In search of a home.

Spoilers for Season Four of Battlestar Galactica through “Islanded in a Stream of Stars” included below. Be warned.

Going home was a pretty defined concept for the first seventeen years of my life. After I left for college, however, things got a bit more…mutable. Home became—depending on when and where I was, and who I was talking to—anything from a small, shared dorm room with a bunk bed and two desks, to a series of three- and four- bedroom apartments in various states of disrepair in upstate New York and New York City, to a house in suburban New Jersey, to my first “very own place” in Cleveland, to a new bedroom with its own balcony in the house that my parents built. After my senior year, in college, though, home could never again be the blue bedroom in the front corner of the house in Michigan that I grew up in, because my parents moved. Which is fine; I love the sprawling, open house my parents built on 20 acres of semi-rural land, right in the curve of the woods, with the neon green of the spring buds filling the windows of the house with the proof of spring, and herds of twenty deer making a daily dinnertime grazing trek across the open spread of the meadow.

It’s been a relatively peripatetic life since college, with a number of years in NYC and New Jersey, some time outside of Philadelphia, a couple of years back in Ann Arbor, and a sojourn to Cleveland for grad school, before returning to New York City. For the past ten years or so, home has generally been the place where I wasn’t: Michigan when I was talking to friends in New York or at school, the city when I was visiting my parents, and anywhere else when I was living in Ohio. Although I referred to these places as “home,” I was mostly using the word as shorthand for “the place in which I store most of my stuff.” For about ten years, the places I have used the word home for have been, of necessity, impermanent, and “home” has weakened, becoming diluted with generic use.

I moved to New York City, both times, because I am an actress. It’s not just what I do—in fact, most of the time it’s not even what I do; that honor is given over to temping, or more recently, helping to operate a theater—but who I am. It’s how I identify myself to the people I meet, and it’s also how I see myself when I look in the mirror; it’s how I define myself to myself. And right now, New York is the center of the theatrical world. It is a remarkable city in which to live, and there are things about living here which I love: the May morning air on a run around the reservoir, playing hide and seek with the sunset while walking down an avenue on my way home from work, buying fresh flowers on any corner, any time of year. But I have never loved living here and I have always known that home would end up being somewhere else. I was excited to move back here after finishing grad school, and also utterly unsurprised, less than a year later, to realize that instead of living here, I feel more like I am simply trying to keep myself busy until my life can begin. And so I have begun to think about the possibility of leaving.

My family are all back in Michigan, and we’ve always been incredibly close. I’m getting to a time in my life where struggling out here by myself is not balanced by my quality of life. But, while Michigan has a number of wonderful professional theaters, the amount of work there is several orders of magnitude smaller than in New York City, and even in years where the local economy is not falling apart, is insufficient for me to support acting as a career. So what do I do? Is it worth it to me to change the way I see myself, to find another vision of who I am, if it means I’m happier in the small ways on a day-to-day basis? If I can paint the walls in a place that I own? Watch tulips that I planted come up in the spring? Call up my sister because I had a bad day and then meet her for a glass of wine after work? A place where I could send my children out to play in the afternoon and be thrilled at their stories of adventure and imagination when they came back to the house, dirty and smiling, several hours later? I wrote a piece several years ago for popgurls in which I talk about home as a process—is part of that process finding a way to re-imagine the thing about myself that I’ve always taken as a given?

You know, sometimes I wonder what home is. Is it an actual place, or is it some kind of longing for something, some kind of connection? – President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) to Admiral William Adama (Edward James Olmos) in “Islanded in a Stream of Stars”

