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This weekend my keyboard started going incredibly wonky. Lowercase f becomes f+return. Lowercase g appears not where you type if but in the middle of random words pages away. V adds enter, Enter adds a v and a hyphen. Uppercase R highlights whole sections which are then deleted if you hit another key. Uppercase N just deletes the whole document. And m causes the cursor to run off down the document one letter at a time and make you chase it.
Needless to say, I am awaiting a new keyboard and hope this will stop.
I was having a thought about Numb3rs this week that sort of applies to fandom in general. This past week Alan, father of Charlie the Math Genius, is getting on his case about doing grown-up things like taking care of household repairs. This turns out to be a cover that he's worried Charlie isn't going to get married and have children and might instead turn out "like Larry," his weird physicist friend. Turns out Charlie has had the same fears. Not only did I find that a pretty disappointing thing to learn they think about their friend, I thought it was a profound misunderstanding of who Larry is.
Larry is an oddball. He only eats white food, he recently sold his house because he wants to live with as few possessions as possible. He's often shy, especially around women. Not that this keeps him from starting a tentative relationship with hot!FBI woman Megan--one wonders what's wrong with turning into Larry given that info. But the main thing that confused me as that Larry seemed to be being seen as a Charlie who failed to thrive, which not only implies that Charlie and Larry start out as the same character (when they seem very different) but that Larry's is a personality one gets by accident. I mean, it seems to me that Larry is in fact a person who's put a lot of effort into who he is--not as a performance, but just by thinking a lot about the world and who he is in it. It's not that Larry is superior to everyone else by any means, but he's not inferior either. His issues aren't so much more problematic than other peoples just because he lives outside the box.
This seems to apply sometimes to single people in general. Now, it's true that a single person can sometimes naturally become more eccentric than someone with a family simply because you naturally mold your life around your own interests. You don't have to provide a stable routine for children, for instance, or compromise for other people in the family. But the show seemed to go a step further and make that common assumption that single=stunted and childless=childlike.
This is something that used to come up a lot in LOTR--I remember always getting really annoyed when anyone would suggest that Frodo was single due to the ring's influence which "kept him from growing." Obviously on one level this just annoyed me because I'm single too, but I think it was more than that. Throughout history there have always been many people who didn't get married and have children, who had to fashion their life around other things (particularly in times in history where there was a shortage of one of the sexes, like after a big war). Those people have always been an important part of any society, contributing along with everyone else, and I guess it surprises me when people casually reveal a kind of prejudice about it. As if the single people are failed marry people, the childless failed parents--certainly that the single people aren't the "grown-ups" of the society, which implies they're being taken care of by the parents, somehow.
Now, marriage and children are two things that seem attractive to me. I just pretty much accepted very early on that they obviously weren't so attractive to me that they'd ever be a priority. If they happened they happened, but I probably wasn't putting as much effort into making them happen as I did into making other things happen. But that never made me feel like I had a life that was any less of a life than anyone else. It’s a frightening thought how many people throughout history get written off through this idea, or put on some lower level of experience. You only get one life to live, isn’t it better than people can fashion many different shapes out of it?
That was the thing with Larry. He's an odd guy, but he's also a unique guy. His life might not be for everyone, but then it's not like he's proselytizing about it. Why not just accept that you have this one interesting friend who has this life? Part of what's so ironic about the whole thing, after all, is that Alan is the one worried his sons will be this guy, so who perhaps feels sorry for this guy....and yet where are any signs that Larry is so much less happy than widower Alan? Sure Alan has Don and Charlie--but so does Larry. Larry just has them as friends instead of grown sons, and has never expressed any desire to have them as sons. In fact Larry very often is the character excited over some new thing he's thought or discovered. Of the two Alan seems to spend far more time worrying over what he *should* want or what he *should* have. So what exactly is the fear Larry represents? It's just apples and oranges. Only I get the feeling the Orange is less bothered by the apples than the apples are by the orange. Really the exact same thing goes into "having a life" whether you have children and are married or not. It's the approach rather than the chosen activities.
