Catching Up

It's been a couple of days, and what a couple of days! On Friday, I attended the Intermountain Graduate Conference here at Utah State. Because I didn't cancel my classes, it was very hectic going from teaching to registering to teaching again to presenting my paper to sitting in on part of a session to running to a poetry panel discussion. Wow, it makes me almost tired just writing about it! The paper I presented was a short story that I wrote around an issue of modern life, technology and the soul, the influence technology has on the sense of self and on culture, all those topics that deeply fascinate me. I worked with the idea that the story would be told just where technology comes into play, hence the story jumps between three scenes, and leaves out much of what happened.

On Saturday, I had a couple of friends over, and we watched an episode of the TV show Firefly followed by the movie Serenity. Ah, why do they cancel such good shows, when something like Friends runs forever? The Sci Fi channel should really have bought it. Then again, thinking of shows that really do run too long, maybe it's better to die before you're huge than to die long after you're interesting.

I value the TV shows that mean something. A good TV show, like a good book, should say something about how to live. That's why I much prefer a show like Firefly, with its messages of family, honesty, and courage, and even shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender, to something more mainstream (and much less meaningful) like any number of cop dramas I could mention. A good TV show should show something about what makes a hero, and whoever doesn't aspire to being a hero seems like a waste of space to me.