Space: The Final Frontier

When I was in college the student activity committee used to organize all night movie marathons. If you stayed for the whole thing you got a t-shirt. Do you remember this Katy? The Harrison Ford movie marathon happened before I came, but I did go to the Disney one. I learned a couple of things from this experience. The first was that I really don't like to stay up all night and will fall asleep during the screening of "The Sword in the Stone" even though I kinda like that movie. The second is that you can convince me to do a lot of stuff for a free shirt.

This past weekend, I had a similar experience. Charles and I totally geeked out and watched three Star Trek movies in one day. Don't judge. It rained all weekend. Fortunately, this particular movie marathon was mostly during the afternoon/evening, so I wasn't forced to choose between Star Trek and sleep.

Anyway, Star Trek movies are always sort of disconcerting for me. I love The Next Generation TV show for the same reasons many people think it's boring. People are reasonable. They're thoughtful, and they get out of tricky situations by modifying the deflector dish to change the internal phase of the ambient resonance waves rather than blasting through with the phasers. When I was 14 I really, really wanted to live on the Enterprise. So far, that hasn't happened, but I still have a special place in my heart for Jean Luc.

The movies, however, involve a lot of phaser fire. And photon torpedoes. And, I think, something called a quantum torpedo, but since those don't exist in the TV show I wasn't sure what they were. The Enterprise in the movies is way to violent for me to live there. Which, honestly, is for the best - since I've seen no evidence that an anomoly in the spacetime continuum will allow me to relocate to the 24th century.

That said, I still had a lot of fun on Sunday. The only thing that could have made it better was a free t-shirt.

And then, on Monday, Charles got a package. Apparently the t-shirt he ordered had some sort of subtle mistake and he got a free replacement t-shirt. And since he didn't need two nearly identical shirts, I got one. Awesome! It's way better than the shirt I got for the Disney marathon.