Strange dreams

I've been having dreams about being forgotten lately. Which I guess is a welcome reprieve from dreams about my teeth falling out, but they're no less disconcerting. Dreams where I walk into a room and someone who should know me doesn't acknowledge me. If I smile and wave, they look right through me. If I try to remind them, they say, "No, sorry."

Dreams where I wander around an office full of people I know I know, who I know know me, and they don't even notice I'm there. Which is maybe a function more of being invisible than being forgotten. I don't know.

At least I understood what the teeth dreams were about, more or less.

Things I am really tired of, thank you very much. (Or, first world problems)

1. People who hit "Reply All" to messages sent by listserves. I do not need to know your pithy opinion about an email that was sent to the entire university, please stop.

2. Writing professors who give patently bad advice. Like, this is not me being an upstart youngin' who should learn their place and respect their elders - this is me being genuinely annoyed for reasons I have been told are completely legitimate.

for example:

• The professor who told the class that any time a director suggests a change, you must do it, because you don't want to acquire a reputation of being "difficult to work with." No, fuck you. When a director tells you to make a change, it is completely at your discretion to do it or not to do it, and they cannot coerce you. And if the director makes the change without your permission, then they have violated the rights of the playwright and fuck them. 
• The professor who complains about actors improvising lines and then, when you get muscled into having them read a part in your pages, improvises the fucking lines. THERE IS NOT A "WELL" THERE. THERE IS NOT A MENTION OF THE ADRESSED PERSON'S NAME THERE. IF I HAD WANTED IT READ THAT WAY,  I WOULD HAVE WRITTEN IT THAT WAY. It does not help me to hear what is wrong with my lines if you are changing my lines. 

Thoughts on 'Lifetime Achievement'

This play comes from two conversations I had, and a few other places.

1. A discussion with my sister, ages and ages ago, that because we are almost ten years apart our early childhoods were completely different, despite us having the same parents. In the ten years between when Ellen was born and when Max and I were born, our parents financial situation changed drastically, they moved to a new city, built a house, etc. E. was born to parents who were still finishing their educations, whereas M. and I were born into a family where our parents were already established professionals. Same parents, completely different childhoods, because we encountered them at different points in their lives.

2. A discussion with my mother about different children need different kinds of parents, and parents adapt their parenting style to what works best for their specific child. Siblings might remember their parents in very different ways, even if they lived with them at the same time.

The way you describe a play when put on the spot by your anthropology advisor is probably as close to the essence as you're ever going to get. In that case:

"Five siblings gather after their father's death to write his eulogy, but realize they can't and that because of their large age differences they all knew different versions of their father."

Alternate Continuities

Sometimes I indulge myself and imagine an alternate continuity where Valeri Gridenko meets Fyodor Alkaev, the whiz kid from Omsk, and things really are as they seem. Fyedya is completely human. His nervousness comes from being surrounded by scientific minds he sees as being so much more brilliant than himself, not from being terrified of not being able to keep his imaginary history in order. In this world, Valya can mentor Fyedya, and tease him as his boyish good looks fade (and they do fade, because he ages, and won't be twenty-six forever), and they are witnesses to history together as mankind advances into space. Their friendship is the kind of deep connection that you only find in scientists who recognize a likeminded thirst for knowledge in each other, and it lasts their entire lives.

But that's not the story I wrote, and it is far less interesting than the story I wrote, so it will only merit one paragraph while the story I wrote is 83 pages.

Complicated thoughts about Ender's Game

Okay, so, I have come to terms with the fact that Orson Scott Card is a complete bag of dicks and I'm just going to let him be what he's going to be - it doesn't change the fact that Ender's Game was a massive part of my childhood. Even if I've struck the rest of the series from my own personal continuity (yes, even Ender's Shadow, because let's be honest with ourselves - it's not that good, and Bean is a Sue if you take the Shadow series to be true, and I liked him so much better when he was just the runt of the litter on Ender's team of ragged misfits and not the goddamn Messiah-slash-chessmaster, because the EG universe already has three Christ Archetypes too many without Bean adding to the clusterfuck. Also? Bean/Petra is the worst 'ship ever, it makes me barf in my mouth. Dink/Petra forever).


