Star Trek

Life 101: Is yours what you really want it to be?

Posted on by Kat

I’m down for the count with a minor illness, which always makes me more contemplative than usual.

I quit my soul-sucking, bleeding-the-life-out-of-me job nearly two years ago to try to live a better life. People have asked me how I did that and/or why. The job, which I had loved for quite a few years, just became something I didn’t.

Less than two years before that, my younger brother (whom I adopted as my own, and he me, when we were in our teens) and my mother died, both of them unexpectedly, just nine weeks apart. Couple that with the death of two beloved German shepherds, one three months before my brother died and another just eight days after my mother died. That six-month period – which included getting two new dogs after the one died and finding out one of them was terminally ill just weeks after I got them – shook me to my very core.

After I wandered around in a fog of grief and pain for several months, my mind started asking questions, just a few of which I will mention here because they are important.

Why did all of my beloved family members die well before their time should’ve been up? They had hopes and dreams and things they were living for and boom, it was over, and all of those hopes and dreams were gone and wasted.

That led to: What do I still want to do with my life? What things do I really want to experience before I die? What places do I really want to go? Who are the people I really want to meet? Are there any things that I really want to purchase? And are there changes I want or need to make to make my life the best it can be before I die?

Answers came quickly. What to do about each of them took longer.

The first thing that came to my mind was Star Trek. Really. I remembered watching “The Original Series” when I was a child, when it was on in syndication. I loved it so much. That got me thinking about what I truly loved that I needed more of in my life and what I didn’t that needed to go out of my life.

Before Star Trek, when I was younger, I saw the animated “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer” for the first time. I realized immediately that I was a misfit toy and that there were other misfit toys out there for me to be with who would accept me and love me for me. I just had to find them.

Spock made me feel the same way, but on a deeper level. He helped me know that I would find my place in the world, even though I was different from others, and I would find people who would not only accept me but even adore and care about me just the way I am. That was profound and it echoed throughout my life, as it continues to do to this day.

Well, there it was, the answer to question one: Star Trek. I had watched “The Next Generation” when it was on television, but since I had given up TV for other pursuits, I hadn’t seen any of the other series. My first goal was to watch them all.

That first revelation happened to come to me in December, just in time for a new year. I only make one resolution every year. (You can read more here about that.) I decided to watch everything Star Trek I could get my hands on, starting with all the series, every episode, and then move on to the movies and then any documentary I could find. I started Jan. 3 and I finished Dec. 27. I watched at least one Star Trek episode every single day. I had daylong and even weekendlong marathons. It was glorious.

In February, I starting thinking about those conventions they used to have. Surely they didn’t still happen, did they? A little Internet research showed they did and that the longest (in terms of days), biggest one (in terms of number of celebrity guests) was in Las Vegas. A few more clicks and a not-so-small amount of money purchased me a Gold ticket for that very year, at the end of July/beginning of August.

That trip changed my life. I had found my Island of Misfit Toys, my tribe, my new family. I was home. (You can read more here about that.) I now go every year and it restores my mind, body and soul.

Next, I started focusing on my health. I had been in a car accident less than a year before my family losses. I still wasn’t 100 percent recovered, and all the grief had halted my healing in its tracks. I started working on getting better and losing weight. That has been a long journey in its own right, but I still work on it every day. (That’s another post for another day.)

Next, I quit that job and moved across the country to live near my father and spend time with him while he still has time left on the planet. There have been ups and downs in this new life, and some hard times, but I’m now in a much better place than ever.

I’m now a freelance writer who writes what I want for whom I want when I want. I’m not making a lot of money, not like when I was managing four newspapers for a multimillion-dollar corporation, but I am making enough. And for the first time in my life, enough is good enough for me.

I have time to spend with my dad, to play with my German shepherd, to work on my beloved Camaro, to figure out who I really want to be, to make those changes that I want and need to make to get there, to make a new life and more good friends, and to spend time each year with my new family. Life is good.

Are you right where you want to be now? Are you living the life you want to every day? I’m happy every day. Maybe not all day every day, but every single day of my life is happy and good.

Every journey starts with a decision, one that you have to make with your heart and your head (I’ll write more about that later, because they are two very different things). And then you have to make a real commitment and take small steps toward your goal. That’s it. It really can be that simple. If you let it be; if you make it be.

