It's the little things.
After a brief wait of only 25 years, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy will finally be released as a feature film. I am both excited and anxious. What if it sucks dead wombats? The books (and BBC Radio shows and even the BBC miniseries) were so cool that I wonder if the film can live up to my expectations.
I originally read this book (by Douglas Adams, in case you have been living under a boulder in Tibet) as a freshman. I read it because it seemed (as it seems still) that it was making fun of Science Fiction, a genre which richly deserves all the mockery it can get. The book was clever, witty and uproriously funny much like A Confederacy of Dunces is proclaimed to be, but isn't. In fact, this book (and its progeny) has been tangentially instrumental to many of the great developments in my life.
I met one of my very bestest pals, the guy who turned out to be my best man (and I his) trying to muddle through the PC-Game version of this book. We had to buy two versions because he played it on an AppleII and I on a PC. This was 1984.
When I first joined the cyberworld, via the "old" Prodigy service, I met some of my very favorite people on the Hitchhiker's BB there, some of whom I still keep in touch with fifteen years later. (Alas, Jenny Scott up and disappeared one day from my life's radar screen, and I miss her horribly. She got me into They Might Be Giants.)
But life moves on. And now I have reached a certain point in my life when I can afford, not only to buy the Hitchhiker Trilogy (comprised of six books and a short story), but also the snazzy Easton Press edition, bound in leather and gilt-edged. Fairly recently I discovered that Easton Press carried not only those Great Classic books, but also a lot of other pretty cool stuff and I have begun to stock up for the day when we can get an addition put in on this house, to include a library. "Library" is a sort of semi-pretentious way to put it, but it's really a room for my books and for me to be left the Hell alone to read them. Maybe I'll put my magazines in there also.
Another drawback to having reached a certain point in life is that people ask you to do things which:
1- You'd really rather not be doing
2- Will take a lot more time than any estimate you've been given
3- Will prove thankless at best, and wildly alienating at worst
So far, my defenses remain up and effective.
Much of the blame is mine, of course. I have been cursed with one of those minds that fairly hums with thought. Not necessarily brilliant or creative thought, but if one is spinning off ideas fast enough, one will eventually make contact with a good one and then people start coming to you for more and that morphs into pleas to take charge.
To make a short story pointless, I was at a gala when I was introduced to Person A. People no longer have the decency to introduce someone and say "This is Xxx Y. Zzzz, Vice-President of The Porphyry League of America." Instead they just say this is "X" and assume you will hit it off with "X" and you'll gather all the data on your own in due course. So foolishly, I dropped a little (I thought whimsical, humorous) pearl about "The Pink and Green Ball" which seems like a catchy thing, now that preppy is making a comeback.
Next thing I know, I am being peppered with questions and request for advice and it just degenerates from there.
Feh.
That's not to say I am unwilling to take on responsibilities and tasks. I just tend to not want things to devolve out of control. It's OK if a photographer and a reporter from the society column show up to an event at which I am present...as long as I am not the guy in charge. This of course, explains why my All-Gentile Seder has never achieved breakout status. That and deadpanning (to a Jewish friend's mom) that "it's restricted."
Part of the problem with events which require someone to chair them (as opposed to events which require someone to bring chairs) is people who are blissfully unaware they are dead and embalmed show up. Sometimes they look like they built the Pyramids, and sometimes they are "decreppies" (i.e., ancient and spavined preppies who have managed to get a chokehold on life and have somehow been left on the shelf well past their "sell by" date) and sometimes they are both.
For some reason these sorts of attendees tend to carry a outrageously heavy jewelry loads. You know the type...diamond rings that would make Elizabeth Taylor mutter about wretched excess and the like. You half expect some women to have Billy Barty walking in front of them with a cushion on his head so they could get around with their eleventy gazillion carat diamond ring. When you see these people, you realize there's half a mountain missing somewhere in South Africa.
But the biggest gripe is that most of the time, there aren't any attendees who might remotely be considered fun. I have several friends who'd be ideal partners-in-crime for these things, but they tend to live 1000+ miles away. Not sure what that says about me.
Feel free to throw this blog entry in my face if I should relent to the pressure to chair something.
