Roswell That Ends Well

The concept of time travel excites me because it reminds me of one of my most favorite shows- for once, I'm not talking about Felicity- but instead, the AMAZING Futurama.  If you've never seen this show, you need to start.  It was once on FOX, but was foolishly canceled. Much like Family Guy, after it left the air it gained a huge cult following thanks to Adult Swim (adult programming) on the Cartoon Network.  They have recently released four full-length Futurama feature films straight-to-DVD, but to be honest, the quality is not really the same as the orig. They play the old episodes, as well as the new movies, on Comedy Central, usually at 9PM and 1 AM on weekdays. You will thank me!

Anyway! Here's what the series is about.  It's basically a really funny, satirical, science-fiction cartoon. I am not usually a fan of sci-fi, but I can see why people become obsessed with it. A lot of it involves really interesting story lines and character studies. So the main character in Futurama is Philip Fry.  He is your typical turn-of-the-century twenty-something slacker. On New Year's Eve, 1999, he's delivering a pizza to a lab that cryogenically freezes people, and accidentally get frozen.  He then awakes 1,000 years later and meets a colorful cast of characters who have various adventures in the New New York in the year 3000. Not only is this show incredibly witty and full of social commentary, there is some amazing overarching plot lines going on.  For example, you watch the show for over a year before it's revealed that Fry's freezing was not at all a random accident. Actually, it deals with the fate of the universe. When you realize the planning that went into sketching out the long-term story lines, you can't help but be impressed. I also love many of the stories contained in particular episodes. My very favorite is the one about Fry's brother, Yancy, and what happened to him after Fry went "missing" in the 21st century. And I can't watch the episode about Fry's old dog- it is so moving. Whenever I see the title "Jurassic Bark" in the TV listings, I very swiftly change the channel.

There's one episode in particular that deals with time travel. I forget the scientific reasoning behind how the crew was transported to 1947 New Mexico, but it had something to do with some sort of eclipse and stove-top popcorn being placed in the microwave. Fry is told by the Professor (also a distant nephew of Fry's, although he is a really old man) not to mess with anything in the past because even the smallest action can cause massive changes to the future (don't we all know that?). Fry knows that his grandfather is stationed there, at Roswell Army Base, and decides to spy on him. Then Fry decides that his grandfather is completely unsafe and he needs to save him. I won't totally spoil the ending, but I will say that Fry's involvement leads to some insane consequences. The "B" story line is also extremely entertaining. Dr. Zoidberg, a hideous lobster-man who works with Fry, gets discovered by the Army. He ends up being the alien found in Area 51. I can't explain why it's so funny, you just have to see it.  Anyway, it's one of my faves.

My closing thoughts on time travel are this. I agree with GirlWednesday- you must feel like you are on Mars- time, is in a sense, a place, and traveling through time means you are going somewhere you have never been before. It must be disorienting and scary. But the crux of Futurama is the idea that Fry didn't have things all that great back in 1999. Sometimes he missed "home", but he soon came to realize that in the year 3000, he has people who care about him, and a purpose. The lesson is universal-- home is where, and when, the heart is.

Fast Forward

When I think back on my short-lived life thus far there are absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, things that I wish I would not have done. I chose not to spend quality time with family members who are no longer here, there were times that I drank too much at college parties, and other moments where I lied to my family about things they eventually found out about. None of these things I am particularly proud of, nor would I repeat them if I could go back and do things again. However, I don’t think I would want the opportunity to go back and change things if I had the chance. As most of my fellow blogettes have mentioned, the hard things I went through shaped who I have become and have made molded me into who I am today.

Knowing that, I was having a hard time this week deciding what to write about. If I wouldn’t go back in time and change things…then what would I do?? All of the sudden two things happened: 1) I felt the baby kick for the very first time (I mentioned this briefly in a past blog….but I am about 20 weeks along with a little boy right now). And 2) I realized that I didn’t want to go back in time – I wanted to look forward!

There are so many questions I have for my future self and future family. I wonder what my children will look like. Will they have my big eyes or HubbyThursday’s cute and irresistible grin? Will they be athletic and captains of their sport teams? Will they be intelligent, well-spoken, and leaders of their classes? Will they appreciate theatre and music? Will they learn to build meaningful relationships? Will they be leaders and activists in their communities? The list goes on and on!! I want my future children to have so many opportunities and I hope they have the mindset to truly do anything they choose.

I wish so badly I could go forward and see how everything is going to turn out. My life right now has the opportunity to go is so many different directions and I wish terribly I knew which road I am going to take. Where is my career going to lead? How many children will I have? Etc, etc , etc.