Now, what is it you want for your life that you don’t yet have? Think about it. This isn’t a dress rehearsal and there are no do-overs. Get out there and be the real you. And be happy.

If this post speaks to you, I hope you will share it with others.

Happy birthday, Star Trek – here’s what you mean to this Trekkie

Posted on by Kat

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People often ask me about my love of Star Trek, and on this day, the 50th anniversary of its going on air, I thought I might try to explain to nonTrekkies what it means to some of us Trekkies.

I was always a black sheep, a misfit toy, the odd girl out, even when I was a child. I knew as far back as I can remember that I was different.

For starters, I had an immense compassion for animals (to the point of capturing bugs in the house and taking them outside, which I still do); bad things that happened to people wounded me deeply, to the point of not only tears, but complete exhaustion (think May Boatwright in “The Secret Life of Bees”); and I was a girly girl who also liked things that girls weren’t supposed to like (jumping ramps on my bike, climbing trees, playing Army with my friends, who were all boys).

I didn’t really fit in anywhere, with anyone. And that was OK with me, because I’ve always enjoyed my own company, and I always knew deep down that being different didn’t mean being wrong, because as I thankfully learned in Sunday school, God doesn’t make mistakes.

But children can be hard on each other, and seeing original “Star Trek” reruns on the screen when I was little helped ease my discomfort, my loneliness, my pain. In this bold new universe, I saw and related to people with too much emotion, people with too little emotion, people who had pointed ears, people who were different colors, people who had different talents, people who were happy, people who were sad, people of all races and colors and creeds, all living together in harmony and peace.

Heck, there were even girls who did “boy things,” like Lt. Uhura on the bridge of the mighty and glorious Enterprise. I longed to live on that ship, where everyone cared about everyone and no one was bullied or ostracized, where everyone was not only tolerated but accepted and celebrated no matter who or what they were.

And before you knew it, there came the movies, and then “The Next Generation,” and all the series and movies in between and after those. I wonder, when Gene Roddenberry was creating that first show, if he knew that he was creating a place where us misfits could fit in, could feel approved and valued, could feel we belonged, could even be the cool kids. If he didn’t then, I hope he knew before he died.

He created an alternate place for many of us to reside – in secret or in the open – to become a family, to be good to one another, to be loved. I so thank him for that, especially today, on Star Trek’s 50th anniversary/birthday.

And I thank all of my Trek friends, my own band of cool kids, who have made me feel less lonely in a world gone quite mad with power and hatred and ridiculousness.

And to all of you, Trekkies and nonTrekkies, I wish for you to Live Long And Prosper.

It’s all true: I go to Star Trek conventions and I love them

Posted on by Kat

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“Oh, you’re one of those people,” a woman said to me when I told her I was heading to the annual Star Trek convention in Las Vegas for my vacation earlier this month.

What does “those people” even mean? Before I could even open my mouth to reply, she asked, “You dress up in weird costumes and stuff?”

I didn’t even stop to think about whether I cared what she thought and answered.

“Well, I do have a lovely pair of Vulcan ears,” I replied. “And then I have different T-shirts and jewelry for every day.”

I thought she was going to faint. But I doubt if she even knew what I was talking about when I mentioned those ears.

Confession time: I’ve been going to this multiday convention for several years and I love it. And I’ve been to many others. And I absolutely love Star Trek. I love every series, every movie (yes, even that one you think sucks), every character (well, maybe not Kai Winn, who was so evil) and every costume and alien race. OK, not every race. Some of those in Voyager and Deep Space 9 were scary as hell. (Hirogen or Vidiians anyone?)

The funny thing is this. People dress up and go to all kinds of things – football games, auto races, costume parties, charity functions – but I bet no one ever says to any of them, “Oh, you’re one of those people.”

Why is it that people can spend money on costumes and clothing and memorabilia for sports teams and they’re perfectly normal, but when we Star Trek fans do it we’re weirdos?

The first time I went to the Las Vegas convention, I went by myself. My friends couldn’t believe I was doing that.

“But you won’t know anyone there,” they told me again and again.

They couldn’t have been more wrong.

See, that first year, I met a ton of people and I made friends that I kept in touch with all year. Being outgoing doesn’t hurt. But even if I hadn’t been, I bet I still would’ve made friends. And in each year since, I’ve made even more friends.