In a serendipitous bit of timing, I am not alone in wrestling with these questions. Battlestar Galactica is hurtling toward a series finale after four brilliant seasons. In a universe very like our own but just a little bit somewhere, or somewhen else, the 39,651 remaining survivors of a catastrophic war finally found their touchstone—the mythic Earth, their one remaining idea of home—only to discover a decimated planet utterly incapable of supporting life. What do you do when the dream that sustains and motivates you cracks into an infinite number of pieces and blows away before your eyes? Who do you become when the ship that defines your job—which also defines your life—is disintegrating around you? Who can you possibly be, when you’ve touched the charred remains of your own dead body, and yet can feel your feet against the ground, blood pulsing in your ears, rush of adrenaline all the way into your fingertips? These are the questions the show poses. With the adjustment of a few life-threatening (although no less life-changing) givens, they’re the same questions I ask myself crawling out of bed early in the morning to go to another open call. And they’re the same questions we’re all asking ourselves in front of the news at night, watching the sparkling, brightly-colored vision of the American consumer culture bleed out into a pale, tattered fretwork of failed aspirations. Battlestar Galactica has three more weeks to answer. I have a couple of months. And we all have…as long as it takes.

This is not a trick.

There are two people for whom—no matter what public (or my own) opinion might say to the contrary—I will turn on the television and watch every single episode of every show they ever create: Aaron Sorkin and Joss Whedon. And between the two of them, they pretty much cover the range of what I find interesting in scripted television: all the way from ensemble-driven shows about small groups of multi-faceted characters and their internal dynamics, with smart, funny writing and a flair for metaphor, to ensemble-driven shows about small groups of multi-faceted characters and their internal dynamics, with smart, funny writing, and a flair for allegory…which also incorporate some element of the fantastical.

See, among other things, I read a lot of fantasy novels, and as much as I’m a fan of realism, there’s something about setting a story in a world that is different from our own—where the impossible can, and does, happen—that makes a story lighter for me. I don’t mean “lighter” in terms of the ideas the novels address, or what they hope to accomplish. I don’t mean that these books are necessarily lighter in tone or in impact. Instead, I think that by stepping outside of our own day-to-day lives, these books ask us to shed the assumptions that we have about the way that society, culture, class, gender, race, etc. work in this world. (Or, the well-written, well-thought ones do, anyway.) By separating us from our preconceptions, these stories force us to rely only on the internal information provided. We become completely dependent on the author to introduce us to the rule and governing institutions, norms and unusual behaviors, even the color of the sky of the world we are entering. Cutting us off from our usual frame of reference, fantasy novels give us the freedom to get completely lost in a story.

Or maybe I just like magic.

I know that no one is going to believe any of this. That’s okay. If I thought you would, then I couldn’t’ tell you. Promise me that you won’t believe a word. That’s what Zofia used to say to me when she told me stories. - “The Faery Handbag”

Stranger Things Happen is the name of Kelly Link’s first short story collection, but it is also an apt description of her second, Magic for Beginners (which, with the title spelled out in huge type across the front, I will admit I found mildly embarrassing to read on the subway). The stories in Magic for Beginners are brilliant little slices of a life running right alongside of, but never quite touching, our own. They’re like fairy tales for grown-ups; just similar enough that I could see myself in the main character’s place, just off enough that I wasn’t sure I wanted to. They’re unsettling, and in places laugh out loud funny, and they lingered in my mind long after I put the book down. The best thing about them, though, is the way they twisted my perspective so far around as to illuminate an everyday aspect of life in a completely unexpected way.

There was something about clowns that was worse than zombies. (Or maybe something that was the same. When you see a zombie, you want to laugh at first. When you see a clown, most people get a little nervous. There’s the pallor and the cakey mortician-style makeup, the shuffling and the untidy hair. But clowns were probably malicious, and they moved fast on those little bicycles and in those little, crammed cars. Zombies weren’t much of anything. They didn’t carry musical instruments and they didn’t care whether or not you laughed at them. You always knew what zombies wanted.) Given a choice, Soap would take zombies over clowns any day. - “Some Zombie Contingency Plans”

I was, for many years, pretty active in one of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer online communities. “The Library,” the longest story in Link’s collection, sent me right back to the feeling of those Tuesday nights in the late 90s and early 00s: of anticipation and hope and excitement and the unspoken fear that maybe this one wouldn’t be able to keep all those balls—of comedy, and the horror of both high school and living on a hellmouth, and action, and romance—suspended up in the air. “The Library” encapsulates the feeling of being utterly caught up in a television show, while going the extra step further that is every fan’s secret dream, of being actually caught up in a television show.