One of my greatest fears is that I will get older and forget how hard I had to work to get there. I was the oldest of a huge family and growing up we didn’t have much. When I was seven I held my first job delivering newspapers. In high school I worked two jobs, was a Varsity athlete, and involved in almost every club our school had to offer. In college I waitressed at two restaurants, held positions in Student Body Government, competed in pageants, and was a three-sport Varsity athlete (cross country, indoor track & field, outdoor track & field), and graduated with honors. It was hard. There were times that I was jealous of my friends whose parents paid for all their education and had the benefit of being able to focus solely on their academics. But it taught me the importance of working hard and truly earning every accomplishment I achieved. When I came across challenges, I worked through them. Sometimes I succeeded and sometimes I failed, but I learned that it was impossible to succeed if you never attempt a challenge. Today, I know I am more successful and well-rounded because of the situation at hand when I was younger.

I fear that if HubbyThursday and I work hard to provide nice things for our children they won’t have this sense of accomplishment we were able to create for ourselves. It is so important to me that our children never think that they are “entitled” to anything, or that they are better than their peers because of accomplishments their parents have achieved. Don’t get me wrong….we haven’t even gotten to that point yet in our lives. We still have massive amounts of student debt and will still be living like poor college students for the next few years. However, I have no doubt in my mind that we will be successful some day.

If I could fast forward ten/fifteen years I would remind my future self that this is how I feel. I would remind my future self that I don’t want to drive fancy cars or own shiny things. It’s not important to have the biggest house, or the fanciest vacations. What is important is that we make it to all our kids’ track meets and basketball games. That we are there for each one of their parent/teacher conferences and can help them after school with their homework. That we are there for them when they have a terrible break-up and come home in tears, or when a mean junior-high girl makes fun of them. Most importantly, I never want to forget that our family is THE most important thing. Period. And that you can never give up on those you love the most.

So, as I am writing here feeling the baby kick (he is very little – not even a pound yet!) I have realized there is really no way I will be able to see what the future will hold. All I can do is hold myself accountable for my actions and constantly remind myself how I want to live my life and the values I want to instill on my children and future family. I have made mistakes in the past, and I know I will make mistakes in the future. I have confidence, however, that if I surround myself with people whom I love and care for my life will be full of fulfillment.

Life on Mars

When I picked the topic of time travel, it was fresh on my mind.  I had just watched the last episode of a great show, "Life on Mars."  A show about a man, 40-ish in 2009, who's forced to live in the year 1973.  This man hated it in 1973-- especially when he was faced with his toddler self and was given the opportunity to talk to himself about his father abandoning the family.  To serve sort of as a mentor.  He didn't want to at first, because he didn't want his toddler self to know what a dark and cynical man he'd become.

This man tried desperately, for the two years the show ran, to get out of 1973.

I think if any of us were forced back in time, to a period of our lives, knowing what we know now, it'd be as strange and as scary as being planted on the planet Mars.  And I wonder-- how tough would it be to resist the urge to warn ourselves, or advise ourselves on decisions unmade.

There's a perfect movie moment in "My Best Friend's Wedding," where the two friends are talking on a boat deck, about how once a moment passes... it's gone.  And as they say this, a cool shadow from a bridge above passes over them.  Suddenly it's sunny again, and indeed the moment has passed.  An opportunity gone.

At least in part, the tantalizing fantasy of time travel is defined by the possibility of going back to a moment of regret.  I try not to torture myself with this too often, though I admit that for a good portion of my life, I've been obsessed with regret.  I have a fear of regret so great that I fear I'll regret not packing every possible first aid item into my giant purse.  And then my purse is so heavy, that I usually regret packing it so.

I worry I'll regret everything from not buying that splurgy sunless bronzer, to not going outside on a perfect, sunny day.  What if I hadn't gone to Key West on spring break?  Would I have regretted not doing that sort of thing, looking back on my college life?  Would I regret not ordering something more daring from the menu?  Would I regret not riding the roller coasters in Disneyworld?  Would I regret not studying abroad in Florence?  

While thinking of all these things leaves me on the verge of a headache-- I think my greatest fear, is that I could potentially regret not fulfilling the expectations I had for myself as a child.  I wanted to be a  dozen different things- detective, hot-air balloon operator, lawyer, explorer, entrepreneur... And I wanted to take the world with me on all my adventures.  I wanted people to look forward to these adventures the way I looked forward to reading "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," and watching "Flight of the Navigator."  I don't think hovering in obscurity, or even normalacy-- known only to my family, friends and teachers was something I ever dreamt for myself.  In fact, I wanted to be great.