I truly love my Star Trek friends. They are a wonderful, sometimes wild and sometimes wacky bunch. But they’re also well-read, well-educated and know more about having a good life than many other people I have met in my years on the planet.

I’ve met many celebrities and some of them have become friends as well. I know, hard to believe, huh? In what other fandom does that happen?

True Star Trek fans care about the same things I do – science fiction, the environment, love, kindness, respect, diversity, exploration, inquisitiveness, education, and not only tolerance but acceptance and even celebration of the things that make us all different.

In the years I’ve been going to the convention, I’ve met more people like myself than anywhere else on the planet. These people are my tribe and I don’t care what anyone thinks about “those people.”

We take funny photos, we dance, we laugh, we have a few cocktails (OK, maybe some people have more than a few), we reminisce, we dress up, we hug (there’s a lot of hugging), we have intense discussions and we support each other’s love for the vision of a better world – one without hate or greed (not to be confused with acquisition) or hunger or caring about a person’s race or gender. We respect each other’s opinions and beliefs. We agree to disagree and we go on caring about one another.

If that makes us weirdos, so be it. I’m all in. And I already bought my ticket for next year. To my Trek friends, I can hardly wait to see you again. To the rest of you, I encourage you to go out and find your tribe, whoever “those people” are.

Do you have a favorite Star Trek or convention memory? Share it with me. And if something in this post speaks to you, please share it with others.

Please stay inside your car when it’s running

Posted on by Kat

anton yelchin

Like other Star Trek fans, I have been deeply saddened by the death of Anton Yelchin, who played the young Chekov in the rebooted movies.

Yelchin, who was only 27, was killed by his own car when it rolled down the hill of his home and crushed him against a brick mailbox pillar and a wrought iron gate.

I’ve read many stories since his death. There are the issues with recalls of the type of car he owned. Some people are even talking about his death being mysterious and saying that maybe someone was behind it, because otherwise how could he end up like that.

Let me tell you one way something like that can happen. I love my car, and I have always treated my cars like people. Maybe it’s just in my nature, but I tend to anthropomorphize things. (That means I give inanimate objects human characteristics.) I’ve done that since I was a little girl. I truly do think that many things have feelings.

I had a Chevrolet Monte Carlo CL many years ago. At that time, it was the nicest car I had owned. It was a beautiful silver-gray with a landau top. I called her Monte and I babied that car and cared for it like you would a beloved pet.

One day, I drove to a friend’s house. We were in a hurry to see each other, in a hurry to go somewhere. I parked Monte in the driveway, and leapt out in a hurry when I saw my friend on the porch waving to me. I was so excited to see her! She was supposed to be ready to go, so I didn’t shut off the car before I hopped out to run to greet her.

Most of what happened next plays in slow motion in my mind all these years later. I knew that car was in park. I double checked. But to my astonishment, as I headed toward my friend, she yelled and pointed to my beloved car, which was now rolling down the driveway and off to the side where there was a grassy hill. I shrieked and ran for Monte. My safety was not even in my head at that moment. I couldn’t let anything happen to her!

As ran as fast as I could, and bolted down the hill where my car was then rolling. The rest is a bit of a blur, but I ended up between the driver’s side door of my car and a large tree, which crunched into my door and my back. I still have the scar to prove it.

I was wedged there only momentarily before she rolled a little bit farther and I was able to get unstuck, open the door and put her in park. But that could have gone so much worse. Thankfully, I wasn’t killed. However, I did learn a valuable lesson.

Automobiles, although they can be dependable in the mechanical sense, and they can take us to freedom and away from bad things and people, they are also machines and they can malfunction. We humans do, too.

Never, ever get out of a car that is running. Please turn it off every time you have to exit. It doesn’t matter if you just have to close the garage door, you forgot to turn off the light inside the garage, you need to move that shopping cart to pull into that space or you just want to grab the mail. Don’t run into a gas station or a store or back into the house for something you forgot with your vehicle running.

If you have get out of the car, for any reason at all, turn it off. You can restart it in seconds and doing so won’t harm anything. It might even save your life.

 

You aren’t what you eat; you’re what you do

Posted on by Kat

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I recommend changing careers if you wake up one day and realize that the thing that has always made you happy is making you deeply unhappy.

