doing hard stuff...

 (no posts over the weekend; I had a bit of a reaction to the vaccination and spent Friday night shivering and feverish. Saturday I was well enough to go to graduation but not great)

Anyway.

I heard this morning that Paul Reubens, aka Pee-Wee Herman, passed away. A lot of feelings about this one because he was a television part of my late teenaged years - I liked Pee-Wee's Playhouse partly because it was silly and weird, and partly because my liking it ticked off my younger brother, who didn't like that kind of weird stuff.

I guess actually his original stage show as Pee-Wee was definitely not kid-friendly; some people talked about how it was slightly surprising CBS (I think it was?) let him do a Saturday morning kid's show. And it definitely wasn't for everyone, and I think maybe it was more aimed at late teens/young adults. It was definitely mildly subversive, or could be read that way. But also this was where Laurence Fishburne got his start (as Cowboy Curtis), and Phil Hartman was involved with it, and S. Epatha Merkerson (and I had forgotten this!) was Reba the Mail-Lady.

Like I said, I just liked it because it was weird. It was visually weird - lots of bright colors, that kind of 1980s styling. Short-attention-span-y, and maybe now as an adult I'd find it hard to watch (I know watching some re-runs in my 30s I found it harder to watch) and I think maybe when I was younger I was more blind to some of the innuendo that got slipped in. 

Apparently Captain Kangaroo liked it, though, and I think Reubens made the comment that he did the show partly to foster an appreciation for people who were "different" among his kid audience. 

He also had a movie - I was misremembering, the movie came first and THEN the tv show - called Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. There's more innuendo in the movie, as I remember, but of course they didn't necessarily have to please advertisers/network censors/the "educational and informative" board of tv stations with it. 

I don't think I ever saw it in the theater, but I've seen it a few times when it would run on cable tv. It's weird, but in some ways less weird than the tv show because it's ostensibly set in the real world. Basically, Pee-Wee has a really tricked out bike that he loves, and the bike gets stolen by Francis (who I always interpreted as "that rich jerk who gets his way because he's rich" although I don't think that's ever explicitly stated in the move that he is rich). There are too many "Francises" in the world, frankly. 

Anyway, Pee-Wee goes on a journey to get his bike back, has big adventures on the way. One of the things about Pee-Wee is that he's fundamentally a good and kind character, if kind of silly and naive, and often willing to stick up for the underdog.

And someone on twitter (yes, I'm still on there, for now) called wyntermitchell commented (slightly bowdlerized for here:) 

Anyway, wyntermitchell is describing the fire-in-a-petshop scene, where Pee-Wee goes in and rescues the puppies and the kittens and the bowls of fish and the bunnies and the ducklings and every time he runs through grabbing more animals he sees the snakes in their enclosure. And he knows, HE KNOWS, he needs to rescue the snakes too. But Pee-Wee absolutely DOES NOT LIKE SNAKES.

But at the very end, he does it: he grabs the snakes and gets them safely out, even though he faints from fear of the snakes once they are safely out. 

And wyntermitchell says: "The way I think of this scene every day that I wake up because this is exactly what my life is like. Walk into fire, do the best you can do to assist or lead and do the hard [stuff] even when you absolutely do not want to" 

And you know? That's right. I've beat up on myself a lot this past few months for not being more productive than I was, for seeing other people write books or complete research or whatever while I ground away on prepping classes. And yet. And yet: I did do the hard stuff. I prepared a systematic botany class PRACTICALLY from scratch after the retiring prof left all his stuff for it on a drive that was deleted months earlier from the campus server than it was supposed to be. And again this summer - I spent 10 or 12 hours each week relearning and summarizing advanced biostats stuff. For three students. For adjunct pay. And a lot of the time I felt like I didn't know what the heck I was doing, and all I could do was get through that one week's class and then after I walked out I could think about starting to prepare the next week. 

And I think also that idea of "do the best you can do to assist or lead or do the hard stuff" is sometimes an overlooked virtue in our world where the big and the flashy and the extreme get the press - where a billionaire crybaby can buy a social media site and basically turn it into a joke, or multiple disgraced politicians worldwide continue to open their mouths wide and insert a foot that they previously had tracked through poop - and these are the people who get the attention, and that means someone like me, someone who is doing her best, *even though it is very small* and is trying to leave the world if not better, at least not-worse than before she got here, often feel a little discouraged and let down and like ..... well, if what matters in this world is being a sort of a supervillain, why even TRY?

But I guess like the old story about the boy and the starfish, in the world of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, what he did mattered to those snakes....

 

 (And yes, later Reubens/Herman was arrested for....well, something not very savory.... and I admit my feeling about him changed a bit. And still later I admit I enjoyed him as The Spleen in "Mystery Men" (which I think is an underrated movie, and again it's visually weird and cool in that way, and has interesting characters, if maybe the plot isn't the most memorable).