As an adult, the book, "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood," only fueled my fears and obsessions. This one hit me hard.  Two generations of women-- the daughter became a famous writer.  The mother was once young, vibrant, full of dreams and energy and charm- shouting her lofty aspirations from the back of her friend's speeding, red convertible, that she was going to be a star.  That same woman grew old, lamenting-- she "could have done something," "could have been something great."  Could have...  

I can't.

I can't, I refuse to give myself cause to look back on my life that way.  I'm going to keep plugging forward at full speed until I don't know what.  I don't know when I'll stop.  But I just can't, won't, shudder to think I might one day be an old and tired woman wishing for a time machine to take her back to Mars.    

A letter to my eighteen-year-old self

A few weeks before I graduated college, my mom called my dorm room to tell me that a very odd letter had arrived in a self-addressed envelope, but postmarked in my home town. Given the impossibility of my being two places at once, curiosity got the better of her and she called seeking permission to open it.

The contents—a letter. The author—eighteen-year-old GirlTuesday. The pristine pen strokes stretched across three pages of Five-star college ruled paper, serifs crafted with the authority and care of a confident yet uneasy hand. The tightly-crafted prose portrayed a miniature time-capsule snap shot of my mental musings at one naïve and narrow-minded moment of youth. The assignment—write a letter to yourself upon your college graduation. What do you want to say to the future you? What do you think you’ll be doing? Where will you be living? What will you have accomplished?

As soon as I realized what it was, I insisted that my mother stop reading. What could I have possibly have had to say, at eighteen, to my adult self? And, more importantly, did I dare share it with my mother?

In reality, my predictions were simple. My eighteen-year-old self expected that I would be graduating from the wrong college (I had not, in fact, gotten in to the one I’d predicted in that letter); marrying my high school boyfriend (we broke up two weeks after my arrival at college); finishing up my final season of swimming (I’d quit two years earlier); majoring in the wrong subject (I’d switched from Psychology to English and Political Science); and heading to law school in the fall (this alone was true). But more than the relative inaccuracy of the predictions, the thing that struck me most about that letter was the sheer simplicity of it. My eighteen-year-old self had not ventured to tell my adult self how much leaving home and charting my own course into adulthood would fundamentally shape my personal and professional life. My eighteen-year-old self could not have predicted the tragedy that would befall my teammates, or the precipitous international landscape into which our nation, and the world, were about to be thrust.

That letter is the closest thing to time travel I have ever experienced. And as I sat down to write this week, the question I kept posing to myself was whether, if I were able to, I would want to send a letter back from this moment in time to that eighteen-year-old me. Would I want to temp fate in disrupting the space-time continuum like Marty Mc Fly’s letter to Doc? Is there some bullet-proof vest I want to warn my younger self about?

I thought that I would write that letter here and tell my eighteen-year-old self all the things I should and shouldn’t worry about. I was going to tell myself to have more confidence, to recognize that my achievements were not simply a product of being a large fish in a small pond, to truly embrace the guidance my parents had once given that I could truly do and be whatever I would like to be when I grow up. I wanted to tell myself that there would be heartache, loss, and adversity in the ten-years between then and now. I wanted to tell myself to learn and grow and not dwell upon it. I wanted to tell myself to cherish the friendships, to hold fast to the people who mold and shape who I become, and not to let myself fall out of touch with them.

But the more I thought about it, the more I decided that I would never want to send such a letter. Getting a letter from my past was sort of a gut-check against my dreams and aspirations. It forced me to pause and see how my path had veered from where I had thought I was headed. In contrast, writing a letter from the future to a younger version of myself runs the risk of changing, fundamentally, who I am and who I have become. I’m not trying to proclaim that I enjoyed every moment of my life thus far; nor can I honestly say that I’ve learned lessons from every good or bad thing that has happened thus far. There are things I’ve said, done, and seen that I would like to take back or change. I just don’t think I want to rely on time travel to change any of it; and for now, I am thankful of that.

Flies and Walls and All That Jazz

I struggled a lot with the topic this week, trying hard to make it unconventional, but yet something you all might want to read. I thought about writing on my favorite Cher songs (but there are really only two, and that wouldn’t be a blog, it would be a list because I don’t have much to say about them, they’re alright, not terrific and not worth shelling out $150 to sit in the back row of the upper deck at Caesar’s in Las Vegas to hear). I also gave some thought to boring you all with a little astrophysics rant from my early days, but the thing about physics is that it’s sort of a hard topic to put to paper without lots of mathematical symbols, equations, and back story. Plus I haven’t yet come up with the exact formula for time travel, so we’ll save that for next week. What a great idea, next time it’s my turn, the topic is MATH. Woohoo!