Oh, it isn’t like it happened to me overnight. It was more of a wearing-down-over-time kind of thing. First, an unkind boss and then the company becomes less than caring paired with long hours and low pay and there I was wondering, “What am I doing here?”

So now I’m on one of the biggest adventures of my life. I made the best plan I could, fashioned a type of parachute moneywise and jumped out of the corporate plane for freedom. And I’m not looking back.

I decided that rather than write and edit for someone else to make them money, I would write and edit for myself to make me money. It’s exciting and fun and scary as hell.

They say you never know what you’re made of until you risk it all and find out. Well, I’m finding out, day by day. It’s been nearly five months since I left my job of 10 1/2 years. It was a job I loved, until it wasn’t.

The pay was never great; the hours were terrible. Sure, I could take a long lunch often when I wanted to, go to the office later in the day if I needed to and make up hours sometimes when I wanted to. Sometimes, I was even allowed to work from home.

But there were times when I called in sick and I would get asked, “Are you sure you can’t make it in anyway? What’s wrong with you? We need you here.” I once worked a 15-hour day, and workdays that lasted 10 hours or more were not the exception, but rather the rule. Some weeks, my dog walker saw my dog more than I did.

For years, I wasn’t allowed to take vacation when I wanted to, and sometimes not at all. There were years when I was told, “You can take one of these weeks here, or don’t go.” Honestly. I have the emails to prove it.

I missed events I had bought tickets to, family events, things I wanted to do with friends and even funerals of family members. I missed too many holidays to count because I HAD to be at the office.

More than one man broke up with me because I always had to put my job first. I never met a relationship that stood up to that test, at least not for very long.

But that is all behind me now and I’m working for myself. I can spend the day in my pajamas if I want to, watching episode after episode of “Star Trek” (The Original Series) and I have. I can also write all day, but do it in my pajamas if I want to, like I did today. I can play hooky when I want to, and I am spending a lot of time with my dad, my last family member. See, two years ago, I lost other family members, unexpectedly, in the space of a few months. That can really change how you think about your life and what it means to really live it.

After I grieved until I could grieve no more (although that never really ends), I took a look around and thought about the time I have left in life. After all, maybe I won’t live to be as old as I want to be. My mom didn’t. She had dreams and goals and things she was going to do. And then she was no more, and the dreams and goals and things were gone. Because of that, I thought about what I really want, and want I really don’t want. Lo and behold, that job was the first thing that I no longer wanted.

I’m freelancing now, and working on a few books. I spend time with my German shepherd and we go for a lot of walks. She loves chasing her tennis ball in a field near where we live in the little town into which I have disappeared. She’s snoring away at my feet as I write this. But it has been hard to find a groove, to set and/or stick to any kind of schedule, to get things figured out.

Turns out that when all you are is what you do, you don’t quite know who you are when you don’t do that anymore. That’s OK. I’m happy now. And that’s what really matters.

If there is something in this post that speaks to you, please share it with family and friends.

You can mourn someone you’ve never met

Posted on by Kat

graveyard-celebrity deathsIn the past couple of years, I have mourned the loss of several people who I had never met.

Leonard Nimoy (yes, who was Spock of Star Trek but also had success in movies, television shows, in the recording studio and in the art world) died Feb. 27, 2015.

The mercurial, but nonetheless talented singer/songwriter Scott Weiland died Dec. 3, 2015. And even though his death was predicted and “expected” for years, that didn’t make it any less shocking, any less painful for me when it came. I loved Stone Temple Pilots, and I also loved all of Weiland’s side projects. I met him once and made him laugh, and I will carry that image of him forever – his head thrown back in true laughter at something I did that he called “delightful.”

The great David Bowie passed away Jan. 10. Just four days later, actor Alan Rickman died. Both men had cancer, and both were 69 when they died. In this day and age, that isn’t old. And both were vibrant and still performing amazingly well in their chosen careers.

I still recall like it was yesterday sobbing and dropping to my knees when I learned that John Lennon had been murdered on Dec. 8, 1980. I remember right where I was, who I was with, what I was wearing, how I heard the news. I felt like I had been punched in the stomach. I loved him and his music so much. My teen brain couldn’t make sense of the fact that he was a peace activist and he was murdered. I still want someone to explain that one to me. And there’s the snuffing out of all of the wonderful music he was making and would have made…

When Johnny Cash died, I felt like I had lost a family member. I wept bitterly the day I found out he was gone. My dad played his records when I was a child, and I followed Cash’s music career as I grew up and moved from place to place. Never saw him in concert, never met him, but I truly loved him. Maybe this won’t make sense to some people, but he was like a father figure to me.

