That would be me - not the actual baby. Although this is a picture of the baby being geeked which I know is off topic, but she's so darn cute at the moment! (babygrow curtesy of AnonymityBlaize and made for Sally when she was the new baby on the block.)
This blog post is going to require some backstory from another life.
Back in this other life before I got married and had children and my life generally revolved around keeping other people fed, clothed, clean(ish) and entertained, I lived in Glasgow and had cool friends. They introduced me to the world of tv geekdom and I have no idea how I managed to get my degree given how much tv we all watched.
I was a pretty wholesome teenager all things considered. Yes, there was a bit of teenaged alcohol consumption, but for the most part it was books, horses and lots of sport, there was a bit of tv, but Dawson's Creek and Ally McBeal don't register high on the geekometer. Then I got to Glasgow and fell in with a dangerous crowd of tv addicts. Conversion to the temple of Geek in Glasgow started out with Buffy, an inordinate amount of it, and that was only the beginning. The work of Joss Whedon was like a gateway drug, potent, led to other tv binges of various qualities, but ultimately remained our home ground. At one point the individual episodes were known well enough that when a number was selected from the Bag of Numfar (yes, we had a randomisation bag named after the character Joss appeared as in an episode of Angel) we'd generally be able to name the title of the episode.
I miss a lot about Glasgow, Uni life is formative in many ways. One of those for me was heading round to my friends house round the corner - Mama Geek and she of the best tv package - to watch the latest episode of Veronica Mars and Battlestar Galactica or to watch as much Oz or the Wire as we could cope with in one sitting and then endlessly discuss the plot details and justify character motivations. I just don't get to do that anymore. So having gone from being Baby Geek that needed to be taught so much by the Geek Elders of the West End and graduated into something of a Medium Grade Geek, but now - having lost my community, I have fallen from grace and am utterly not in date.
I didn't even know until a few months ago that there is going to be a new season of Veronica Mars. I knew there was going to be a Buffy reboot which I am greatly ambivalent about, but the Veronica thing failed to register on any of my internet feeds. But you know what, it did mean that when I was reading an interview about the new season a few weeks ago I discovered there were two Veronica novels. Amazon obliged, and whilst they are not works of literary genius, it was nice to be back in Neptune again. Fortunately the plot was written by Rob Thomas and made sense, unlike the writing, which seemed to feature the somewhat painful notes of whatever perfume someone was wearing lingering in the air in every other scene. I shall have to subscribe to Hulu for the duration, but VERONICA MARS is coming back to kick some butt and presumably tase a few people.
The other bad-baby-geek news from this week - a decade late I finished Lost. 2010 when I should've been watching the end of Lost was after I left the HPA tv conclave, so there were no chums to discuss the nuttiness with and generally yell at the tv and I was having trouble getting hold of the episodes anyway. I figured I'd catch up sometime... I just didn't expect sometime to be almost ten years later whilst on maternity leave with my third baby.
So, I might be almost a decade late (and I had to do some serious spoiler avoiding in these intervening years) but WHAT THE ABSOLUTE FRACK! Was that really the ending we deserved? White light? You've gotta be shitting me. Also, Jack died, that bit was ok. There were polar bears, Desmond hopping all over the place and numbers and DHARMA and a smoke monster and THAT IS THE END?? I think I want to go back to when I thought there might be a good ending waiting out there for me and I'd forgotten how annoying Jack was and how utterly ridiculous the running back and forth across the island and never bloody telling anyone anything was. I might have also forgotten how much I loved Hurley though and how funny the half a season where Sawyer doesn't have a shirt was, but I'm not sure that justifies the number of hours I lost to discover that the sideways universe was nothing of the sort.
I can't go back to Glasgow - obviously I could for a visit, although getting anywhere over an hour away has now turned into a serious logistical feat, but the HPA corner has moved on, that Glasgow doesn't really exist anymore. We've all had babies and no one can stay up half the night because we 'accidently' pressed play all on the dvd - I expect now that we're in the netflix era and we wouldn't need to change a disc every few episodes we'd be in even greater danger - but a bit of me will always live there. I'm sure I learnt just as much about narrative and literature from my friends as I did from lectures. I miss those days and I miss those friends, and one day I'm sure we'll all sing our way through Once More with Feeling again, it'll just be sometime in the future when I don't need to put the kids to bed.
The baby pictures were too funny to pick just the one...