RL: the No Good, Horrible, Very Bad Day, and BSG: The Awesome, Wonderful, Very Good Vid.

[beccatoria]

So, I have been having a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. No day when you wake up to discover you have no water because your pipes have frozen is going to be a good day. It is usually only made worse when you get yelled at aggressively by a random person on the street (near as I can tell for...not being Korean or something), made to teach an extra class forty minutes after my finishing time, having to handle children who think it's hilarious to draw in PERMANENT MARKER on the white board, discovering that 60% of the teaching staff of your school are leaving AT THE SAME TIME IN SEVEN WEEKS meaning that the school who are already serially late paying me (and worse about paying the Korean teachers) because rumour has it the bad economy is tanking it, will have to pay out about three times as much as usual in severance pay AND I'll probably get an insane workload all through March if I get paid at ALL, coming home to discover the pipes have frozen AGAIN because if the workman told us to leave a tap running, we didn't understand him and no one at the school thought to relay this piece of common wisdom to us until ten minutes before we left, having the workman show up to fix it AGAIN only to have him stand up in my husband's face, yelling his head off (presumably for being stupid and not leaving the tap on) even when it was obvious that a) Kev had no idea what he was saying, and b) he was scared. As people are wont to be when other people walk into their homes and yell at them in a language they don't understand. Oh, also, all the stress and then craziness at work meant I accidentally went for almost twenty-four hours with having anything to eat or drink. NO WONDER I HAVE A HEADACHE.

On the more positive side, I came home to this:

We Didn't Start the Fire by chaila43

It's an AWESOME vid. Go watch it. (Warning: it has historical spoilers! But only up to 1990.)

It's an epic cycle-of-time, everything-that's-happened-in-the-show vid. To Billy Joel. It's wonderful. I can't really parse why it works so well, but I'll try. The vidder categorises it as "crack (sort of)" which I think is along the lines of what I call "deadly serious crack".

Sometimes ideas are crazy but work if you commit to them. I think the reason this vid works despite a song choice many would assume could only work for comedy (although there are some hilarious moments. Srsly. Laura Roslin is Elvis. WHO KNEW), is that it underscores the absurdity of, well, everything.

And absurdity is just as good for poignancy as humour.

And yes, I do believe that BSG is absurd. In the philosophical sense that they all live in a world where things just happen and therefore things are meaningless. Which might sound entirely contradictory considering my deep affection for the cycle of time, both in the show and this vid, but I don't think it's contradictory at all. What's more meaningless, arbitrary and absurd than being trapped in a giant cycle of events? Just because it's happened before doesn't empower it with a special gravity of meaning. It doesn't mean it'll count for something extra special later.

Oh. Yay! I think I just found my zen if they decide to do anything truly insane or disappointing in the last half of S4! Also. Again, this will help me handle any and everything to do with Bill Adama.

And now I am finished.

Comments

[chaila.livejournal.com]

For your idea, the absurdity of Billy Joel is part of what you want to take seriously.

Yes, completely! (EEE! I am flailing over your vid talk!) The song needs to be impossible to take seriously, all while totally being taken seriously. This sentence makes sense to me. I mean, the humor does kind of obscure the deadly seriousness of the crack--and thus the true absurdity, rather than just the hilarity--for many, but who cares because there is YOU and THIS REC. I don't even know where the idea came from. It wasn't there and then all of a sudden it just was. How absurd of it.

But then I also have this whole schtick about how if everything we do is pre-determined, actions-wise, all we can do is decide what kind of person we want to be while making those choices.

I THINK MAYBE YOU HATE BILL ADAMA BECAUSE YOU ARE BILL ADAMA. I AM JUST SAYING. Except for the mustache. And the selfishness. Okay so maybe not exactly. BUT HE WOULD UNDERSTAND YOUR SOUL.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

This sentence makes sense to me.

AND ME!

I THINK MAYBE YOU HATE BILL ADAMA BECAUSE YOU ARE BILL ADAMA. I AM JUST SAYING. Except for the mustache. And the selfishness. Okay so maybe not exactly. BUT HE WOULD UNDERSTAND YOUR SOUL.

NO. NO YOU KEEP BILL ADAMA AWAY FROM MY SOUL!

He would hear me say that and nod deeply and pretend like he understood what it meant, all the time misunderstanding and thinking it meant something like, "I can ignore my actions as long as I believe, really hard that I'm everyone's Daddy. Because reality ITSELF will conform to my masquerade." He'd like, think I meant that the type of person we are while making those choices can somehow be divorced from the shittiness of the choices. Or something.

...and sadly, in the BSGverse, Bill Adama would probably be right, and I'd be wandering the Galactica hallways preaching some kind of "be honest with yourself and act with love," hippie bullshit.

Or something.

*shakes fist!*

also my vid is going very slowly. I blame the craptacularness of this week for killing my groove.

[chaila.livejournal.com]

Are you saying Bill Adama is not a hippie?

I blame the craptacularness of this week for killing my groove

It DOES sound like you've hard a particularly craptaculous week. OR you could just blame Bill. That's what I usually do. Then I want to hug him and then I have an identity crisis, for which I also blame him, and then we go around again. But since you'll be able to skip the crap, I think you can pretty safely blame him. A focus for your ire! :)

Although OMG I want this vid like bread. For realz. I don't even care that you mean it in a totally different way than I'll probably take it. :D