Wait. You mean I've gotten old? When did that happen?

Watching #DoctorWho and as luck would have it this was the one on BBCAmerica tonight so I watched it even though it's an old one. It's one of my favorite and he's my favorite Doctor. Although Rory & Amy's love story is my favorite story arc of all. 

So, this isn't all that Doctor Who related but it's sort of Time-related, yeah? Yeah.

I realized last week and when I say this you're going to think I've lost my mind, or maybe you won't. I imagine it'll depend on how old you are. Me? I'm forty-eight. This past week I realized, and I'm not sure what prompted it, that, let me start over. I've always assumed I'd have a kid. I'm not sure why or when, but I sort of felt like at some point I'd be a dad and there'd be a kid and school and field trip notes and teaching to drive and having them go through a phase where I'm an idiot and hopefully they'd grow out of it and think I was a pretty okay person. 

I don't know why I thought that and I didn't realize until last week just how strongly I felt like that was something that was going to happen. And last week I realized if I found a person right now who said, "Put a baby in me you big hunka man," and got started right then and there I'd be um... 66 when they graduated. Um, sixty-six? What the hell? Also, what woman of safe & sane baby-making age is going to look at an almost fifty-year-old man and say, "We should totally get sweaty and roll around on the ground together and exchange fluid and mingle our DNA into some sort of unholy abomination of a baby." I can answer that, no sane woman. 

So, last week I realized I wasn't going to be a dad because when I wasn't paying attention I got too old. Before you say anything about movie stars doing it etc. I'm not a movie star. I make cat food cans. Hell, that is a bit glorified. I stack the cat food can ends (You'd call them "lids" but you're wrong, trust me, I'm old I know these things) on pallets.  I don't actually FEEL old. I feel about thirty or so. I really didn't notice that I'd entered softly and silently into an age beyond which being a kid's dad was contraindicated. 

That was kind of a depressing blow.

Then, also this week, I got an e-mail fro my parents saying my Dad had health issues that are of the older person variety. Very carefully NOT saying he's old in case he reads this. But me being old means he's probably a bit oldish as well. Anyway, so, suddenly, without my paying any attention at all I've come face to face with my own mortality and I don't like it one bit. So, I thought I'd watch some good old fashioned escapist TV and turned on some Doctor Who. What should happen? Turns out it's one of my top two favorite episodes ever... also one in which The Doctor dies. Of course it is. But dangit... it's got Wilfred in it and I love that crusty old man. Like seriously. I know it's irrational, but at my age, I'm prone to irrationality. I should point out I've been saying that for years, decades now apparently.

Anyway. The past week has been a little bit rubbish, can you tell I've been watching British TV? Yeah. I have, and I like it a lot. I don't like the past week much though. No, I don't like it at all. So, if you see me looking off into space a bit wistfully I'm probably thinking about all the things I didn't do with my non-existent kid. Don't sweat it. The mood will pass. I'm not even really that sad about it anymore, just surprised that I got this old this fast without noticing. It seems like something you'd notice, doesn't it?

Bates Motel thoughts

I've been watching Bates Motel on A&E since it started last year and I really love the acting in it. Freddie Highmore is amazing as a younger, high-school aged, Norman Bates and his mother, alive thankfully, played by Vera Farmiga is stunning. The two together are greater than the sum of their parts and seriously are the two best performances I've ever seen. They're seriously perfect together. Freddie Highmore seems to be channeling the original character, Norman Bates and has the walk, mannerisms, everything so spot on it's creepy.

What has me really thinking this season isn't just their amazing performances or their story line (I'm not a super fan of the drug business in the town story line but hey, every show has a B-line and it's never as strong or it'd be the primary story, right?) But it's something A&E has done that I've never seen before.

One of the criticisms I got in my book Jump/Drive was that I had high school aged kids dealing with sex when they weren't adults. I'm not kidding. They talked about it and talked to an adult about it and I got e-mails saying that wasn't appropriate or okay in a YA (Young Adult) book because there are two kinds of people: Adults who are sexual and children who are children all 17 years and 364 days of their childhood and are NOT sexual animals and must not EVER be looked at that way, thought about as thinking about it, or anything else. TV has mostly played along that line really.

Season 2, Episode 9 of Bate's Motel we hear something very different. Norman has a crush on one of his teachers who has mysteriously turned up dead after he was at her house. He doesn't know what happened. He blacked out. It keeps happening that people get hurt when he's blacked out. But that's not the important part. They didn't show him having sex with her. They showed him at the house. In S2E9 the sheriff says something along the lines of "Some of the semen in [dead teacher] was Norman's." My mind was blown.

What Bate's Motel and A&E did was just talk about a minor not only having sex with an adult but leaving "semen" and that's the word they used and I was like, "What the hell?" behind. That's not something a child would do but he IS a child. The hard sharp line between adulthood and childhood that TV seems so fond of is so very broken here. They did a throwaway line about arresting her for sex with a minor if she weren't already dead or something like that to cover their butts and make sure we the audience knew they didn't condone that sort of behavior. But the part where they discussed it at all, and in that kind of detail was very different from what I've seen before. There were bodily fluids discussed between two different generations of people and one of them is/was still a child. (Yes, I'm intentionally using that word to be provocative because that's the way things are done on TV with this subject a lot of the time. But not this time.)

So, if you've never seen this show find it on DVD, watch it on Netflix, whatever it takes, but watch it. It's some of the best TV out there and you won't regret it.