I am (and have been) off with my family celebrating a belated family Christmas. I was not planning on treating this as a work week, though I did come into this with the expectation that I’d be blogging semi-regularly during it and polishing and posting a few things I had previously written, but as is usual for these get togethers I overestimated the amount of quiet downtime I would have and—even moreso than usual in this case—the amount of internet connectivity I would have.

So, just letting you all know why I’ve gone completely quiet. I’ll be back in the saddle next week for a regular work week, allowing for Monday off to recover from the travails of travels. Everybody enjoy the weekend!

Love like

hunger like

knives like

teeth like

pearls like

teardrops like

memories like

someone like

you.

You know that thing that stage magicians do where they wave a handkerchief or wand around or otherwise make a distracting flourish to point your eyes in one direction so that you aren’t paying attention to where the trick is really happening?

I feel like this is why Steven Moffat, more so than previous showrunners on Doctor Who, has directed so much attention to the idea of “Doctor who?” as an unanswerable question: in a vain attempt to stop us from asking “Doctor, how?” or “Doctor, why?”

Originally I was going to try to fit that sentiment into 140 characters so I could tweet it out into the nethersphere as a little bit of wit, but the more I think about it, the more I think about one of the annoying “Doctorisms” of the current era: the Doctor telling everyone in the room and audience what questions they should be thinking.

It’s a very stage magician-thing to do, and the 12th Doctor is very explicitly referred to as such a magician, though nothing in the series except that people keep referring to him as one really sells it. He does behave like a magician in one way, though: he very deliberately leads people in the direction he wants them to be thinking.

In “Under The Lake,” the question he tells you that you should be asking is what “the temple” means in the interstellar directions “The Dark, The Sword, The Forsaken, The Temple”.

Without the Doctor to tell you this, you might instead be wondering how aliens would know the three lights in Orion’s sword are supposed to be a sword when that’s earth mythology and they don’t even form a line when viewed from other angles, or you might be wondering how aliens are supposed to connect “the forsaken” to a single specific abandoned town or why they need directions to find the planet from which a radio signal is emanating in the first place.

Without the Doctor to tell you that your questions are boring and pointless and indicative of low inteligence unless they are the questions he wants you to ask, you might be wondering why the ghost of a character who died 150 years in the past doesn’t show up to haunt the present until we the audience see her die, even though someone else who died in the same era was the first ghost and even though the ghosts could totally have used her at the moment when every ghost we knew about was trapped.

In fairness to Moffat, Doctor Who is a fantasy series and there has never been an era when its science made sense, when it wasn’t powered by cardboard and whimsy, and when the story logic was tighter than a child’s puppet show. I know it’s not popular to acknowledge this and I’m sure that a lot of people who hate Moffat and were nodding along right up until this point stopped when they read that, because of course it wasn’t like that in whatever they regard as the golden age of Who.

But of course it was. It always has been. God willing, it always will be. We ignore these flaws when the show works for us, but wouldn’t recognize it without them. It’s all part of the charm.

But I said it’s part of the charm, and I mean every word of that phrase. It is only part of the charm. And if the rest of the charm isn’t there… well, you know what it’s like when something breaks and you step on a part of it. Not very charming, is it?

Steven Moffat doesn’t know how to charm us, not consciously, and doesn’t have any confidence in his ability to charm. When he tries to be charming, he comes off like his avatar from Coupling trying to be anything. Ditto when he tries to be clever. So he gives us stories wherein the characters tell us again and again how clever the twists are, what we should be paying attention to, what we should be questioning, what we should be leaving alone, and all this comes at the expense of making the episode fun enough for us to go along with it willingly.

It’s all supposed to be a neat magic trick, but he does it with all the deftness and subtlety of, well, Steve, and it ultimately just grates.

Full disclosure: I have only seen the first two stories of the most recent season. My impression so far is that it’s better than last season (which was possibly the low point for New Who, in a lot of ways). I think the show gains a lot from a multi-episode story format. That’s what’s ultimately worst about these failed flourishes: they’re so unnecessary.

