sistermagpie (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sistermagpie) wrote2006-10-09 06:17 pm
sistermagpie) wrote2006-10-09 06:17 pm
Becoming Larry
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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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!