The syllable by syllable analysis of dialogue, the cataloguing of details of costume and location and props, the hopeful identification of signs and portents; Link has perfectly nailed the joys and whimsies of fandom with a story of boy and his group of friends, and the television show that they have coalesced around. And then she steps over the edge of the expected, and brings the show to life around him, while also establishing the entire story itself as simply one more episode of the magical show. In conception, it’s a neat—and potentially confusing, or precious—series of nesting boxes. In practice, it reads as the beautiful, elegant dream that every fangirl hides away in her heart, so deeply buried that even she doesn’t know it’s there until the words begin to unspool on the page before her. With Magic for Beginners, Link has shaped stories which unfold with wonder and concise wit, that while constantly surprising me, also felt familiar, as if she had seen into my dreams, and translated them onto paper, making them funnier, more precisely angled, and more interesting in the process.

She has also crafted perhaps the best three sentences about the potential evil of couches ever written. Well, okay. Maybe the only.

In the eye of the beholder.

I grew up with ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Ok, yes, for several years at the very beginning of my life there was another well-known anchorman, of which all I really remember is the day in kindergarten when a teacher asked us for whom our parents were going to be voting, to which I (confusing the two most commonly heard “c” names on the television, evenings in my house) responded with supreme confidence, “Walter Cronkite.” But after 1983, when he became sole anchor and I started to actually pay attention to the background noise that was the constant undercurrent of our family dinners, it was Peter Jennings. He was charming, handsome, and witty, as well as being incredibly intelligent, and persistent with—and unafraid to ask—the hard questions. He was the news, for me—and I took it for granted that he would always be there, keeping me company through dinner, wherever I went, for the rest of my life. With several moves across the country, Peter Jennings was a constant, a familiar face to rely on, so it was heartbreaking during early 2005 to watch his decline from lung cancer.

As a presence at our dinner table every night growing up, he seemed almost to become part of our family in a way that wasn’t really clear to me until the day we broke a long-standing family tradition. On our annual family vacation in Maine, one of the first things we do upon arrival at the cottage that my parents have rented every year of my life except one, is hide the single, small, rabbit-eared television, so that for two weeks, aside from the radio in the morning (and in more recent years, the internet via laptops and a USB-cell connection, which we tell ourselves is something entirely different), we are on not just a family, but a media, vacation. This persisted, even through years with summer Olympics, until 2005. On the evening of August 8th, one day after his death, ABC broadcast an hour-long tribute to Peter Jennings, for which we broke out the television, and my parents and I watched, and wept.

ABC went through several permutations of hosts after Jennings died, including the short-lived shared anchorship of Bob Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas, which ended with Woodruff hospitalized for serious injuries suffered when his convoy in Iraq was hit by an IED, and Vargas stepping down to spend more time with her family. Eventually, Charles Gibson took over, and has been hosting since May 2006. Gibson is good: friendly and reassuring and authoritative, but somehow lacking the panache of Peter Jennings, the implicit confidence and utter imperturbability that comes from years spent reporting from the frontlines of the civil rights movements in the US and South Africa, from the killing fields of Vietnam and Cambodia, and from the all-too-frequent chaos of the Middle East.

I have seen Peter Jennings, and you, Charlie Gibson—while pleasant—are no Peter Jennings. But although I still miss him every evening at 6:30 when I turn on my TV, for the most part, I have come to terms with reality.

