:: a toe in the water... ::

:: Monday, December 30, 2002 ::

F minus 10

A blessing and a curse, that waiting for a tv show to start should have me so nervous. Could be that for the first time, I actually get to see an episode of Farscape right as it airs. No waiting for tapes, no queuing for (ahem) alternate methods. Damn, but I wish we could all talk together at 7.30.

The machine is set, the tea is steeping...go ahead, DK. Do your worst, which is always the best. The UK awaits.

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:: fialka 6:44 PM [+] ::

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For your reading (ahem) pleasure:

Rain (NC-17, so it won't be posted here.)

PS -- if you have written me feedback, I'm on the road again (yeah *again*, sigh) so please forgive me for late responses. It is, however, read, printed, happy-danced, rubbed on cheeks for luck and otherwise deeply appreciated as the best chocolate in my UTiverse.

See you Monday.

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:: fialka 10:25 PM [+] ::

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Am I there yet?

Piles of letters, inbox full, suitcase stuffed with dirty clothes, bit of post-trip depression...yup, I must finally be home.

Doing the blog rounds I find there's not much to add to the con reports. I was not expecting the glory of last year, which I've heard so much about, and which made me buy a ticket way back in July. I knew ahead of time who would and would not be there. I'd had time to get over my disappointment. But the welter of conflicting emotion during that weekend is something I've yet to sort out. It was not the wake I feared, but as Deneba says, it's a lot like being Aeryn right now -- losing your one great love, needing to mourn yet clinging to hope, because it's not been truly lost. *Not yet.*

But I went to America to see friends, old and new, and in that I was not disappointed. For the rest, there were moments that made me deeply sorry I'd come, and moments that made me glad to be there.

Wayne's cancellation story made me sad, made me leave my gold ticket seat by the crazy chick (the one person I would have begged not to have to sit next to) to find someone I knew. Found the entire sf.com team sitting in the back row and collapsed gratefully beside them, never to return to the land of gold. A con is no fun without your friends to share it with, certainly not a Creation con which seems to be mainly about keeping the 'talent' from spending any quality time with the fans. And bless their cotton socks, for the brief time they were around, it seemed the actors just wanted to do what we wanted to do -- hang out, meet some good people, have a laugh. For their sake I wish they'd been able to do that. I think they needed the contact, the validation, even more than we did.

Anth and Wayne's band, Number 96, turned out to be your basic down-home rock'n'roll and never was that more needed than Friday night. It started with a high-kick chorus to the side, ended with the Women in Black boogie-ing like crazed teenagers at the front of the stage. Beowulf's Save Farscape video came on silently behind the band, and the lines blurred. Ben on the screen shouting 'humans are superior' at last year's con. Lani and Gigi dancing out into the middle of the audience, Anth jumping off the stage and into the crowd to join them. No longer actors and fans, we became just a bunch of people who *love* something so very much, making a joyful noise together.

Celebration at last. How I wish we all could have been there.

Went to bed too late, again. Again, got up *way* too early. Being on LA time all these months didn't help allay the jet lag one little bit.

We weren't going to work the whole weekend. We weren't. The best laid plans, etc etc etc... I vaguely remember sitting in the bar on Saturday night with Cofax, Feldman, Shrift and the fabulous Froons. I wanted to talk writing, but talking campaign non-stop for two days left nothing in my brain, no room for anything else. I went back to the "cocktail party", a misnamed affair if there ever was one, and almost immediately got commandeered for 'work' again.

The rest is kind of a blur, staffing the table sandwiched between trying to catch some of the events I came to see. Anth is a total nutter, and totally adorable, with enough energy to power all of Sydney should the lights go out. Claudia is the diagonal opposite of Aeryn, all radiant smiles and glorious laughs, talking non-stop, in perpetual motion. Ricky was as hysterical as the actors and made me deeply regret the lack of a writer's panel, and though I missed most of Lani's set he and Ricky do a fine commentary together. Sadly, I was also working through Kent, but I did get to see Raelee, who's wonderfully charming and articulate, and Gigi who's just as adorable as I expected, though her story about 'how I lost Farscape' made me want to cry. And then she pulled DK onto the stage, and the crowd went wild and -- I admit it -- I did burst into tears. No, DK is not God, but it meant the world to me that he showed up and thanked us all for fighting so hard, because I knew some of the reasons why he didn't want to be there.

And again, I wished that everyone could be there, because that was something the whole campaign deserved to share.

Which leads, laterally, back to validation -- who, what, how. Everyone has a need to be seen, to have their efforts acknowledged. Sometimes the attempt to do that backfires, is misinterpreted as something else. Politics rear up, an innocent mistake gets blown out of proportion and again I ask myself, why am I here?

What it is for me, is validation of a different sort. An exchange with the cast and crew that says, 'There may not be many of us, but we saw what you did. We loved this show, fiercely and with an inexplicable passion that's equal to the passion of the people who made it. We're fighting to know the end of the story, because this is how much you've made us care.'

You see, I miss my friends. I *miss* them. Not just my beloved John and Aeryn, not just Chi, D'Argo, Rygel, Pilot -- those I've travelled with so long. I miss Scorpius and Crais, the old woman, the new girl...all of them. I miss them like I miss my friends across the sea now I'm home again. It brings tears to my eyes to think I may never know what's happened to them.

And then I'm astonished at my tears, because I *know* these people are not real. I know it's just a bloody tv show. Yet they *feel* real, because I know them so well. I've laughed and cried at their tales, I've been shown the bad and the beautiful in all of them, and I've watched them fight and change and hurt and learn. Flawed and flailing, trying so hard and never gaining anything without a price. I've loved them, warts and all, and I am different for having known them.

But mostly, I believe in them. Not that they're real, but as if they were real, I believe that they will eventually find their way, that they'll end, not in perfection, but in grace.

It's what I hope for everyone I love. To end in grace.

I can't put it into words, how strange it is to feel so strongly about a fictional universe. That's the testament to Farscape I'll never know how to write. I only know how to *do*. Thankfully, I'm not alone in the doing, or the feeling. I ping Deneba and we talk, and we cry, and she tells me about an old man who grabbed her once in her sleep and said, "Listen. This is a dream. But you experience things here that are just as real as your life. You can learn lessons here just as meaningful as when you're awake. There are beings that can only speak to you through your dreams."

And I say, yes.

Farscape is a dream I'm not willing to be woken from yet, because I haven't learned all it has to tell. I enter the dream in this most prosaic way -- by turning on the television -- but is it any less meaningful, any less *real* in an emotional sense for the way the dream occurs?

I'm in this campaign because I wanted the cast and crew to know that this is what they've achieved, and I wanted to know that they knew. That's the validation I sought. And that's what I walked away from Burbank feeling I had. Not for myself. For them.

I was lucky. I was there, I was able to talk to all of the people, even if only for a few seconds. I heard it from the mouths of every one of the Farscape team, I saw it in their eyes when I was standing face to face. I was not thanked for being staff at savefarscape.com or for being Fialka (whatever that might mean). Apart from one person on their end, that name holds no resonance for them. They looked at me as just a fan, just someone who saw what they did, who cares enough to try to keep the dream alive, and the thanks were heartfelt and plentiful just the same.

I share that with everyone who couldn't get to Burbank or New York this year, because it is for all of us. They see. They know. And they'll pass the word to those who couldn't be there.

And if that's not enough validation to go on with, I don't know what is.

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:: fialka 2:48 AM [+] ::

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