Audiences are no longer invited to consider a viewpoint where the Doctor’s idea-powered magitech makes sense; we are berated and badgered and hectored and upbraided for not already being on board, we’re told we’re a bunch of slow-witted, unevolved ninnies for not already knowing the story’s going to go in the direction the writers have decided it must, and we are promised that if we are clever and wise (and worthy of being a companion like Clara), we will see the Doctor as the world’s greatest magician and regard every conclusion he forms as solid and unassailable, every word that comes out of his mouth as sparkling brilliance.

And why do we put up with this?

Of course, that’s the wrong question. The question we should be asking, the question that matters is “Doctor who?”

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the value of these status posts, and the format to take with them that actually brings that value. Initially they were more of a public to-do list. Eventually they became more like a candid, off-the-cuff self-inventory. Both styles fall apart when I’m feeling vulnerable, as they both require me to take something (myself, or my work life) and just sort of… put it out there. But it keeps me on track to do so.

Coming into 2016, I’m going to be more consistent about posting but less consistent about the format, as I try to find out what works for me best right now. Next week, I expect I’ll be more or less taking the week off from blogging as my far-flung family separates a late Christmas, so I guess that will give me a chance to reflect and adjust when I come back.

One thing that I think really was helpful that I did in the past was to do before-and-after posts for the day, morning status posts and post-mortems afterwards. It let me ride the high of accomplishment when I had an amazing day, and look at what didn’t work when I didn’t. So I might be bringing that back, though probably not today… my sleep schedule led to a late start today, and then I spent some time ruminating on this post before making it, so it’s not exactly morning anymore.

2015 was not a good year for me. I’ve thought about doing a big retrospective about what went wrong and why, but I’ve decided to leave 2015 in 2015. Just bury the year and move on. There are some specific course corrections I’m making, and I might elaborate on my reasoning as they become apparent, but no post-mortem on the year. No dwelling. A great American once said “We must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!”

Maya Angelou said to never make someone a priority in your life if you are only an option in theirs.

That is sound advice as it goes, but I wonder often if we don’t carry it too far in assuming that the goal should be to find someone worthy of being your priority, rather than matching option for option.

Or perhaps the mistake is seeing it as a dichotomy. “Option” and “priority” are not opposites; a person may have any number of options in life to which are assigned different priorities. So perhaps the advice might be stated more accurately (if less pithily) as “never make someone a higher priority than they make you,” or “never treat anyone as a necessity for whom you are only an option.”

For my part, I would rather be someone’s highly-favored option than their bleak necessity.

It’s not just that I am not very good at being needed. I can’t stand it, in a close to literal sense: I can’t stand up under it. I am too weak too frequently to withstand the weight of another human being’s need for long.

It is a terrible thing to be both weak and needed, and a terrifying one to be needed and know that sooner or later the weakness will come.

I would rather be chosen than needed, again and again each day, even if it is not every day and even if it might not be forever.

I would rather know that each time someone comes to me, it is because in that moment they decided it was exactly what they wanted than because they felt they must absolutely do so or die.

You call that true love? I call it the approximate effects of an around-the-clock sniper detail.

Conventional wisdom says that if you want to experience unconditional love, you should get yourself a dog. It does not say why anyone should wish to experience such a thing. What does it even mean if someone is always happy to see you? What does it signify if someone loves you not in spite of your imperfections, not because of them, but in complete and perfect ignorance of them?

Give me a cat instead. When a cat is excited, it means something. When a cat is annoyed that a human is missing or out of place, it is not because the cat needs attention but because the cat would like the option. And while this is no great model for human relationships, it certainly seems more meaningful to me than a dog’s unfailing gratitude.

I don’t want to be the missing piece of your heart returned to you. I want you to be a whole person who enjoys my company. I don’t want to be you entire life. I would much rather be a neat addition to a full life. Let me be a bonus, an unexpected value-add.

Don’t ever try to base a relationship around need in the long term. It may be nice to feel needed, every once in a while, but it’s nothing but a chore to actually be needed. It is exciting at first, but then it wears thin and it wears you down and if you never learn the trick of choosing one another over needing one another… well, then, sooner or later you’ll feel like you’re in a relationship because you have to be more so than because you want to be.