I guess the reason it seemed to relate to fandom in a small way is that fandom draws people interested in ideas and imagination. There’s plenty of married people in it, and plenty of people with children, but it still often carries with it the same casual dismissal. Rather than celebrating the passion involved it’s associated with misusing passion that would be better applied to other things. Not that words like sad, pathetic, unhealthy and wanky can’t ever honestly apply to fandom/fandomers—it can. But I think it gets overused or is used carelessly, without anyone really wanting to think about why it’s being used—which is I think was going on with Larry on that particular ep of Numb3rs.
Needless to say, I am awaiting a new keyboard and hope this will stop.
I was having a thought about Numb3rs this week that sort of applies to fandom in general. This past week Alan, father of Charlie the Math Genius, is getting on his case about doing grown-up things like taking care of household repairs. This turns out to be a cover that he's worried Charlie isn't going to get married and have children and might instead turn out "like Larry," his weird physicist friend. Turns out Charlie has had the same fears. Not only did I find that a pretty disappointing thing to learn they think about their friend, I thought it was a profound misunderstanding of who Larry is.
Larry is an oddball. He only eats white food, he recently sold his house because he wants to live with as few possessions as possible. He's often shy, especially around women. Not that this keeps him from starting a tentative relationship with hot!FBI woman Megan--one wonders what's wrong with turning into Larry given that info. But the main thing that confused me as that Larry seemed to be being seen as a Charlie who failed to thrive, which not only implies that Charlie and Larry start out as the same character (when they seem very different) but that Larry's is a personality one gets by accident. I mean, it seems to me that Larry is in fact a person who's put a lot of effort into who he is--not as a performance, but just by thinking a lot about the world and who he is in it. It's not that Larry is superior to everyone else by any means, but he's not inferior either. His issues aren't so much more problematic than other peoples just because he lives outside the box.
This seems to apply sometimes to single people in general. Now, it's true that a single person can sometimes naturally become more eccentric than someone with a family simply because you naturally mold your life around your own interests. You don't have to provide a stable routine for children, for instance, or compromise for other people in the family. But the show seemed to go a step further and make that common assumption that single=stunted and childless=childlike.
This is something that used to come up a lot in LOTR--I remember always getting really annoyed when anyone would suggest that Frodo was single due to the ring's influence which "kept him from growing." Obviously on one level this just annoyed me because I'm single too, but I think it was more than that. Throughout history there have always been many people who didn't get married and have children, who had to fashion their life around other things (particularly in times in history where there was a shortage of one of the sexes, like after a big war). Those people have always been an important part of any society, contributing along with everyone else, and I guess it surprises me when people casually reveal a kind of prejudice about it. As if the single people are failed marry people, the childless failed parents--certainly that the single people aren't the "grown-ups" of the society, which implies they're being taken care of by the parents, somehow.
Now, marriage and children are two things that seem attractive to me. I just pretty much accepted very early on that they obviously weren't so attractive to me that they'd ever be a priority. If they happened they happened, but I probably wasn't putting as much effort into making them happen as I did into making other things happen. But that never made me feel like I had a life that was any less of a life than anyone else. It’s a frightening thought how many people throughout history get written off through this idea, or put on some lower level of experience. You only get one life to live, isn’t it better than people can fashion many different shapes out of it?
That was the thing with Larry. He's an odd guy, but he's also a unique guy. His life might not be for everyone, but then it's not like he's proselytizing about it. Why not just accept that you have this one interesting friend who has this life? Part of what's so ironic about the whole thing, after all, is that Alan is the one worried his sons will be this guy, so who perhaps feels sorry for this guy....and yet where are any signs that Larry is so much less happy than widower Alan? Sure Alan has Don and Charlie--but so does Larry. Larry just has them as friends instead of grown sons, and has never expressed any desire to have them as sons. In fact Larry very often is the character excited over some new thing he's thought or discovered. Of the two Alan seems to spend far more time worrying over what he *should* want or what he *should* have. So what exactly is the fear Larry represents? It's just apples and oranges. Only I get the feeling the Orange is less bothered by the apples than the apples are by the orange. Really the exact same thing goes into "having a life" whether you have children and are married or not. It's the approach rather than the chosen activities.
