Alone and Unobserved

• To the producers and writers of Fringe:
• My Nightly Internal Monologue
• Dead-Easy Broccoli Butter Pasta
• Submerge Yourself in the Cold, Clear Flow
• End of an Era
• Nestling In
• Housekeeping Post
• Eight Tips for Making Amazing Red Sauce
• Salsa Rossa (Simple Tomato Sauce)
• Eight Tips for Cooking Fantastic Italian Pasta
• Tell me there's no one left to tell

(This is a sticky, so it’ll always be at the top. If you’re on the main page, scroll down for the rest of the blog.)

I finished Season Two of your show last night. Well, early this morning. And now I am a bitter, broken shell of a man, capable only of sobbing and rocking back and forth in a fetal position. That’s right, the finale was that good! Kudos. Except now I’m cursing myself for not saving the last episodes until September, when the next season is set to air.

A couple things I can’t wait to find out:

Will Agent Olivia Dunham keep that horrific new cut and color or will she come to her senses? (Just say NO to those bangs, honey. They don’t suit you.)

Yes:

No:

Will Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson) continue to be brooding and hot?

Will the sight of him in jeans continue to mesmerize me? (It’s especially nice from, er, behind, but I couldn’t find a suitable picture.)

Will the black characters on the show continue to be allowed to have personalities, or will they be shoved into the background again?

Will Charlie Francis (Kirk Acevedo) take off his shirt again??? (Couldn’t find a pic of that, either, but here he is anyway.)

UPDATED: Thanks to Craig, here’s a shirtless pic!

Will September (Michael Cerveris) continue to be the best and awesomest of the Observers? (He’s second from the left. Of course, because he’s visibly better and awesomer than the others.)

Producers and writers of Fringe: I know you’ll make the right decisions. (And if you can’t figure out what the right decisions are, contact me. I’ll set you straight.)

No, self. You can’t stay up all night again watching Fringe.

No, you can’t get shitfaced drunk, either!

Or high.

Or make broccoli-butter pasta at midnight and eat too much. AGAIN.

Stop looking at me like that. Bambi eyes will get you nowhere.

Stop!

Oh, all RIGHT. I can never say no to you. Where’s the bourbon and Coke?

I consider myself a logical person. I always have. Which is why, I suppose, even when I was a believer I tried to use logic to explain my beliefs. As a proselytizing missionary I spent countless futile hours reasoning with believers in other faith traditions, trying to get them to see the inconsistencies in their belief system and to demonstrate—with words, with logic, with the force of conviction!—that my beliefs were superior and they should convert to Mormonism. You may or may not be surprised to hear that I rarely got anywhere with these tactics, except to find myself embroiled in endless debates with college students and professors and other people who like to hear themselves talk.

After ditching Mormonism and then Christianity and finally theism altogether, I was still in that mindset. If people only thought about their beliefs, they’d realize they were logically untenable and they’d abandon them! This also rarely (never) worked.

I am an atheist because there’s no reliable, reasonable evidence for the existence of any kind of god, and there’s plenty of evidence against the existence of specific gods. That’s logic. But it’s not convincing to someone who relies on the warm fuzzy feeling in their chest to decide what’s true.

So I’m done doing that. I’m still gonna blog about what I believe and what matters to me, but no more trying to convince people. Because you know what? I’ve stopped believing that I can touch the center of people who rely on faith for decision-making. That I can reason them out of their belief. Because a belief that isn’t supported by evidence cannot be based on logic, and can’t be reached by reason.

There you go. I stayed up thirty-six hours straight over the past couple days watching an addictive and remarkably illogical TV show called Fringe so I’m not really strong on “reason” or “argument” right this second anyway.

I was reading Dooce’s most recent post, a letter to herself on turning “four hundred and twenty months old” entitled “That old hag.” And I was like, oh, fun, let’s plug that into the Google search bar and let it do the math for me to find out how old she is. So I typed in “420 / 12″ (boy does Google have some fun suggestions for people who type in “420,” by the way) and up pops… “= 35.”

After I calmed down a bit I did the math myself, and it turns out Heather Armstrong was born in 1975, which makes her a little less than five-and-a-half years older than me. It doesn’t seem possible that someone who was born in 1975 would be turning thirty-five this year. I mean, 1975 is RECENT and thirty-five is OLD.

In other, related news, a couple days ago I called home and spoke with my dad about possibly coming home in November so I could be there for my birthday, his birthday and Thanksgiving.

“Do you guys have anything planned for then?” I asked, meaning “Do you have any (i.e., out-of-town, not-going-to-be-home-for-a-visit plans) for that period?”

And my dad looked at my mom’s big calendar where she writes down absolutely everything and he was like, “Nope! The only thing on here is

And then he asked what that horrible strangled, kicked-in-the-gut noise coming from my end of the line was.

Which is all a long way of saying

Some of my older friends (i.e., the ones who are in or past their thirties and are not too happy with my moaning and gurgling that thirty is “the edge of decrepitude”) have tried to reason with me, saying that their thirties are/were their favorite age—not a kid anymore, but not yet an old fart.

My problem isn’t really that thirty feels “old.” I don’t think thirtysomethings are decrepit (or at least I wouldn’t say so to their faces) and I don’t think I’m immediately going to start experiencing joint pain and stiffness and hair loss (who am I kidding? I suffer from all of those already) immediately after my birthday.