You can’t leave because you need them, and even more so, because you know they need you. But obligation is not love, and obligation breeds resentment.

I know my stance on all this sounds terribly unromantic, and that it runs counter to a lot of the prevailing cultural narratives about love, but just try looking at your partner every day and thinking: this is the choice I make. Affirm to your partner that they are your pick, your choice, that you choose them again and again (and then pause for giggling to subside if either of you are pokeyman fans). Remind yourself that your partner has chosen to be with you. Truth is this is likely more accurate than any melodramatic “need” talk, and when you get right down to it, more flattering.

I think the reason we pull back from thinking about relationships in terms of choices—options—is that a need seems more absolute. If you believe someone chooses you, you have to be aware they could have chosen someone else, or simply chosen to pass. If you feel like someone is choosing each day to spend their life with you, you are also going to realize they could choose otherwise.

But obligation is not love. Love can create obligations, but an obligation cannot engender love. And every day in every state in this country and in every nation on this earth, a relationship ends between two people who swore passionate oaths to each other that they needed each other like a fire needs oxygen, right up until the point that they didn’t.

I don’t wish to feel that kind of need, whether within myself or from another person, and I can’t change that about myself any more than I could turn a cat into a dog.

I cannot make myself any different than I am. The only thing I can do is make myself plain. I am fuel for nobody’s fire. I am the blood in no one’s veins and the breath in no one’s lungs. I am who I am and I am where I choose to be because it is what I want.

That is a passionate declaration, and it’s the purest romance you’re likely to find outside of a story where the lovers die at the end.

Well, this week has not exactly gone to plan in a number of ways. It’s actually been a very strange week. My ability to not only post a thing of the day for all the preceding days of the week but keep them on a creepy theme was helped inestimably by the fact that a lot of the things in my trunk file are fairly creepy (though the story I posted last night just before midnight was brand new).

We had a sort of extended family situation that ate up a lot of time in the past couple days, and on top of that we just realized yesterday that trick-or-treat night on the civic calendar is tonight, on account of the Mummers’ Parade that’s always held on Saturdays, so we’ve had less time to get ready (and none on the weekend… I was really counting on being able to do a lot more Saturday.

So with that in mind, rather than half-assing everything, I’m doing a little castling maneuver with my calendar… today’s all holiday stuff, and then over the weekend I can take some time to write and post. Talk to you more then!

I’m taking this week off for personal reasons, the first and least personal of which is that I had some of the worst insomnia of my adult life for most of last week and I’m mentally and physically exhausted. I need some time to recharge, which I think I can do best by disconnecting more from the internet and social media and re-connecting with what’s really important to me. I’ll see you all next Monday.

Okay, so, that thing I had alluded to in my status post this morning? It’s settled itself. I’ve had a scheduled trip to see my mother set for this weekend, but with newly-minted hurricane Joaquin set to either come in or throw a bunch of rain down our mountain roads as it passes us by, it’s kind of a now-or-never thing. So now instead of leaving Saturday, I’m going to be leaving tomorrow morning. It’s going to be hectic as heck, but better safe than sorry. There may or may not be things of the days for all days in the very near future.

The Daily Report

Did not have the best start to the day. I did wake up at 8:00 and make a blog post and have breakfast before my work day started at 10, but I got bogged down in the responses that post generated on its cross-posts, and some next-day responses to the Hugo post from yesterday.

Ah, well! I guess on the plus side, it’s publicity. A better self-promoter than I would be getting a huge boost off this, I’m sure. I’ll take whatever small lift comes my way.

I have achieved the formatting work I meant to do today, at least.

The State of the Me

As much as “not enough sleep” is frequently one of my problems, I think my decision to get up as soon as a time is reached when I am both actually awake and the sun is up is a good one. Staying in bed until just before my accustomed start time works out badly for a number of reasons.

Plans For Today

Well, most of the day is gone, and I’m a little wound up, so I’m actually going to be doing something kind of personal, by which I mean working on game design stuff. It’s in this weird intersection of “creative” and “technical” that lets me slip into the creative mindset more easily.