I originally read this book (by Douglas Adams, in case you have been living under a boulder in Tibet) as a freshman. I read it because it seemed (as it seems still) that it was making fun of Science Fiction, a genre which richly deserves all the mockery it can get. The book was clever, witty and uproriously funny much like A Confederacy of Dunces is proclaimed to be, but isn't. In fact, this book (and its progeny) has been tangentially instrumental to many of the great developments in my life.
I met one of my very bestest pals, the guy who turned out to be my best man (and I his) trying to muddle through the PC-Game version of this book. We had to buy two versions because he played it on an AppleII and I on a PC. This was 1984.
When I first joined the cyberworld, via the "old" Prodigy service, I met some of my very favorite people on the Hitchhiker's BB there, some of whom I still keep in touch with fifteen years later. (Alas, Jenny Scott up and disappeared one day from my life's radar screen, and I miss her horribly. She got me into They Might Be Giants.)
But life moves on. And now I have reached a certain point in my life when I can afford, not only to buy the Hitchhiker Trilogy (comprised of six books and a short story), but also the snazzy Easton Press edition, bound in leather and gilt-edged. Fairly recently I discovered that Easton Press carried not only those Great Classic books, but also a lot of other pretty cool stuff and I have begun to stock up for the day when we can get an addition put in on this house, to include a library. "Library" is a sort of semi-pretentious way to put it, but it's really a room for my books and for me to be left the Hell alone to read them. Maybe I'll put my magazines in there also.
Another drawback to having reached a certain point in life is that people ask you to do things which:
1- You'd really rather not be doing
2- Will take a lot more time than any estimate you've been given
3- Will prove thankless at best, and wildly alienating at worst
So far, my defenses remain up and effective.
Much of the blame is mine, of course. I have been cursed with one of those minds that fairly hums with thought. Not necessarily brilliant or creative thought, but if one is spinning off ideas fast enough, one will eventually make contact with a good one and then people start coming to you for more and that morphs into pleas to take charge.
To make a short story pointless, I was at a gala when I was introduced to Person A. People no longer have the decency to introduce someone and say "This is Xxx Y. Zzzz, Vice-President of The Porphyry League of America." Instead they just say this is "X" and assume you will hit it off with "X" and you'll gather all the data on your own in due course. So foolishly, I dropped a little (I thought whimsical, humorous) pearl about "The Pink and Green Ball" which seems like a catchy thing, now that preppy is making a comeback.
Next thing I know, I am being peppered with questions and request for advice and it just degenerates from there.
Feh.
That's not to say I am unwilling to take on responsibilities and tasks. I just tend to not want things to devolve out of control. It's OK if a photographer and a reporter from the society column show up to an event at which I am present...as long as I am not the guy in charge. This of course, explains why my All-Gentile Seder has never achieved breakout status. That and deadpanning (to a Jewish friend's mom) that "it's restricted."
Part of the problem with events which require someone to chair them (as opposed to events which require someone to bring chairs) is people who are blissfully unaware they are dead and embalmed show up. Sometimes they look like they built the Pyramids, and sometimes they are "decreppies" (i.e., ancient and spavined preppies who have managed to get a chokehold on life and have somehow been left on the shelf well past their "sell by" date) and sometimes they are both.
For some reason these sorts of attendees tend to carry a outrageously heavy jewelry loads. You know the type...diamond rings that would make Elizabeth Taylor mutter about wretched excess and the like. You half expect some women to have Billy Barty walking in front of them with a cushion on his head so they could get around with their eleventy gazillion carat diamond ring. When you see these people, you realize there's half a mountain missing somewhere in South Africa.
But the biggest gripe is that most of the time, there aren't any attendees who might remotely be considered fun. I have several friends who'd be ideal partners-in-crime for these things, but they tend to live 1000+ miles away. Not sure what that says about me.
Feel free to throw this blog entry in my face if I should relent to the pressure to chair something.
Comments
http://www.chicagooperatheater.org/join/join-gala.html--P.
TFBIM chaired a gala and it proved such an irritant that I cannot recall it without bile shooting out of every pore.