I guess the reason it seemed to relate to fandom in a small way is that fandom draws people interested in ideas and imagination. There’s plenty of married people in it, and plenty of people with children, but it still often carries with it the same casual dismissal. Rather than celebrating the passion involved it’s associated with misusing passion that would be better applied to other things. Not that words like sad, pathetic, unhealthy and wanky can’t ever honestly apply to fandom/fandomers—it can. But I think it gets overused or is used carelessly, without anyone really wanting to think about why it’s being used—which is I think was going on with Larry on that particular ep of Numb3rs.
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Writing this post I suddenly started thinking of Nanny 911, some episode that was probably on before this one, and some of those families really show that having kids doesn't necessarily mean growing up or being fulfilled. Half the time the reason people need the nanny is they seemed to think just having the kids would take care of everything else. They're a lot of work!
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I don't think they see Larry as failing to thrive, they see Larry as failing to balance work and home, a failing that both Charlie and Don share.
I think it would be an unfair comparison if Larry had never expressed interest in a wife and child (because not everyone wants those things) but since he has, I don't think the comparison is unfair.
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One of the ironic things, after all, is that nobody on the entire show is married--unless I'm forgetting someone. Larry's own lack of a family doesn't seem like the defining point in his life to me. I guess I felt like both Alan and Charlie seeing Larry as "what could happen" seemed strange to me. Family is something that any one of the people on the show (except Alan) could end up missing, and it would just be the way their lives worked out, one of probably a number of things that they might have wanted but didn't.
I guess the other thing that seemed more aggressive about it is--was Charlie worried about it? His dad was judging his life as well. Just as there's a difference if Larry had never expressed a desire for children at all, there's a difference for me with a Larry focusing on a family and failing or not. It seems like it's just something that didn't happen, and that's not something you can always do something about. For instance, if you know someone who says they always wanted to a published author and never did it. It's something they didn't get out of life. I would still think it would be odd to start riding another person about becoming a writer and saying, "I just don't want you to end up like Larry, the failed writer." It just still seems like defining their life by something that might have been nice, and might have been something they wanted but didn't get, but is still not who they are in the long run.
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Except that Larry does want them.
One of the ironic things, after all, is that nobody on the entire show is married--unless I'm forgetting someone.
Well, Alan's widowed.
Larry's own lack of a family doesn't seem like the defining point in his life to me.
I don't think it's "the" defining thing in his life, but I think it's "a" defining thing. And it's something Larry and Charlie have discussed as a problem with their kind of work ("Sacrifice")
Family is something that any one of the people on the show (except Alan) could end up missing, and it would just be the way their lives worked out, one of probably a number of things that they might have wanted but didn't.
I think it's more than that, though. I think Don in particular needs family to anchor him.
was Charlie worried about it?
Yes. See "Sacrifice." Or even the conversation with Don in "Spree" about Amita. But here I think "Sacrifice" is more apt. Charlie has expressed concern about the inability of major scientists to balance work and family more than once, but I do think "Sacrifice" is the best place to look for that.
I personally put family in a different catagory than a career or hobby. I think one of the things Alan is worried about is who will take care of his kids when he's gone. Who will they spend their lives with? Charlie and Don both need family as an anchor, Charlie to keep from getting lost in math and Don to keep perspective in his job. To some extent I think Larry gets that from the Eppes family.
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Sorry--that was a typo on my part. I meant that he had lived his life as if he didn't want them, meaning that it's not like he's been chasing down women all this time. Yet he does want them and so is disappointed they didn't happen.
I personally put family in a different catagory than a career or hobby. I think one of the things Alan is worried about is who will take care of his kids when he's gone. Who will they spend their lives with? Charlie and Don both need family as an anchor, Charlie to keep from getting lost in math and Don to keep perspective in his job. To some extent I think Larry gets that from the Eppes family.
Yes, I think that's what Alan is worried about too--which has really nothing to do with Larry's life or becoming Larry or not. It's also a widely accepted idea in the real world (so not referring specifically to these characters here, but just something that I went off on in thinking about it) that isn't really true, where people assume that family=being taken care of, or single=needing to be taken care of.
