Quilt No More

[lydamorehouse]

 The dino quilt is in pieces now and the fabric has been set aside for some other day. I looked at for a long time and just decided that, even if I liked it (and the majority of people who commented on it had positive things to say), I was now going to associate it with a very dumb internet fight that made me feel bad. That's enough to kill the thing. So I did. It may seem petty, but it's actually self-care. 

A weird thing about me: I remember the shows, the conversations, the songs I listened to when I look at a quilt I've made. I can pick up a piece I worked on for months and get a full wave of sensory memories about the things that happened while I was making it. One of the baby quilts I sent to the UK? My strongest memory is working the actual quilt hook (for the first time, I think?) while listening to the podcast Wolf 359 with Mason.

So, I was never going to love that quilt the same way, even if I had been happier with it when I started it.

Alas.

Today is supposed to be "What Did You Read Wednesday" and I have a big pile of TBR manga in the other room (which I need to renew!) I could talk about one of them, which was Cat + Gamer, which was quite cute, but instead I want to talk about my newest evening routine. I've been picking one old Star Trek episode and rewatching it. Last night I watched "Mirror, Mirror," a classic. The night before was "The Turnabout Intruder." 

It's been interesting to watch these again. For me, it's the first time I've seen them in color. The TV I grew up with was black & white, which, no, I did not grow up in the 1950s. My parents were just very late adopters when it came to color television. If I remember correctly, they didn't get a color TV until I had moved out to go to college, so that's after 1985. 

Star Trek is pretty startling in color, I have to say. The colors are so vibrant that a lot of the special effects actually feel like they stand the test of time. I mean, some don't, of course, but a shocking number actually look very good. Like, almost believable. Which, feels counterintuitive? My brain apparently only remembers the very obviously Styrofoam rocks or whatever. But, the transporter looks fine. The planets, at least when the Enterprise first goes into orbit, look good, honestly.

Things I had forgotten include things like, how much time is spent discussing mutiny in "The Turnabout Intruder." I remember it for all the reasons I'm sure most of you do, which is how grossly anti-trans it is, how sexist it is, and how badly Shatner hams up being inhabited by a woman (see point number one). 

In "Mirror, Mirror," I had forgotten how sleezy a captain Kirk is once he returns to our dimension, In the final scenes (actually as the credits start rolling), he OVERTLY hits on an ensign who has been transferred who happens to be the counterpart (at least visually) to the woman who was "the Captain's woman" in the Mirror, Mirror 'verse. Bleh. The episode was decently good up to that point, for all its cheese. 

Tonight I am considering either "Who Mourns for Adonis?" or "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky." I am taking recommendations. Do you have a favorite that I should rewatch?

Comments

[pameladean]

I'm sorry about the quilt, or rather about the occasion of its dismemberment. But I'm sure it was the right decision. I sometimes, going over one or another of my books for some reason, experience a vivid recollection of sitting curled in a corner handwriting the first draft, or impatiently shutting down a YouTube ad, depending on when the book was written. So I do see your point.

Some years ago, David gave me a cleaned-up boxed set of all the original Star Trek episodes. I keep meaning to watch them in order, which even the thought of calls back the family room in the house we lived in when the series premiered: the asphalt tiles spattered with gray and black spots over a concrete subfloor (heated in the winter!), the sliding glass door that always admitted the afternoon sun at the time Star Trek first aired, my youngest brother rampaging around with his stuffed animals.

Anyway, I too picked out episodes to watch rather than doing anything organized. The first one I watched was "The Trouble with Tribbles" because David was watching with me, and the second was "The City on the Edge of Forever." I'm also fond of "The Devil in the Dark" (the Horta episode) and "Balance of Terror," which is the Romulan first-contact episode. It's really a repurposed submarine thriller, and I'd been reading a bunch of books of that sort at the time the episode first aired.

For pure hurt/comfort extremely gratuitous very idtastic stuff (for the show; any fanfic can surpass it), "The Empath" is interesting.

"Turnabout Intruder" enrages me, but the actor playing the ambitious Starfleet member was really good when enacting Kirk trapped in HER body. She was a lot subtler than Shatner.

P.

[lcohen]

i remember where i was the first time i read "tam lin" whenever i re-read it, possibly because i was somewhere unusual--these days i read most books while lying in my bed in my current bedroom which tends to fade to much of a muchness.

[pameladean]

Yes, I now do most of my reading on the couch, usually peering over a cat, and most of my writing at my desk in my office. Sometimes it's on Eric's couch, so those bits would stand out on a rereading, I expect.

I wrote one chapter of Tam Lin sitting on the bank of Waldon Pond, but I would have to reread it to remember which chapter.

P.