Monday, November 11, 2019

How to Be a Fan in 23 Easy Steps


 1. Be a teenager.

2. Become aware of the Giant Pop-Culture Book Series and Literature Event for Children (GPCBS&LEFC) as the first few books are published.

3. Read the first two books. Feel slightly smug when you, a high schooler, do not get caught up in the same whirlwind of readership that your younger sister, a middle schooler, enjoys when the third book is released. Ignore the subsequent books as being "for children."

4. See the first two movie adaptations in theatres. Be vomitously hungover for both. Leave the theatre during the giant-spider scene. Use that opportunity to sweat in the bathroom, away from your parents.

5. Let sixteen years pass. Get dumped a few times. Have a kid. Get evicted. Have people you love get sick. Be in your 30s.

6. A friend—a good friend, a friend whose opinions you trust—reads the GPCBS&LEFC. She reads the whole series in a summer: on the beach, during work breaks. She like them.

7. Look at your life's to-do list and realize that you've written "read an epic book series" on it. Ask your friend if she would recommend the books. She does!

8. Get the books out from the library. Realize that the hold system for these books—that they are still on hold 20 years after their initial publication—means that you can't just read them straight through. There will be lag times. There will be binges. Read in floods and droughts.

9. Read 300 pages of the fifth book of the GPCBS&LEFC in one night. Feel that there is something happening inside yourself. Do not say anything out loud.

10. Take an online quiz about which characters you are most like in the GPCBS&LEFC. 

11. Finish reading the books. Watch the movies. Realize the movies are utter garbage compared to the texts, which are themselves a C+ literary experience, but absolute BANGERS when it comes to plot, world-building, and general immersive fun.

12. Unrelated to this reading project, ask for podcast recommendations. A friend will recommend a queer-inflected, feminist, very funny podcast that does a critical reading of the GPCBS&LEFC. Download every episode of the Feminist Podcast. Listen to every episode while knitting.

13. Start giving TED Talks in the shower about how toxic masculinity presents throughout the GPCBS&LEFC. Give other TED Talks on family-building, and on PTSD, and on depictions of queerness. Credit the Feminist Podcast with giving the texts enough life to do these kinds of deep dives. Wonder briefly if you can go to graduate school for GPCBS&LEFC Studies, and if so, where.

14. Discover by accident that the city you literally just moved away from has a store devoted to the world of GPCBS&LEFC. Go to the store. Feel sort of ashamed as you poke around the merch, because the merch for the GPCBS&LEFC properties is often sort of...dumb. Or, at least, it feels a bit like getting a teeshirt on your high school trip to Italy that just says ITALY in big letters, and doesn't capture how it felt to stand under the Sistine Chapel and quietly know that this is a Big Moment in your life, maybe a touchstone, maybe you'll major in Art History and come back in seven years during graduate school knowing so much more about Michelango and Italianate art in the High Renaissance, and that the ITALY teeshirt sort of represents all of that, but also does any of it zero justice.

15. Buy a GPCBS&LEFC patch and sew it onto a knitting bag. Understand that you are deeply, deeply nerdy.

16. Listen to the GPCBS&LEFC audiobooks as you walk your child to preschool three times a week. Listen to them when you knit. Listen to them in the tub. Try your best to forget the film depictions, and instead imagine each chapter in your own head. Be careful that you don't accidentally adopt a British accent.

17. Finish the sixth audiobook and realize that you're not ready to start the seventh book because you're not ready to be done. Feel sort of silly. Honour that feeling.

18. Google "GPCBS&LEFC podcasts." Find a new one, a chapter-by-chapter reading done through a queer lens. Listen to four episodes. It's just the hosts braying "That's fucked up" at each other for 40 minutes. Unsubscribe quickly.

19. Google "GPCBS&LEFC podcasts." Find a new one, a chapter-by-chapter reading done by divinity school graduates. Listen to 27 episodes. Find their focus on gratitude, blessings and connection to be surprisingly healing. Remember that one of your life's unmet needs this decade is to find a spiritual community that doesn't have "believe that Christ is a god" as one of its entrance exam questions. Remember that you don't want to be spiritual alone in a field somewhere; you want other people, in conversation. Realize that living a life of gratitude, blessings, and connection is choosing a life full of those things. Realize also that choosing those things doesn't protect you from getting dumped, evictions, sickness, loss, or grief. Continue listening to the podcast. Feel a lot of feelings.

20. Buy GPCBS&LEFC fan art, including pins that you are too shy to put on your actual clothing, so you put them on your bedside table and look at them fondly and often. 

21. Go to the GPCBS&LEFC-themed bar in the city you moved away from. Watch as the bartender lights every third drink on fire. Talk loudly to your tolerant husband about the books. Delightedly receive a GPCBS&LEFC-themed gift from your tolerant husband.

22. Continue giving TED Talks in the shower. Continue listening to podcasts. Continue thinking deep thoughts about healing, compassion, forgiveness, grief. Start PTSD counseling. Google "churches without Christ" + location. Hold off on starting the seventh audiobook. Listen to podcasts. Feel a lot of feeling.

23. Feel a lot of feelings.