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This is a good point. Very little respect is given to the concept of family of choice in our society. Someone 'all alone in the world' can in reality live (and die) surrounded by loving friends, and someone with plenty of 'family' can be, for all intents and purposes, alone. How many people you can rely on in life is a result of how you live and the choices you make, and I think choosing to marry and reproduce is really a very minor one when all is said and done.
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I think it's more accurate to say he's been living his life as though it isn't a major priority. But I think that's starting to change as he gets older and realizes that he's running out of time.
where people assume that family=being taken care of, or single=needing to be taken care of.
There's something to be said for that. But there's also something to be said for not coming home to an empty house. I think Don would benefit from having someone to come home to. Even Don thinks he'd benefit from that.
And while it's true that being in a family doesn't mean you're taken care of, it's also true that human beings need other human contact. If he can get it from friends instead of family, great. But I also think family has more of an obligation to stand by you when things get bad and they're less likely to move away from you than a friend. Charlie may not have the family/duty connection down, but Don and Alan certainly do. I think Charlie could be fine single as long as he had someone who lived with him or at least visited frequently.
Larry seems slightly more capable of taking care of himself. (I say slightly because yeah, the homeless thing is eccentric but borders on being more than that. For one thing, I dont' think he gets that in choosing to be homeless he imposes on everyone else when he crashes on their couches, etc.)
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I want to go a level up on your meta here and say that I think that this season's turn toward comparing Charlie and Larry (with Larry placed in the "That could be you if you don't wise up" position) has a lot to do with TPTB's insecurity about setting up the protagonist as a professor of mathematics and, more than that, a genius.
There's a major suspicion of intellectuals in this country, and a valuing of people who declaim "down home, common sense, family values." Charlie, clearly, is a problem in terms of drawing a mass audience of those who may have problems with intellectualism while being drawn to and valuing the latter.
So having set up a geek as protagonist, TPTB are hard pressed to at once show him doing his math thing (part of the point of the show) while scrambling madly to make him seem more "normal" (and beyond normal, more cool). And, as we know that they are making it up as they go along, you can see canon as a series of moves they're making to balance earlier decisions.
Charlie's not getting it on with Amita for too long started to make him seem inept to the point that numerous fans have noted by now that, if they knew him in RL, they'd recommend against him to friends. "Sill living with Dad? Can't figure out if a girl likes him? Can't figure out what to do with a girl who likes him? Maybe he's gay. Certainly, he's self-involved. At any rate, he's not a good investment, cute as he might be." And what started out as a "family values" thing with his living at home, turns into a problem as he seems unable to leave the nest (and he can't for reasons of plotting and the need to keep him "open" as a romantic figure). So we get a retconned, British, older hottie girlfriend with whom he lived for awhile. Not so believable given everything else we knew, and a lot of us were going WTF? But suddenly, we see Charlie has had a successful het relationship with a cute chick. So he's alright. No worries. Except...
Second season, he also starts to wear cooler clothing, grow his hair out, show up with hollow cheeks, etc--all moves that make him more ordinary, less geeky. Fans complain that the math seems incidental, that there's too much Charlie/Amita and not enough family scenes, and yet Charlie's pretty hot.
So now we get him back at third season and Charlie's (DK's) put on weight, and still lives with Dad and still can't figure out Amita. (Over)compensation is required, so now the emphasis is on comparing him to Larry, who is by turns made both more geeky and odd (to the point where, again, the move out of the house may well prompt a WTF? Where did that come from?) as well as potentially more successful with women, in that Larry is both seeing Megan without incident and offering meta on Charlie's having "chased the girl until she caught" him.
I think part of the problem here is that lots of things don't make sense in a coherent, characterological way because all the other characters (Larry, Amita, etc.) exist and are made to do and say things to define Charlie--a character who's an oddity on TV and who has to be normalized even as they retain some sense of his specialness.
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::breathes sigh of relief:: I kept thinking about this tonight away from the computer and I realized I think this is why it bothers me at all, that the more I thought about it the more it seemed like the whole math geek vs. romance thing was beginning to seem far more of an obsession with the show than it had to be. Sometimes I feel like they figure it's a good way to warm the audience up to the genius idea--it's a Faustian bargain. You get all these brains, but, are always in danger of being a sort of Frankenstein's monster.