Why do celebrity deaths affect us so much? I think there are many reasons. But, mostly, I think it’s that these people gave us themselves and their time, and therefore we spent time “with” them. I knew everything about Lennon, and as a teenage girl I had spent hours and hours talking with friends about him and listening to his music.

Bowie made me feel like being an outsider, a misfit, wasn’t so bad. It was fine to not be like everyone else. In fact, it was cool to be whoever I was, whoever I wanted to be, and I could change and change again and still be cool. I could just be me. And that was all right.

Cash spoke out for the downtrodden, the broken, the wayward people. I felt his music deeply, and felt like he was talking to me in some of the things he said.

As Spock, Nimoy taught me many lessons when I was a child and as I grew up. I also loved his music. And later his art. He seemed a noble person to me.

Rickman made me laugh, and cry. His quality roles are too numerous to list here, and I may have loved him for the ones that were not as famous as others. I wonder if he would find it funny that the first thing I thought when I learned he was dead, while I hadn’t even wrapped my head around Bowie’s death, was, “By Grabthar’s Hammer…” And then I laughed. I think he might have approved.

The bottom line is this: Let people criticize us “commoners” when we mourn the passings of the famous. Love is love, no matter where it is found. Go ahead and love, and mourn, however deeply you need to.

If something in this post speaks to you, please share it with your friends or on social media.

Resolutions are for quitters

Posted on by Kat

I’m just going to go ahead and say it: New Year’s resolutions are for quitters.

Think about it. How many resolutions have you made only to find two months later that you don’t know what they were or when you stopped caring about them? Or worse, you get down on yourself for not keeping them.

Depending on what study you read, between 55 percent and 95 percent of people don’t keep the resolutions they set.

I can’t count the times I made resolutions (to lose weight, stop swearing, change jobs, spend less, save more, spend more time with family, go on a vacation, etc.) that I never kept. Sure, I would start with the best intentions, only to fail days, weeks or months later.

A few years ago, I decided to stop this cycle that only made me unhappy. I no longer remember the funny comment someone made to me about my love of cheese just weeks before the end of a year. But I clearly remember thinking, “That’s it! I’ll make one resolution for the coming year. I will eat more cheese.”

After laughing like crazy with my friends about the idea, I decided maybe it wasn’t so crazy. It was something I wanted to do and it involved something I loved. The resolution revolution was on. Over the next 12 (Yes, all 12!) months, I researched cheeses, read books and articles about cheese, visited places where cheese was made and even attended a cheese festival. And I bought some new type of cheese every week when I shopped for groceries.

I told friends about my “resolution” and I can’t tell you how many times people would ask me throughout the year, “When was the last time you had some cheese?” or “Have you tried any new cheeses lately?” People even bought me cheeses to help me keep my resolution. Maybe it was the novelty that excited them. Or maybe it was that I was actually succeeding long after the idea came about.

I didn’t gain weight that year, if you’re wondering. What I did gain was a better understanding of how I follow through (or not) on various goals I set for myself. I also gained a feeling of great satisfaction when I realized in mid-December that I was still eating more cheese than I had the year before. And I learned that I liked blue cheese, something I had always thought I hated.

Each year since, I have made one “resolution” per year. The year after cheese, it was to go to more movies. The following year, go to more concerts. The year after that, spoil myself. Surprisingly, I kept those all year as well. I also did the year before last, when I vowed to watch every Star Trek series and movie, in chronological order. I started Jan. 2 and finished Dec. 27. That led to me attending my first Star Trek convention and a new bunch of friends, but that’s a story for another day.

I do set goals all through the year and keep them. You likely do as well. But why set unrealistic goals, call them resolutions, and then set yourself up for failure and disappointment at the beginning of every year, just because everyone else does? Find something you love and go for it, no matter what time of year it is.

I tend to be more reflective this time of year, and I certainly think about my life and where I am in it. Am I doing something I love? Am I balanced? Am I happy? What do I really want for the coming year? I think those are the questions you should be asking yourselves instead of making empty promises you may not keep.

Happy New Year.