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.

Being a teacher

So I'm in the process of applying for teacher training programs. No big deal. The nice thing about my university though is that many professors force students to teach class once per quarter, so I'm at least sort of prepared. Until today I'd only done this for French classes, and I gotta say that I don't remember too well how they went. In French you're too busy trying to remember which word you need and in which tense/mood/person or whatever, and trying desperately not to accidentally say something inappropriate,* so you don't have a lot of energy left to pay attention to the daydreaming, doodling, and facebooking sitting before you.

*Example of something inappropriate: Today in Hebrew class a girl said "to fuck" instead of "to identify with." Apparently I was the only kid in class who knew how to say "to fuck" because I was the only person who laughed.

Anyway, all of this changed today when I had to be the teacher for the Religion Seminar. It actually wasn't too much work. Basically I just had to come up with a couple of questions, ask the class, and then WHOA off they go, debating with each other. For the most part I hate that class because many members of the class seem to think that even choirs of angels in heaven could not compare to the beauty that is their voice. There's one student in particular who's just so arrogant, pretentious and greedy with class time that I sometimes wonder whether or not his presence in my life is the karmic result of a murder-rape I committed in a previous life. The worst part of having people like this is that you assume that the teacher probably likes them, that they must get great grades. But that was until today, when I faced the class....and realized that this guy somehow manages to be even more grating when viewed from the teacher's perspective.

Someone asked a pretty inoffensive question about Emil Durkheim's definition of religion to hear the class's thoughts. You know, it's the sort of thing where you can passionately be like, "Oh, I disagree with Durkheim's interpretation and here's why," but it's hardly the Holocaust. But this boy, draped in a large shawl with swirly patterns with the same feminine drama of a 60's film star, this asshole rolls his eyes with such overwhelming surliness and disgust that I could have sworn he was having some kind of epileptic fit.

"Call an ambulance," I wanted to cry out, "Axe-Chin is having a stroke!" (I call him Axe-Chin because he has such a strong cleft in his chin that it looks like someone took an axe to his face...which is actually what I sometimes imagine doing after two and a half hours of class in which he can't figure out how to shut the fuck up.)

Anyway....it was an interesting experience. Apart from trying to politely beat Axe-Chin into submission so that shier members of class could share their thoughts, I didn't really do much besides watch people as they either paid attention, or daydreamed (and I sort of daydreamed about what they were daydreaming about), or doodled. It was kind of surreal, thinking that hopefully I'll be doing something like this a lot more in the future. Except unlike my profs here, I hope that I'll have the balls to say, "Shut the fuck up so that someone else can share what they think, you greedy bastard." How more professors don't throttle their students is just beyond me...

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.