And in a way, the situation just makes it worse. Like I said above, I always think it's just funny when Alan complains about Charlie living like a kid when he lives with him, thus keeping him in exactly the same living situation he had as a kid. Charlie is often treated as a child--and I don't know...maybe that's the way they feel they can blunt the intellectual stuff? So he's forever the special child?
That's another reason it always seems so odd to compare him to Larry as if he could turn into him--they just seem like such fundamentally different people with different backgrounds and attitudes about the work and the world.
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Absolutely, and I have a whole rant about this up somewhere *g*. But y'know, I've run into soooo many people who absolutely cannot see those differences.
A lot of what slashers often find most appealing in slash is "difference" between the men (so you end up with shorter/taller, blond/brunet, scientist/flyboy, etc.), and they just don't see that with L/C. A geek is a geek is a geek. They're both mathematicians, right? And both short. Gah. Anyway, all many fans see is the age difference and the fact that Charlie, being younger, is de facto better, sexier, smarter (and he must be that, if he's helping Larry with the math, and yes I've got a rant on that as well *g*).
Even those times when Larry and Charlie have argued, people don't seem to get why they're arguing (in terms of different ways of thinking, intellectual strengths, philosophical positions).
As for that bargain, they set Charlie up in the house to make it easier to give him a family life, and they set him up with Amita as a "will they/won't they" in order to say, "He's heterosexual." But they have to string us along with Amita because consummation would take Charlie away from female fans as a love interest/fantasy figure. It's a real mess is what it is.
Even that whole scene with Charlie and Larry at the funeral, with the whole "too many of us die alone" thing? It's just not true. Feynmann married three times. Einstein was married and had a lover. Reimann was married with a kid. Poincare was married with four kids.
I mean, it's not that there weren't any who remained single, but the idea that great geeks in history had women trouble is... unsupported as a generalization, as Larry might say.
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Yes, to this whole post, and especially this. It's just a very odd theme to keep getting hit on in a story that's about math saving lives, being closely tied to the world of people. Is that stereotype just appealing? Because I don't know a lot about the lives of all brilliant scientists but it seems to me that the ones that "die alone" do so not because of their job but because of the exact same factors that make so many non-brilliant people die alone. Is the show just drawn to that conflict, whether or not they're aware it's not realistic? Especially ironic since Charlie and Larry both seem to be recognized as attractive to female viewers.
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That's an interesting idea, though I have to admit I don't agree. My interpretation leans more toward Charlie simply fumbling through adulthood--not out of any intelligence-related incompetence, but because the world is more open for him now that it was before. Working with Don and his team has both brought Charlie closer to Don (which fosters a more detailed, if not necessarily better understanding of Don) and also brought Charlie into contact with non-academicians. That's a completely different culture than Charlie's own and I think some of the fumbling has been Charlie's attempt to understand and perhaps integrate the two.
Ah, the beauty of personal interpretation. :)
To get back to the original post, I did a bit of Larry meta after the episode. Here's the salient bit on collectivistic ideas of responsibility.
Second is Larry's (and Charlie's, by extension) responsibility: if you are that talented, don't you have a responsibility to use that talent to its fullest potential, no matter the sacrifices you may need to make? There is such a small number of people in the world who can do what Larry or Charlie can do that they have a unique responsibility to do it. Anyone can have a family, but not anyone can find what truly makes up the fabric of our universe and not anyone can explain what consciousness is and how it's formed. And if you can do that, then you are held to a different set of standards. Often family gets neglected, but for Einstein's sacrifices we have relativity. It's a hell of a trade to have to make, but can anyone really argue that it wasn't worth it?
Of course, that's a more collectivistic view of responsibility, sacrificing yourself for the many. It's the culture I grew up in, but it may not have been a culture Alan grew up in. And it must be difficult for him to see that his boys (Don as well, though to a lesser degree) to have, essentially, outsourced their caring and caretaking.
And a final idea is that of Charlie as Larry's surrogate child. I'm always fuzzy on canon, but it seems as though Larry's been Charlie's mentor for some time, and since Charlie was relatively young. In a way, he's been Charlie's intellectual father just as much as Alan's been his familial father.
