought it was amusing to ironically compare my own struggles with strangers to Owen's struggles with gas attacks and deadly assaults, but a larger and more alarming part of me likened our struggles with a complete lack of irony. You can tell that one poem in particular, "Anthem for a Doomed Youth," really captivated me because this page lays flat more easily than all the others. If I remember correctly, I was particularly attached to the word "cattle" because that's exactly how I felt. I felt bitter that I had no choice, that I was being forced to go to school, in a country I didn't want to be in no less, when all I wanted to do (if I remember correctly) was to open a vegan bowling alley in Wales and roam the countryside of England like a gypsy (minus the whole house squatting thing). I was miserable and lonely and frustrated and bitter and I was blaming it on society and my parents for requiring an American college degree, and at 18 I was convinced that Wilfred Owen alone, that doomed youth sent by Mother England to die in a foreign land, he alone could understand what that felt like.

Now of course, as a wizened woman of 22, who was denied jobs in Israel for lack of a degree, who spent time away from the educational universe, now I understand what an idiotic little shit I was. And though I may have felt like I had no choice and that I was surrounded by terrifying soldiers, but I wasn't exactly facing enemy artillery fire. Even now I can barely stand to look at "The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen," because on the front cover I now imagine Wilfred Owen holding back tears caused by my teenage insensitivity, and his picture on the back cover appears to be holding back a smirk caused by my teenage idiocy.

So to go back to the question of whether or not I regret any of my choices that brought me to this school or to Israel or back here..... No. Because without it, I don't know that I would have come full circle back to my true (but more mature) self. Yeah, I'm still a work in progress, but I no longer compare my struggles to those of World War I poets. I'm more prepared than ever to go forth and be awesome. And that's what I plan on doing.