So, clearly, I've got a lot invested in this fandom, even if I don't actively participate in it, because honestly there's not much of a fandom to participate in. The book came out in the 80s, the author is alienating of his fanbase, the sequels all undermine the original, and the older I get the more I recognize that the universe I thought was so wonderfully diverse when I first encountered it (Alai remains the most sympathetic Arab character in all of science fiction, thank you and good night) is actually pretty sinister in ways I can't quite put my finger on. But I love the book, I've read it something like fifteen times, and that's why I get so mad at Orson Scott Card - because he's one of the people who first inspired me to write, and he's not a worthy role model. He's a misogynistic, homophobic, evangelical bag of dicks and I don't understand how a book that reads as having a really liberal worldview came from his mind. 


I'm really excited that the long-rumored film is finally in production and has what looks like a fantastic cast (Harrison Ford! Asa Butterfield!), but I do worry about what kind of reflection of this world is going to finally turn up on screen. I've been attending Battle School in my head since I was about nine years old and while I recognize that all the detail from the books isn't possibly going to make it to film, I'm more worried about the essence of the world.


What would ruin this film for me is if the author's personal politics were to be jarringly present in it. Because I don't think his worldview is overtly present in the book. I do think that the film could benefit from updating the world to match modern terminology - but even that's not a huge stretch, because OSC basically predicted the internet and iPads. But if the world of Ender's Game were to change from one where characters are presented with moralities independent of their ethnic and religious backgrounds to one where OSC's xenophobic rationale is the norm I would be sorely disappointed, because the message of Ender's Game is one of acceptance - just because you don't understand how someone thinks doesn't make them evil, which is Ender's ultimate conclusion about the Buggers/Formics (dear fandom, what are we calling them?)


I've also got some bizarre but smaller concerns that aren't really relevant to my worries about the overall tone of the world being changed / OSC being a bag of dicks. 


ie - Ben Kingsley, who is a fantastic actor, has been cast as Mazer Rackham. In the books, Mazer is described as being "half-Maori." Ben Kingsley is of Indian and English descent. Does this reflect a tendency in Hollywood casting towards considering minority ethnicities to be interchangeable? (Other complaints I could lodge under this same heading - Taylor Lautner is even less Native American than Johnny Depp; The entirety of The Last Airbender.)


Is it "whitewashing" when you're substituting one minority for another instead of substituting a white actor?

Melting.

In the last few years, I've started to think of my writing process as "tempering the weirdness," which is all well and good by itself. My work does tend to start out very strange and boil down to much more straightforward stories by the end and it's stronger for that. But as of late I think I've been clamping down too much, not embracing the stage for what it is - a stage. Setting scenes in concrete places, in living rooms and lobbies - making it feel solid.

Solid.

Too solid.

No. No.

My theater is liquid.

I was happy with where my writing was two years ago, when I told a story on a bare stare with lights and sound and dialogue - poetry, if that's not too pretentious of me. Two and three years ago, when my protagonist told the world she didn't call the shots and yet exhibited masterful control over lighting cues. Self-aware. Theater as theater.

There is a time and place for realism, but I miss creating magic.

Time to peel back the restraints. Time to let the weirdness back in. Time to dig down and find the poetry again.

Okay.

Here goes.

If I ever write a Hipster Rom-Com

I will string together all of the false starts from my life into something that panders to a very specific demographic that can't be bothered to give a damn. (These all happened but they were not all with the same person and they are certainly not in order)

Boy and girl will meet at the zoo. It will be winter, and freezing, and you'd have to be stupid to actually be at the zoo that day. They will walk around all day without encountering a single other living person and lament that the geladas are indoors for winter and watch seals swim around in the courtyard. They'll buy bagels at a sketchy grocery store in the Bronx and take the train all the way back into the city together, talking the whole way about what kinds of quirky hipster literature they like and then something will happen. (Unlike real life, where nothing happened.)

She'll post ambiguous song lyric Facebook statuses that he'll respond with coded confessions of love and she'll have something witty to say back, and not something asinine, and they'll realize that the feeling's mutual instead of just one person lying awake all night wondering if they really deserve to have good things happen to them.

They'll watch a terrible movie together. Maybe it's The Room. It's not even worth paying attention. He feels her up, and she lets him, instead of repeatedly moving his hands to some part of her body she's more comfortable with him touching, because that sends all the wrong signals, and later that night he'll kiss her instead of muttering, "Sorry, I made that awkward."

In this stupid Hipster Rom-Com, I'm actually played by Zooey Deschanel, or someone who looks like her, instead of just hopelessly copying her hairstyle, even though I'm too tall and too curvy and my eyes are too dark. And the critics will call it contrived and stupid and I will say, "No, no, this is my life, you don't understand, this is my life, only edited. All I did was make it better."