But thirty does feel like the end of my life as a kid. I’ve been a kid for years, it seems. Avoiding responsibility, playing and goofing off whenever I wanted to, eating unhealthy food, spending my money on random shit. Thirty-year-olds don’t seem like old fogeys, but they do seem like ADULTS.

And I don’t know if I’m ready to be an adult yet.

[Updated because I apparently cannot do arithmetic of any kind. Like that's a surprise. I'm OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD.]

Looking around my new place, two months after moving in, I’m fairly satisfied with where I am, layout- and comfort-wise. Not forever, but for now. Except I need some more furniture, and there need to be fewer cables and power cords tangled in my living room, and my piano still needs a permanent spot and my art desk is a hideous mess and there are two growing piles of Random Crap on the floor in the living room and on the counter in the kitchen and okay, maybe I’m not that satisfied.

But it’s home. And that’s something.

P.S. Hey, what do you arty types do with delicate-ish sketches that you don’t want to throw away but don’t want to frame? Like, the pastel drawings that are currently littering the table in my entryway. What would you advise me to do with them? How do I store them? They need to be AWAY. Off the art table. (I specifically need suggestions that won’t cost much. I’m poor.)

P.P.S. I’m a little drunk and I love you guys. OKAY? I LOVE YOU GUYS. LEMME JUST GIVE YOU ALL A HUG OKAY

I’m trying out a CAPTCHA on the comment form to try and cut down on the rate of spam I’m getting. If it doesn’t work I’ll turn it off. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it’s really been a deluge.

A note: if your comment ever fails to appear on the site—or if the CAPTCHA malfunctions and you can’t leave a comment at all!—the best thing to do is email me at sean@aloneandunobserved.com and ask me to look into it.

Something I constantly wonder: how could anyone meet me (let alone know me for any length of time) and not know I’m gay?

Really what this is about is my perennial wish to never have to tell family members, or former Mormon acquaintances, or old roommates, that I’m gay. Because it’s always awkward. They start reviewing every interaction they’ve ever had with me (I can see them doing it in their heads!) and the straight guys feel weird because what if I thought dirty thoughts about them! and everyone feels betrayed and on and on and on. Basically, I want to feel certain that anyone who knew me before I came out of the closet already knew and therefore already knows and therefore doesn’t need me to tell them.

Bleh. Whatever! Surely there’s no one left who doesn’t know. Right?

Not that James Cameron “Avatar: 3-D Smurf-Cats in Space” crap or that M. Night Shyamalan “The Last Airbender: I’m going to take something whimsical and funny and inventive and methodically turn it into overblown 3-D shit” shit.

I mean the *real* Avatar. The three awesome seasons of Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender series.

Which I am watching right now, instead of doing my cleaning.

Why don’t you join me?

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of the Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender. I own all three seasons and rewatch them frequently. The words “PREE-viously, on AVATAH” make me quiver and thrill. I have thought long and hard about which element I wish I could bend, and doggone it if I haven’t had to wuss out and just decide to be the Avatar (who can bend all four) because I can’t decide.

This is the long way of saying that I am what is known as an “Avatard.” (And no, those obsessed with James Cameron’s epic special-effects extravaganza are more properly known as “morons.” We had the name first.)

So naturally I was wary when I heard M. Night Shyamalan was going to adapt the cartoons as a feature film trilogy, given that the last movie of his that I’d watched and liked was Unbreakable in 2000. I winced through Signs and rolled my eyes through The Village, and didn’t even bother to see The Lady in the Water or The Happening. He had descended to hackery; he had lost me.

I gave him my guarded approval, however, once I’d seen the interviews he did for the series DVD extras, where he talks about his deep love for the original series in almost fanboyish tones. After all, how could someone do wrong by something they love so much?

Well! Well. It turns out he was either lying about his love for Avatar or he has a completely different take on “love” than I do. Just take a look at Roger Ebert’s review, which begins with the paragraph,

“The Last Airbender” is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here.

Or the Rotten Tomatoes “Tomatometer,” where The Last Airbender is currently hovering at an “8% fresh” rating—i.e., 7 non-panning reviews out of 89.

Note that most of the negative reviews I read mention the original TV series favorably or at least neutrally, and compare the film to it in extremely negative terms, so it wasn’t the premise or the underlying story that was the problem. The film was just shitty from start to finish.

So M. Night! This is my message to you: Thanks for taking one of my favorite things, killing it, reanimating it as one of the vile undead, dismembering it, and then shitting on its twitching corpse. Curse you!

P.S. I’m still undecided as to whether I’ll watch the movie. Probably not is where I currently stand. The sliver of me who still wants to see it is a masochist who is looking forward to the suffering and subsequent Twitter and blog posts it would generate. I shall do my best to squelch that pain-seeking/exhibitionist part of myself, but I make no promises as to the outcome.

Linda over on All & Sundry wrote a post about how hard it is for her to make and keep friends. The paragraphs that really hit me were numbers 2 and 3:

I don’t have many friends, really. I am shy and reserved and I find it hard to accept the inherent vulnerability that comes with friendships and I’m not good at maintaining them and I’m terrible at reaching out and sometimes I wonder there’s something fundamentally broken in me in this regard.

I fill this friend-shaped void with the internet and I don’t really know if that’s sad or sensible, [...] Continue Reading…