end of the year post, two: it was fine

This is the essay edition.  Doing lists is sort of cheating.  It's easier than actually composing something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  Something with an arc.  I am not sure whether 2013 as a year had an arc for me.  It was just one of those years that just happened, played itself out without much fanfare.  The biggest thing personally was that Chi Young went to study in Ireland, and I went along for three weeks.  It was somewhat nerve-wracking trying to find an apartment within the short time before his semester started, but we did eventually find a place within ten minutes walk from campus.  My mother is having somewhat of a health scare (I spent seven hours in the ER with her last weekend).  It turned out to be less dire than the ER docs made it seem.  We are doing more tests now and are hoping she won't need surgery.  My own health has improved; the abdominal pain I complained much of last year about has gone away, on its own.  I had an unpaid vacation, during which I got a letter from IRS saying I owe the government money, but fortunately it turned out that I only needed to supply some documentation to IRS to support something I claimed in my prior year return.  So maybe that is the arc:  things happen, and you worry, and you do stuff, and then things turn out fine.

Well not everything turned out completely fine.  There were a few things that I wish had turned out differently.  For example, I wish Before Midnight was different.  I waited nine years for the sequel to probably my most beloved movie of all time, Before Sunset.  And it just didn't, or couldn't, live up to my expectations.  I wish:  1) Celine and Jesse didn't have those blonde twins (I am not a fan of blonde twins - it's like a sitcom convention to me, a la Full House or The Suite Life of Zack and Cody); 2) that whole meal scene with all those other people didn't exist (it felt as if I were stuck in the middle of a most pretentious conversation with a bunch of pretentious, well-to-do white people); 3) Jesse didn't turn out to be so obsessed with sex (he played like a dirty, middle-aged man); and 4) I didn't see Celine's boobs, for an uncomfortably looong time (I don't know why, but it just felt wrong to me).  Don't get me wrong - I still find Celine to be the most interesting, complex, and lovably neurotic female film character that ever was.  But whereas Before Sunset and Before Sunrise felt ethereal, Before Midnight felt heavy.  I know Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke wanted to take Celine and Jesse to darker places and explore what relationships feel like after the initial magic has worn off and familiarity took its toll, but I am not sure that's what I want to see between Celine and Jesse.  I want to believe that magic exists, whether it's nine or eighteens years later.  It can be in a different form - I am alright with that.  But I don't want them to suck the magic out completely.  That scene where Celine is watching the sunset and commentating, "Still there, still there, still there, gone..." - well, I don't like the "gone" part.

But gone is how things go sometimes.  And fate is twisty and sick.  How else to explain what happened to Asiana Flight 214 and that teenage girl who had actually survived the crash only to be killed by being run over on the tarmac by an emergency response vehicle?  If you think about it, with every tragedy like this, it takes an entire series of events to put a person at the wrong place at the wrong time.  Call it coincidence and randomness, or call it fate and destiny.  Regardless, there she was.  And there those Boston marathoners were when the bombs exploded at the finish line.  One minute faster or slower, you wouldn't be there.  If only we can travel back and forth through time and space like the Doctor.

Oh the Doctor!  I would say if there were anything that satisfied me completely this year, it is catching up on all seven series of Doctor Who.  I have become a complete fanboy.  I even bought a license plate frame that says "My Other Ride Is A Tardis."  Blink with the weeping angels, the episode with Vincent Van Gogh, Vastra with Jenny and Strax, the second half of series 3, and the Christmas specials were all highlights.  But more than anything, I was charmed by Matt Smith's Doctor Who - his ability to be a young child and an old man at the same time, his fish-out-of-water mannerisms (his awkward air kisses kill me everytime).  I cannot express how sad I am that he is leaving the show.  Tonight is his last episode as the 11th Doctor.  Matt Smith will regenerate into Peter Capaldi, by all acounts a great actor.  Whovians are actually quite happy with this choice.  So maybe things will turn out fine.  That's the great thing about Doctor Who and time traveling and regeneration - you almost always have a chance to make things okay.  Whereas in the Before Sunrise series, time is actually the greatest foe against Celine and Jesse's romance (in the first two, too little time; in the third, too much time), in Doctor Who time is the Doctor's greatest friend.

So back here on earth, where time is linear and marches on without regard, the older I get, the more I appreciate things being just fine.  It used to be that I crave for things to happen, to put a jolt in my life.  I wanted grand gestures.  I wanted to be swept off my feet by the giant waves of life.  I thought of how every year that something doesn't happen, then nothing happens.  But lately, I am grateful of any year that I make it out to the clearing with barely a scratch.  I am too aware that if things didn't go fine, I cannot actually fix it.  I haven't been able to fix anything from my past that went wrong.  My other ride is not a Tardis. Fortunately, this year 2013 was fine, just fine.  No time travel required.  I am happy to leave things alone.