Star Trek fans are well known for being extremely obsessive creatures, going to extremes because of their love for the TV series. They imitate characters, dress in Star Trek uniforms, and are privy to the most obscure references from their TV series of choice. I consider myself a Star Trek fan, though not a Trekkie. The difference is more than a mere linguistic one. A Trekkie is a mark of status, and must be earned or bestowed by other fellow Trekkies. It means attending conventions, learning how to speak Klingon, and doing the Vulcan split finger salute.
I am hardly that obsessive, yet in many ways I have an enormous soft spot for Star Trek, particularly the Next Generation series, which I grew up watching. It must be one of the great incongruities, and such a tremendously fortunate one, that Patrick Stewart, great thespian and Shakespearean actor, plays a science fiction starship captain. It was thus tremendously heartening for me to meet S. recently, someone who shared my interest in Star Trek, and the Next Generation in particular, even admitting to watching TNG episodes when she was depressed.
While randomly surfing the net, I have found two examples of how extreme Trekkies can be in their obsession. The first is this man who turned his entire flat into something straight out of a Star Trek set complete with galley, transporter area, ship schematics, original computer display panels (LCARS to the Trekkies) after his wife left him. The attention to detail is truly stupendous, and has to be seen to be believed. The second is the group of individuals in the Hague who have decided to stage an opera - completely in Klingon.
All of this is certainly a nostalgia trip back to my own days watching Star Trek The Next Generation on late night re-runs (it was usually shown at midnighton terrestrial), reading Star Trek novelizations, particularly the hugely funny ones by Peter David, and generally believing as teenagers are wont to do, that we can "boldly go where no man has gone before".
12 September 2010
7 September 2010
A New Hair Day
I have a strange relationship with my hair. As I tell people, I tend to cut it when I get bored with it. Often, the best that can be said of my relationship with my hair is that I pay it no attention. I ignore it, willfully or otherwise.
The phase of willful ignorance was a legacy of my time in Junior College, where there were two main fashion statements pertaining to males. One was to wear incredibly baggy trousers that threatened to fall off at any moment and which reduced the wearer to walking in a strange sort of shuffling gait in order to ensure that said trousers did not actually fall off. The second was to style one's hair such that there was a peak or pointed end sticking out at the front, or for the more adventurous, to ensure that there was a kind of ridge or crown running from back to front. If one stops to think about it, both fashion trends resulted in behaviour or appearances not dissimilar from the mating rituals and exhibition displays of some birds of paradise, but I digress.
Everyone is young and idealistic during Junior College. I chose, in my own inimitable way, to take my own chosen stand against such vacuous exhibitionism, such facile displays of irrelevant fashion. So I refused to gel, or style, or even comb my hair. It saved me a few minutes every morning, and it certainly saved me a significant amount of youthful angst regarding my appearance (or so I thought). I went to school on some days with tufts of hair sticking out on one side, making me look rather unbalanced (both literally and metaphorically). On good days, my hair would be a shapeless mass, on bad days it would be an unmanageable mess.
Two kind classmates, hoping to save me from myself, once attempted to do me the favour of trying to make order of all that chaos. Given that we were part of a humanities class, they clearly had not heard of the second law of thermodynamics, or they hadn't figured that my hair would follow that law so closely, or else they might not have even bothered. After a PE lesson, they whipped out a comb they had specially brought (a key tool of young adolesence, to be found sticking out of the back trouser pocket, which I of course lacked), and after an attempt to solicit my permission, dragged me in front of row of mirror lined sinks in the boys bathroom and attempted to gel my hair into a semblance of what was then considered fashionable. They ended up aghast at its state, appalled at my indifference. And for all their well-meaning intentions, they decided that it would be all but impossible to convince me to abandon my folly regarding my follicles.
Now that I am older, I have given up the willful rebellion of my younger days. I am no longer (alright, less) inclined towards taking stubborn principled stands based on some fundamental notion of what is intrinsically right. Thus, my attitude towards my hair has gone from one of willful to benign indifference.
The phase of willful ignorance was a legacy of my time in Junior College, where there were two main fashion statements pertaining to males. One was to wear incredibly baggy trousers that threatened to fall off at any moment and which reduced the wearer to walking in a strange sort of shuffling gait in order to ensure that said trousers did not actually fall off. The second was to style one's hair such that there was a peak or pointed end sticking out at the front, or for the more adventurous, to ensure that there was a kind of ridge or crown running from back to front. If one stops to think about it, both fashion trends resulted in behaviour or appearances not dissimilar from the mating rituals and exhibition displays of some birds of paradise, but I digress.
Everyone is young and idealistic during Junior College. I chose, in my own inimitable way, to take my own chosen stand against such vacuous exhibitionism, such facile displays of irrelevant fashion. So I refused to gel, or style, or even comb my hair. It saved me a few minutes every morning, and it certainly saved me a significant amount of youthful angst regarding my appearance (or so I thought). I went to school on some days with tufts of hair sticking out on one side, making me look rather unbalanced (both literally and metaphorically). On good days, my hair would be a shapeless mass, on bad days it would be an unmanageable mess.
Two kind classmates, hoping to save me from myself, once attempted to do me the favour of trying to make order of all that chaos. Given that we were part of a humanities class, they clearly had not heard of the second law of thermodynamics, or they hadn't figured that my hair would follow that law so closely, or else they might not have even bothered. After a PE lesson, they whipped out a comb they had specially brought (a key tool of young adolesence, to be found sticking out of the back trouser pocket, which I of course lacked), and after an attempt to solicit my permission, dragged me in front of row of mirror lined sinks in the boys bathroom and attempted to gel my hair into a semblance of what was then considered fashionable. They ended up aghast at its state, appalled at my indifference. And for all their well-meaning intentions, they decided that it would be all but impossible to convince me to abandon my folly regarding my follicles.
Now that I am older, I have given up the willful rebellion of my younger days. I am no longer (alright, less) inclined towards taking stubborn principled stands based on some fundamental notion of what is intrinsically right. Thus, my attitude towards my hair has gone from one of willful to benign indifference.
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