Slippery slope

I built my first computer today. Pretty much successfully, too. I.e. it starts up fine now, though there's still a lot of fiddling with it to be done. Technically, it's not 'my' computer, as I built it for a friend from parts cannibalised from her old computer and mine; but it's certainly the first I built on my own. (With a little help from a very patient friend on the phone. *g*)

Really, I always thought we were supposed to become *less* geeky as we grow up... but with me, that's definitely not the case:

- Discovered fantasy and sf at 16
- Discovered fandom at 21
- Got a computer and internet access at 22
- Went to my first con at 23
- Joined a fan campaign at 25
- Fell for comics, hard, at 26
- Started roleplaying at 27
- Built a computer at 29

What's next - LARP?

Chernobyl

(expanding on a comment I posted in seti_drd's lj)

I was nine, going on ten. I don't remember what I did the exact day. I remember the oppressive fear of the following weeks and months - watching the progress of the fallout on the news; wondering if the air I was breathing or the rain that was falling would make me sick or kill me; using powdered milk and avoiding nuts, mushrooms, grapes. I was a little too young to really understand what radioactivity meant, which made it all the more eerie - a fairy-tale fear, a subtle thread of nightmare lending a sinister side to the most innocuous everyday activities - perhaps the single most potent source of my more general, and lasting, feeling that the world can't be trusted, or taken for granted.

These things come to mind in particular:

1.) A sleepover with friends: listening to them breathing, wondering if the air they were exhaling were poisonous, and if any of us would die of it before we were old.

2.) A class trip to a museum or something, and getting caught in the rain: a feeling of being helplessly exposed to something both entirely impersonal and utterly malignant.

3.) Desperately wanting to believe my father as he explained that, really, the danger to us wasn't all *that* great. (He was right, of course, and wrong at the same time, because the thing I had realised didn't have much to do with Chernobyl itself, but rather with the general unreliability of the world.)

4.) Lying awake for countless nights for years after, waiting for the sirens. (Anyone remember those? The ABC siren drills we used to have every now and again, back in the Cold War? Those sirens always sounded like the end of the world to me, even before Chernobyl.) I had heard of Biblis, heard that it wasn't the safest nuclear power plant around, and that, for all intents and purposes, it was just around the corner from where we lived. I waited for Biblis to blow up througout my childhood; part of me is still waiting for it.

Have some Real-Life-flavoured meta:

Chernobyl was the first event to teach me the unreliability of life/the world, or rather, the fragility of our conceptions about life/the world, but it wasn't the only. A couple of years later my parents tried, unsuccessfully (and even now I am unable to say if that was a good or a bad thing), to get divorced, and lived separated for a year. I can't say that I remember it as a hugely traumatic event like I remember Chernobyl, but it must have left *some* trace. (Does my inability to commit come from that? Perhaps. Some of it.) It certainly showed me that family was not to be relied on as something absolute and eternal.

Another year or so later I experienced a perplexingly sudden gut-deep realisation of Mortality, without any kind of recognisable stimulus; this went hand in hand with the loss of my faith, which itself had been acquired only a couple of years earlier, and rather by accident. Realising that death was real, was something that concerned me just as much as any other living being, and was very probably an event of true finality, i.e. the absolute end of my existence, filled me with a kind of impotent outrage at the universe. (I was, in those years, the most important being in the universe, of course.)

Around the same time as most of these events (except for Chernobyl), I also became the target of mobbing/bullying at school for a few years, which, looking back at it now after nineteen or eighteen years, sometimes seems dramatic, and sometimes seems fairly mild. Memory is unreliable, so I don't know which of those two it really was; either way, I know it taught me things about not belonging that have shaped me and continue to shape me up to this day. I had never really thought of myself as standing apart from the rest of the world before, never seen myself as dramatically different from anyone else. Since then, I haven't been able to stop seeing myself that way, though I have managed, as time went by, to turn it into a source of pride (or at least: positive identity) instead of shame.

So those are the four times I've fallen from grace: loss of trust in the world, loss of trust in family, realisation of the transitoriness of, well, everything, and realisation of my own 'otherness'.

I am not alone in knowing the feeling of being cast out, of course: it's one of the most central experiences of human existence. Any normal human being is driven from paradises of a variety of descriptions many times in a single lifetime. Growing up, disenchantments and disillusionments, rejections, falling out of love - they all contain that same emotional core.

But somehow, I got hung up on that. It is the basis for nearly all my fannish obsessions. Nearly all the characters I'm particularly obsessed with are explicitly driven from/torn out of a state of relative (mental and/or physical) peace/contentment/security, and thrown into a sometimes much more hostile, but at the very least much more unsafe and unknowable kind of world. Frodo, and the other hobbits from Lord of the Rings? Check. John Crichton from Farscape? Check. John Constantine from Hellblazer? Check. (Newcastle!) Sirius Black from Harry Potter? Check. (Azkaban, of course.) Walky, Sal and Joyce from It's Walky!? Check. Kenji and co. from 20th Century Boys? Check. The heroes of Zebra Girl? Check. The Ninth Doctor from, obviously, Doctor Who? Check. Sam Tyler from Life on Mars? Check. And I could continue.

Then, of course, there's also another kind of character I get obsessed with; they're characters who have already mentally made their home 'on the outside' of whatever they've been driven from. Methos (Highlander) is the prime example for that: he is, perhaps, so far 'outside' that he's sort of 'inside' something much larger - the world, life itself, the universe? Jaeger Ayers from Finder would also, arguably, belong in that category; so would most of the Borribles (The Borribles Trilogy), I think. The Doctor (again, Doctor Who), too, in most of his incarnations.

I've sensed this theme that united most of my fannish interests before, and connected it to the experience of growing up. Now, I'm not so sure it's all about growing up, although the experience is at the core of growing up just as it is at the core of many other things.

[Edited twice to add a couple of sentences and change the title.]
[Edited again to add clearer attributions since this is so *very* multi-fandom.]