Anyway (GM’s most favorite segue), I’ve decided to stick to the basics and just talk about Time Travel. Straight up. No fluff, no trying to make this into some quirky, weird, highly intelligent, but slightly off-topic blog. Nope. Not this week.

As far as being able to travel backward and forward in time, I’m all for it, but leave my life out of it. I don’t often have major regrets over things I’ve done and wish I could go back and re-do them. Most of my regrets come in the form of something that’s just popped out of my mouth at the most inappropriate time or something inappropriate that’s popped out at just the right time, but is still wrong. I would go back in time to take that back since making the mistake doesn’t seem to be helping me keep my trap shut. But those are too numerous to try to list here. I also have no interest in seeing the future. Sorry – it’s not for me. Don’t want to know when I’ll die, don’t want to see how my life turns out. No thanks – if I wanted boring I’d……..well go to a Cher concert.

What I would use my GirlMonday super time travel powers for is to go back and be a fly on the wall for events of the past. But only things that are personal to me – I don’t want to get greedy with the power and lose it. So I’ll pass on the I Have a Dream Speech, or the birth of Jesus (oooooh, how nice would that be though?). I’d rather get a chance to witness my dad asking my mom out on their first date. For those of you who don’t know my parents (who have been divorced since I was 10), MommaMonday is a very type-A personality and my dad is the most amiable guy you’ll ever meet. But apparently at some point he got up the nerve to ask her out, and their first date was to a UT-Penn State football game. He was supposed to be in a Saturday class but skipped it so he could take her out and on the way to the game my grandfather (who didn’t know a thing about this – I’m almost guessing this was dad’s first date ever) passed them on the interstate. As the story goes mom was saddled up next to dad in the seat of his old Buick and he had his arm around her when he looked over and saw my grandpa just waving and grinning in the car next to them. What I wouldn’t give to have been there.

My stepfather moved out of the house he shared with MommaMonday sometime right after I left DC and moved South (always capitalized, sorry). She said he kind of went crazy right before he left, and then it got even worse afterward as they were finalizing their divorce and hashing out the finances. I have my own theories, and I’ll keep them to myself, but he was never anything but wonderful when I was around. He and my mom married when I was 11 (see timeframe in previous paragraph….uh yeah), and I was supposed to just love him right from the start. Okay, sure. I’m 11 and my parents just divorced. That’s exactly what I was going to do. But over time, he sorta grew on me. He was a lot like my dad (I guess that’s why this one didn’t last either) which meant he was an all-around nice guy. Always doing things for other people, which meant being genuinely nice to me. Plus he had interests that matched with mine that I didn’t share with either parent. He was a baseball fanatic – which meant I had someone to talk OBP, CS, and HBP with. Well when he moved out, after I moved away, we lost touch. I tried to email a couple of times, but to be honest, I didn’t try very hard. Mom was pretty upset and angry, and he seemed to be barely holding on. So I tried not to get involved. Divorce is amazing in that once one of your parents marries someone you’re supposed to immediately love them, but once they divorce, you have to turn those feelings right around and push that person out of your life. So that’s what I did – it made her happy, it was easy, and he seemed to be dealing with his own problems from the divorce. But if I could travel through the space/time continuum, I’d be there as his life was spiraling out of control, I’d be there as he alienated all of his kids, and everyone he ever knew. And I’d certainly be there that Valentine’s day he drank himself to death in a hotel room in Florida. I don’t know that I could have done anything. I don’t know that it would do anything but ease my guilt, but I could try, right?

And lastly, for my short little life so far, I would absolutely love the opportunity to be there when my baby was born. GirlFairway didn’t come to me until she was almost four months old. She has such a distinct personality; I am in constant wonderment of where it comes from. Who does the curly tail come from? The black tongue? The incredibly slow gait? The adoration for all flying insects? Was it Momma or Papa Fairway who hated water? Metal sounds? Didn’t bark? Or were they perfectly normal and she comes from some traumatic experience in those first 3+ months. If that’s the case, I would want to be there too. Not as a fly on the wall – I don’t think I could contain myself. There’s got to be a reason why her little body is racked with anxiety every day. A reason why she freaks out when we get in the car and throws up from stress. Some explanation why she has doggie nightmares that cause her to make the most painful noises. There’s a reason why if I raise my voice, for any reason, even to be heard over the washer, she pins her ears back, tucks that long, fluffy, curly tail, and slinks away from me. And if I could just be there at the moment that happened, I could do something to stop it.

If only.