Sinnnnce it’s Sunday night and the internet is asleep, I can share secrets from my nerdy adolescence.
I babysat extensively in the neighborhood I grew up in. I did it pretty much every weekend because a) I had no life and b) I had no idea what the going rate for a babysitter was, so I undersold everyone on accident (I was charging like a buck an hour per kid! And I’m not that old! It was reverse highway robbery.)
Anyhow, one family had all of the Star Trek books, and since I was charging them three bucks an hour, I was basically living at their house with their hoodlum spawn every weekend. I started reading the books there, and they eventually trusted me enough that I could take five or six of them home each week. I would read them on the bus and at school and at lunch while I was hiding in the library — you get the idea. All of them.
So here where my folks live they have a library sale every Saturday morning. We all went (library sales being one of the few things my back is up for :P) and guess what I found?!?!? :D
That’s right! Those are Star Trek books! Some really good ones too, like Sarek and Uhura’s Song! My husband picked up some that had Data and Picard on the front and I was all PUT THOSE DOWN. Nothing against the Next Generation, but those are not the books of my childhood. I might not get a chance to read them for awhile (or be horrified when I do) but sometimes it just feels good to own pieces of your childhood, and at a quarter a book the price was right ;).
Then today, we went and saw the newest Sherlock movie with my parents. And I’ve been watching the BBC Sherlock series at home (very slowly, since there are so few of them to watch, pacing myself.) My husband thinks Sherlock (in the BBC series) is an asshole. Which he is. But I love him. I can’t help myself. Before him, there was Jeremy Brett, who I unabashedly adored.
And before that, there was the man in the stories and books. I had a compendium as a child, and I read it over and over, through and through. I (like every other teenager in the world) felt quite out of place as a kid, and hideously ugly, klutzy, repulsive, etc etc etc. And here was someone who didn’t care what anyone else in the world thought of him, because he was brilliant, because he was right. I put two and two together — I had my brain. All I needed to do was become a genius and that was what would shield me.
Through Sherlock Holmes’s stories, his way of life, I saw a way out of what I was, into what I could maybe-someday-if-I-tried-hard-enough be. I wasn’t ever going to be Texas pretty or Texas thin, but by god, I would get smart enough to not let stupid people or petty concerns bother me.
I realize in a way that the worst parts of SH have been co-opted into nerd culture, the inability to not correct people who are wrong, the slavish devotion to miniscule detail for things that are of no real consequence. (In a way, reading SH has prepared me to deal with those types of people politely at SF-cons, heh.)
But he was my savior at a very young age, and because of that, I’ve been in love with him ever since. He was even safe to love, if you think about it, because he’s not the kind of person who would ever return it. And because of that early imprinting, I love most versions of him (ironically) uncritically. So the movie was grand, and the BBC show reallllly gets it right, and Jeremy Brett will forever hold a special place in my heart.
I think that’s enough show and tell for tonight ;). Back to work on Shapeshifted edits tomorrow :D