At first, it was easy. I could get it anonymously, thanks to the miracle of Ebay. I could find the issue I needed, and bid on it with my oh-so-covert screen name and then, someone from a distant land would put it through the mail. Ta-da!
But then, I realized that I was being ripped off. These comic peddlers were tuned into people like me, and knew that we would pay high prices for the luxury of sitting at home, away from any store front with any word resembling comic and book and store. We had to pay to maintain the illusion that we were still separate, that we weren't so into "Buffy" that we were fine just gleaning the basic plot from the reviews on Amazon.com. They knew we needed more, and like any good dealer, they knew we'd pay for it.
It was right around my birthday that episode five was issued, and for a few days, I stalled leaving my house in the direction of the local comic book store that is a mere two blocks away. I think this was my little vacation to limbo. Russ was on the couch, sick with a debilitating cold, and I used him as my excuse not to venture down the alley. I had a feeling akin to the first day of school, when there are those general barfy feelings one gets on walking into a room of entirely unfamiliar faces.
But, if you read my last post, you all know that it was more than that. I was unwilling to cross over, either into heaven or hell. I wanted the continuing gratification of being involved in a world of characters that I love. But I wasn't sure I was ready to enter a world where I would possible become one of those comic book people, who went to the stores on new release dates, quoted issue numbers and lines, and heatedly debated matters like whether it was an axe or a crossbow that killed the chaos demon in issue number 2. These are all huge stereotypes, admittedly. But I carried them and still carry them around as reference tools, because I know only one or two other people who buy and read comics, and they don't talk about it. So all I have are vague impressions, like the one I got of the two guys sitting next to me on my last plane trip home from Chicago. They were talking about a comic I'd never heard of, heatedly debating the planetary qualities of some world or distant star, and then, when the announcement was made that we were going to have to board a new plane, I heard one of them say, in a hugely stereotypical flem-coated voice, "This plane better be able to crush atoms or fly at the speed of light."
Did I want identification with that?
The short answer is yes, I do. Because I walked to the comic bookstore and with a deep breath, entered to the familiar sound of customer bell rather than Chewbaca-themed growl or something else comic bookesque. The guy behind the counter was not wearing a novelty t-shirt, but a Hawaiian shirt and he was not over or underweight. And all the sudden, I was happy to be there. He was not a stereotype, and I wasn't either. We were probably just two people who liked good stories and were just searching out ways to find them (oh, and he probably wanted to make money doing it). Like Kristan commented, there is something subversive and hilarious about giving the finger to the powers that be and joining in at the fringes. As someone who was always a cool girl, but also, a rule-following girl, this might just be one of my most rebellious moves ever.
It was fitting that this adventure happened around my birthday. Sometimes I wish that we humans had a skin-shedding system more akin to snakes, where it gets tighter and tighter until it's just no good anymore and has to be removed. The process of shedding isn't easy. Snakes repeatedly grind their head against something hard to get that skin to peel back so that they can slid out of it. They leave it there and move on, in a new skin that's a lot more fitting. But they don't get to appreciate that old skin at all, mostly because they have brains with no residual capacity for memory or reflection, but also because it's hard for them to rubberneck. It would be neat to have my old skin from these years before, to look at it and really see that it's no longer me.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Laugh, Dante...Part 2
Intermission: This afternoon, I was chatting with my friend Jeremy, who teased me about my AIM status activity bar, which usually reads "around, writing," because I usually am around and in some way, writing. This afternoon, I happened to be writing a syllabus for my upcoming semester, which is not really "writing," but is a lot like writing. You need the same focus, the same ability to pull ideas from some void in the nether regions, but unlike writing, a patience for the hair splitting tedium of daily details. Anyway, Jeremy's first words to me were something along the lines of "A MFA who writes? I thought we all ditched that gig when we graduated." He was joking, but it's pretty sort of true, that in the world of the real, there is much writing of the syllabus type and not as much writing of the writing type. And I thought about this blog, where I have let this part two lapse for at least three weeks, and not that any of you were dying to see what happened in this second part - except maybe Christina - but this conversation with Jeremy reminded me that there is much writing to be done, lest I become a casualty of the MFA, like so many before me.
This is also, in part, for Kristan, in her blog reading, Planet Earth watching, tea-into-the-sink existence at the moment.
So...