Interesting thoughts, all the way around. Thanks for broaching the subject. :)
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Also as I said below, it seems taken for granted that the human impulse to have a family is automatically considered more important than the impulse to make some sort of mark another way. So if Larry has had a brilliant career but didn't have the children he wanted, that's sad. If the boys' mother raised a family but gave up the music she wanted to compose, that's not sad, that's just the kind of choices we make in life.
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Yes, that is definitely more accurate. But then, he's starting a relationship on the show. There's really nothing about these two men that doom them them to not finding a mate. Like, I remember being confused by Charlie's line about Einstein, which I think was supposed to be an example about how people in his field don't do well with this sort of thing: He left his wife and married his cousin. I don't get how Einstein is any majorly bad example. He got married young (like Alan) and got divorced, then later married again and I think she died a while later. I don't that's very different from plenty of city planners.
And while it's true that being in a family doesn't mean you're taken care of, it's also true that human beings need other human contact. If he can get it from friends instead of family, great. But I also think family has more of an obligation to stand by you when things get bad and they're less likely to move away from you than a friend.
That's a commonly held belief but it's not always true by any means. That is, many people have the opposite experience--unsupportive family vs. supportive group of lifelong friends. (I'd guess the gay community is especially strong that way.) In fact, I always remember reading an interesting thing about nursing homes that said that the more unhappy patients were often ones with families because they depended on their visits. Single people were more used to creating a social life by themselves. Obviously that's not true for everyone, but it is true in some cases. So while having a family is a rewarding experience, it's not always the key to not being lonely in old age.
Charlie may not have the family/duty connection down, but Don and Alan certainly do. I think Charlie could be fine single as long as he had someone who lived with him or at least visited frequently.
It always seems kind of funny to me because watching it always seems like the way to get Charlie to learn the stuff is to just make him live by himself. You learn about that kind of stuff by living by yourself.
For one thing, I don't think he gets that in choosing to be homeless he imposes on everyone else when he crashes on their couches, etc.)
I do wonder about that. I mean, he can support himself monetarily and this does seem to be a conscious choice he's making so he may be very aware of the inconvenience and not stay with people for a long time and offer things in return. It seems like that's the kind of lifestyle he's going for--but then, I don't know for sure!
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The remaining 10%, hopefully somewhat more coherent:
I've only watched the first season, so maybe he comes across as odder in later eps, but from what I've seen, Larry seems more together and much happier being who he is than either Don or Charlie.
What I like so much about about Larry is that he is odd, but not because he doesn't *get* what's normal. He just doesn't seem to worry too much about what doesn't suit him. It's a sort of subtle but nice change from the math/science geek who is unable to discern or follow social norms & niceties. Larry's very aware, both of himself and other people, which in the show's structure makes him an interesting counterpoint to both Don (who seems not at all self-aware) and Charlie (who is not yet comfortable in his own skin/with his own uniqueness).
It's also fun to watch him in counterpoint to my other favorite brilliant physicist, SG:A's Rodney McKay. In Rodney, intelligence and inscecurity combine to create arrogance and rudeness; in Larry, curiosity combined with awareness means that kind of rudeness would just never be possible.
In conclusion: LARRY!
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My hope is that this is the beginning of an arc that leads Charlie to the conclusion that being "like Larry" isn't such a bad thing, and also that he and Larry aren't the same person just because they're both incredibly smart. Because you're quite right about Charlie and Larry being really different. Larry doesn't seem to have Charlie's insecurities and general prickliness about his situation in life, for one thing.
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Sometimes I think these characters' thoughtfulness gets used against them in an odd way. Larry, for instance, lives a very examined life. He knows himself well. If there's something he regrets he's aware of it and can say it. Most people just aren't so aware, can't respond to someone's questions with "Oh yes, I've thought about that..." And because of that it's as if they're so much more lacking in things than other people, when that's just not really true. So it's like you're allowed to just accept the idea that the people doing brilliant work regret not having the life of other people, but the people living normal life can't be said to regret not having their lives. Yet both things are common desires for people to have.
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Thanks for starting the community!