For the last several nights, however, ABC World News Tonight has had a new anchor: Diane Sawyer. (And on a side note, it used to be that when someone different was sitting in the usual seat, there would be an explanation like, “so-and-so filling in while Peter Jennings is on vacation,” or “reporting live from Jerusalem.” It was around the time that Jennings started getting sick that I noticed these explanations had disappeared. Probably, it was a policy change by the network. But now, every time a new host sits in, I get a sinking feeling. I hope you’re ok, Mr. Gibson.) (And on a side, side note, for those of you playing along at home, tonight the chair was filled by George Stephanopoulos.)

Oh, Diane Sawyer. You have been in the news world for 42 years. You co-host Good Morning America (admittedly, not necessarily the most bulldog of news organizations, but still reputable) and Primetime Live. You’ve done numerous remarkable interviews with incredible newsmakers. You are 63 years old.

You are entitled to a few wrinkles.

Instead, we are treated to soft-focus shots of Sawyer. She is a beautiful woman who—it’s plain to see even through the Vaseline-slicked lens they’re using to shoot her—looks remarkably young for her age. Is she really that concerned about well-earned crow’s feet and laugh lines that she cannot bear the thought of exposing them to a viewing audience? It can’t be a Network Policy about Women of a Certain Age, because immediately following Sawyer’s glowing, radiant visage, we were treated to harshly-lit, remarkably unflattering shots of Hilary Clinton with what appeared to be vast canyons carved into her cheeks and black abysses under her eyes, being interviewed by Martha Raddatz. Neither of them were smoothed into agelessness, and instead of being lit by, in Sawyer’s case, glowing candles, were exposed to the indignities of interrogation-intensity, down-lit fluorescents. I realize that youth and beauty are not necessarily seen as being incompatible with intelligence in the world of television journalism—just look at Maria Bartiromo, Lara Logan and Anne Curry—and I am thankful for that. But are they, instead, considered prerequisites? Youth and beauty, for women, have traditionally been equated in the world of entertainment, with power (or at least increased viewership) whereas signs of age, such as wrinkles and grey hair, have equated with authority for men. As anchorwoman of an evening news show, does Sawyer believe that showing her age would reduce her gravitas? Does she think that the viewers at home will associate a few lines not with hard-won experience, but with weakness or senility? Is she right?

Or is she just that vain?

With a thick moustache...

I've never had HBO, mostly because my cable bill is already outrageously high enough that I just can't bring myself to pay for the extra channels, as well. So, while I had heard any number of good things about Deadwood, I'd never actually seen an episode until a friend dumped the DVD set of season one in my lap last spring. I went home and dropped the first disc into my player.

After finishing that first episode, the only reason I didn't sit in front of the TV for the next twelve hours straight was that, knowing the show had been cancelled, I wanted to stretch out my viewing experience as long as I possibly could bear it. Deadwood changed my life--and I don't just mean that in a hyperbolic, gushy sort of way. I mean that, thanks to this show, I actually look at the world in different way. What do you mean, you might very well ask? And my answer is simple:

Facial Hair.

You see, I have sensitive skin. I have come home with a rash after particularly, er, fruitful dates, and this began to color my perception of men's facial hair, i.e. I came down pretty much on the side of Against. And I noticed it creeping into my perspective on language, as well. If a friend referred to a man as "ruggedly handsome," I started hearing "doesn't shave well," and I tended to shudder inwardly.

And then I started watching Deadwood, and I'm not sure if it was just repeated exposure, or some alchemical reaction at work, but I realized I was looking at men differently. Goatees? Great. Sideburns? Bring it on. Good lord, I was even finding moustaches sexy. ("Oh my god. Did you see the handlebar on that guy? Is it hot in here or is it just me?") My last relationship was with a guy who, for the vast portion of the time we were dating, had a beard AND a moustache--and I liked it. I've just started watching season three of the show, and of late my daydreams have been filled with mustachioed men in vests and long coats sweeping me off a dusty thoroughfare and into a dimly-lit bedroom in the nearest broth--

Okay, so maybe the show is having a greater effect on me than even I realized. But, hey. I'm also living proof that television can bring about tangible change in the lives of its viewers.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a date with Al Swearengen.