Confessions....

a few people are posting lists of "confessions" they must make. Now, as much as I am about the sharing, ya'll, there are some places where I draw the line. But I do have two:

I have not been keeping up with New Rule. I planned to do it this afternoon (no lab, students working on their independent projects) but I just cannot bring myself to feel excited about reading about seed banks or community assembly or weighing dry plant matter or typing in data.

The bigger confession is this: I still love the Christmas specials I watched as a child. I try to arrange it so that I can see them when they're on every year. Tonight, "Rudolph" is on. But I have Youth Group to teach. So I have it set to tape so I can watch it at a later date. I have seen this program every year since I was old enough to remember but I am still taping it to watch again...how sick is that? (at least I've not bought the video of it).

One thing I can add given my considerable perusal of the old Rankin-Bass "Animagic" specials over the past couple years (thank you, Family Channel, for re-running them. Even though most of the stuff you show is drek) is that many of them seem to have the "misfit" or "modified Dumbo plot" theme where a character doesn't fit in with the rest of the crowd, goes off to find himself/be alone and pout/remove himself from the happy community because he feels he's spoiling their happiness and then it turns out that the rejected character - and often, the very trait he was rejected for - is needed and saves the day. (Rudolph, of course, but also the New Year one with the creepy baby with the big ears and Harpo Marx hairstyle, and the Nestor the Donkey one...and I think there's another, maybe with nuns in it? where a little boy is rejected but does something wonderful?). I wonder what that says about the writers of the shows (if there were even the same writers for all of them). Were they teased and harrassed as children? Or did they think, hey, there might be a lot of kids out there who are unpopular, and this might make them feel good? Or was it just a convenient plot arc that could be dragged and dropped into whatever situation?

I never noticed it as a kid but an awful lot of the shows seemed to involve characters who were rejected by society or their peers only to be loved at some later date after they showed their own worth. (And of course, the former reject was too good hearted to exact any revenge. Well, okay, except in Dumbo, but that was pretty mild revenge.).

But still. Psychobabble aside, these specials were a Good Thing from my Childhood and are one of the relatively few Good Things I can go back and re-experience on some level. Watching them gives me the same odd frisson that I get from seeing a version of a Fisher-Price toy that I had in the nursery at church or finding a copy of a book very like one I once owned in a used-book shop.