It’s been a long week.

To be honest, it’s been a long month, and it’s only half over. But it’s also been a long year already, and it’s only February. That does not bode well. 

Le sigh.

I have been watching too much Netflix. By the time I get home, I’m just too exhausted to do much of anything else. Since moving to the new apartment, I’ve binged the first six seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and I’m midway through the third season of Star Trek: The Original Series. Because I’m going to write about DS9 eventually (I’ve already started writing about TNG), I’ll save my thoughts for later. But I like cheese, so let’s talk about TOS for a bit.

Random Thoughts About Star Trek: The Original Series

This isn’t your father’s Star Trek, because all three seasons have been remastered. What this means is that they re-recorded the theme song (Why? The original was perfect.) and they redid all the space scenes via CGI. New, improved planets and spaceships! But again, why? Part of the charm of the un-remastered series¹ is that those scenes match the scenes that take place inside the ship or on a planet. If anything, the remastered scenes just highlight how entirely cheesy the sets, the costumes, the props, and the acting (yes, I’m talking to you, William Shatner) were. Why not remaster all those things? The cheese was part of the charm of the original series, but now it’s just an annoyance. 

And while Gene Roddenberry was a great thinker, his ideas in some ways were limited. How many times can we face a god-like creature who is completely irrational until the last scene of the movie (Trelane, Korob and Sylvia, V’Ger, the whale probe, Q, Nagilum, Ardra)? It gets old.

Also, the original series established a number of tropes that also get old:

1. The Enterprise is the only ship in the quadrant/sector/system/neighborhood. I especially love it when the Enterprise is the only ship around Earth. I mean, Earth is basically the capital of the Federation, so why on earth would you want to, I don’t know, maybe protect it? (This continued through The Next Generation, as well. At least it made sense on Voyager.)
2. Kirk gets his shirt torn off. (Because we need to be reminded what raw bread dough looks like, apparently.)
3. Kirk has romantic/sexual intrigues with a woman, either human or alien. Just, ugh. I’m glad they downplayed this in The Next Generation and eliminated it entirely in DS9. 

Still, I love the show. It was earnest, and showed us a future that was worth looking forward to.

Apartment

I still haven’t bought a sofa for the new apartment, and because I am doing a no-shopping month during February, I probably won’t any time soon. But the truth is, I don’t feel like dealing with all the mess that goes along with buying furniture. I could go to our local Art Van store (ugh, Art Van salespeople) and get 12 months same-as-cash, but I don’t feel like dealing with salespeople and I don’t feel like sitting around on a Saturday waiting for a delivery, and I don’t feel like having to coordinate bringing the thing in the front door and up the stairs and through the door.

Besides, when I feel like I really should buy a sofa and maybe a nice coffee table, I just take a look at these things:

• My budget, which although it included spending around $500 on furniture, continues to depress me.
• My very comfortable bean-bag chair, which is comfortable enough for me.
• The pantry and freezer, which are very full of food. I don’t need a whole lot at this point.

When I get depressed, it’s time to either vacuum or go for a walk. I think it’s time to do both.²

Notes

¹Such is our modern life that we are going to face a pile-up of prefixes and suffixes. Oh, well.

²Apparently, happy lights to help you get through Seasonable Affective Disorder are quite reasonable now. I’ll have to research them during the summer and add them to my budget for next winter.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.