Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

[some slight spoilers to the latest "Stargate: SG1" episode after the cut-line.]

First off, I have to say "Hail," "Ave," "Whoo-hoo!", "You go, girl!", and "Thank-you-very-much-O-Revered-and-Honored-Prophet-of-Good-and-Important-Stuff" to missmurchison for making me this cool new icon (she made the previous one, too, from Hayao Miyazaki's powerful "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind"). Adding this to the "Buffy" season 5 DVD's Miss M sent me as a birthday present and the cool Buffy-and-Xena animated birthday card she made with the help of her offspring, and she has officially become my birthday good fairy godmother.

Second, but still on the general birthday topic, I'm just coming to grips with the fact that I'm going to be 42 years old tomorrow. According to the late Douglas Adams, "42" is the ultimate answer to "life, the universe, and everything," but the tricky part is figuring out what the heck the question actually was. Somehow, that seems appropriate to describe my life right now -- I seem to be well-supplied with answers (right or wrong), but the really big questions elude me.

You gotta have QUESTIONS, it seems to me, to get you out of bed in the morning and give you a reason to suffer the slings and arrows, etc. -- and not just any questions, but questions you truly care about, that interest you deeply. Questions that you're willing to take some risks to pursue.

Or maybe I just need a "Quest", period. Don't worry, I'm not planning on putting a barber's basin on my head and riding around tilting at windmills, or anything. Okay, and now my mind has leaped from "the Quest (Impossible Dream)" in "Man of La Mancha" to Bloody Mary singing "You got to have a dream -- if you don't have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?" in "South Pacific."

But I kind of suspect that this is one of the (many) reasons I find the character of Spike so fascinating: even if you accept his self-description as "not one of the great thinkers", you gotta admire his desire, his drive, his relish for living even when all he's got is an "un-life" (see references to Spike's final song snippet in "Once More, With Feeling" in my previous entry).

I feel more like "the Guardian" in the classic Star Trek episode "City on the Edge of Forever," lying dormant until somebody -- anybody -- provides me with a question. Being dependent on other people to provide your reason for being . . . well, that's just not a sustainable lifestyle.

I got home from the potluck supper last night (which I'd gone to as part of my new "get off your duff and do something with real people in the real world" plan: I hadn't been to one of these weekly pot-luck fellowship gatherings since last September, though I used to go all the time; I realized that just because all the other graduate students in the fellowship group are much younger than I am and have very different interests is no good reason for dropping them like that; they're good, kind people, and they always praise my cooking -- what more could I ask?) and tuned in to the new "Stargate: SG1" episode on the Sci-Fi Channel, and was profoundly struck by the apparent relevance of last night's plot to my own situation.

Samantha Carter, alone on the Prometheus ('lost in space') and seriously concussed, sees visions of her father and Col. O'Neill, among others, giving voice to her unconscious mind while she tries to save the day, yet again. The upshot of her conversations with her mental projections of 'Jacob' and 'Jack' is that she's been in a holding pattern too long, playing it safe and keeping herself away from the risks and potential rewards of a real life and real relationships, by pouring all her energy into the SGC (though saving the world IS a pretty important career) and her 'impossible' romantic interest in Col. O'Neill. It really began to seem like the universe was trying to tell me something yesterday, and wasn't willing to just "leave a message on the machine."

Though I'm a morning person and prefer to be asleep by 11 PM, I stayed awake until 5 AM this morning, with that "SG1" episode, coming on top of so many other bits and pieces this week, forcing me to face over and over again the mess my real life is in.

If I can't sleep again tonight for having to confront so much unmanageable reality, I hope I at least come up with something I can use in my sermon tomorrow morning.