This all started with Buffy. No wait -- it goes further back than that, all the way to reading and rereading The Babysitters Club over and over until the spines no longer held together and one by one, pages started dropping out. Then, it was All Creatures, then Sweet Valley High, then those demon-awful Frank Peretti books, and then, the Christy Miller series. Then, there was college, where I tried not to read anything serialized at all, for fear of betraying the not-so-secret English major code that serialized books are dumb. This, of course, was my own take on it and not like anything resembling reality. (Well, maybe just a little.) My friends were still reading Tolkien and Lewis and watching the X-Files, but I wanted to be cool. Cooler than cool. And cooler than cool was more like obscure Medieval theologians and contemporary Irish writers than hobbits and David Duchovny. So there went I, tripping after what I thought would make me smarter-looking and cooler-sounding, when in essence, I was just following the usual hipster-wanna-be directives like a neatly-laid, vintage cobblestone path.
Man, I was lame.
Another not-so-secret English major banner is about the rejection of science-fiction as a lesser, or bullshit, writing style.
Back to Buffy. This was the first serialized anything that I ever stayed up all night to watch in chronological order on DVD, the first series I had bought since junior high, or the first series where I searched out reviewers' analysis of each show and poured over them like a Rosetta stone. I checked out books at the library where fans like me wrote funny and insightful articles about as topics as varying as Platonic ideal in the Buffy verse, or (and much less impressively) Buffy's perfect relationship match. I memorized the soundtrack to "Once More, With Feeling." If I'd been around when the show was still in its hey-day, I might have gone to Comic Con or a meet-and-greet with the stars.
But who am I kidding? I wouldn't have -- I was way too cool for that back then.
The whole Buffy experience, when I thought about it, was a little unsettling. I, literary type who's been trained in tiny cheeses and art-for-art's-sake public readings, suddenly felt as though nothing could reach the pinnacle of the story arcs and characters that I found in Buffy. And that's when I realized, finally, that I was a nerd.
But I didn't embrace it, really embrace it, until recently.
Buffy, as many of you know, had seven TV seasons and then, like most shows excluding The Simpsons, went off the air. But Joss Whedon, that schemey little trickster, didn't end it there. Late last year, he announced that season eight of Buffy would be in comic book form. And to me, that was, comics as in lameness personified?
This is also, in part, for Kristan, in her blog reading, Planet Earth watching, tea-into-the-sink existence at the moment.
So...
This all started with Buffy. No wait -- it goes further back than that, all the way to reading and rereading The Babysitters Club over and over until the spines no longer held together and one by one, pages started dropping out. Then, it was All Creatures, then Sweet Valley High, then those demon-awful Frank Peretti books, and then, the Christy Miller series. Then, there was college, where I tried not to read anything serialized at all, for fear of betraying the not-so-secret English major code that serialized books are dumb. This, of course, was my own take on it and not like anything resembling reality. (Well, maybe just a little.) My friends were still reading Tolkien and Lewis and watching the X-Files, but I wanted to be cool. Cooler than cool. And cooler than cool was more like obscure Medieval theologians and contemporary Irish writers than hobbits and David Duchovny. So there went I, tripping after what I thought would make me smarter-looking and cooler-sounding, when in essence, I was just following the usual hipster-wanna-be directives like a neatly-laid, vintage cobblestone path.
Man, I was lame.
Another not-so-secret English major banner is about the rejection of science-fiction as a lesser, or bullshit, writing style.
Back to Buffy. This was the first serialized anything that I ever stayed up all night to watch in chronological order on DVD, the first series I had bought since junior high, or the first series where I searched out reviewers' analysis of each show and poured over them like a Rosetta stone. I checked out books at the library where fans like me wrote funny and insightful articles about as topics as varying as Platonic ideal in the Buffy verse, or (and much less impressively) Buffy's perfect relationship match. I memorized the soundtrack to "Once More, With Feeling." If I'd been around when the show was still in its hey-day, I might have gone to Comic Con or a meet-and-greet with the stars.
But who am I kidding? I wouldn't have -- I was way too cool for that back then.
The whole Buffy experience, when I thought about it, was a little unsettling. I, literary type who's been trained in tiny cheeses and art-for-art's-sake public readings, suddenly felt as though nothing could reach the pinnacle of the story arcs and characters that I found in Buffy. And that's when I realized, finally, that I was a nerd.
But I didn't embrace it, really embrace it, until recently.
Buffy, as many of you know, had seven TV seasons and then, like most shows excluding The Simpsons, went off the air. But Joss Whedon, that schemey little trickster, didn't end it there. Late last year, he announced that season eight of Buffy would be in comic book form. And to me, that was, comics as in lameness personified?
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