MadMup.com

I am fascinated by celebrity culture.

Now, don’t take that the wrong way. I’m don’t care so much about which celebs are getting married, or who’s having a baby, or who recently had hair plugs installed. Some of that stuff tends to filter through just because it passes for “news” these days, but I’m not scouring the tabloids and soaking it all in.

I’m more interested in the whole concept of celebrity: how it happens, why it happens, who it happens to, what causes it to fade. There’s good celebrity and bad celebrity. Some people have it for a long time, some barely have it for a Warholian fifteen minutes. Some people work their whole lives to get it, some people don’t want it but get it anyway. Some people work hard to get it and then realize they hate having it when they finally get it.  There’s different circles of celebrity, and a someone everyone knows in a particular circle might be completely unheard of outside it.

I also find it fascinating how non-famous people react to celebrities.  There are the fans who cling to every last thing their particular celebrity does or says. Any clothes, perfumes, or product the celebrity puts their name on gets automatically desired. Any thing the celebrity does that is questionable, even to a high degree, is explained away and accepted, even if it’s behavior that you wouldn’t put up with from your best friend.  On the other hand, you’ve got people who hate and resent celebrity in most forms.  In their eyes, the celeb doesn’t deserve any of the fame because they’re a no-talent, vacuous, not-as-attractive-as-people-think jerk who wouldn’t give you the time of day if you saw them.

I don’t generally begrudge anyone’s celebrity. Sure, there are plenty of people who got famous for terrible, terrible reasons, but the way I figure it, they always have a chance to redeem themselves. I guess it’s because I’ve been forgiven over and over again that I feel most people should also be given that chance.  So while I might enjoy it that a movie might tank if it has an actor in it that I don’t particularly enjoy, that’s different from wishing they were cast into the sun. I also tend to feel sadness for actors “in trouble.”  I sense a sort of glee in people when celebrities fail, even if they fail over and over again. And, sure, some of them may be awful people, but even if most of them were, I think they still deserve pity.

I don’t have any great finishing thoughts here, I just find the whole celebrity thing very interesting.

Everybody does resolutions. Nertz to that. Wishes are way more interesting, I think.

Think about every movie, TV show, or story that deals with somebody getting wishes. What happens? The wishes always backfire somehow and the person either has something horrible happen or learns some sort of important lesson.  Even Fox Mulder on The X-Files, after a long process of checking and double-checking his wish to make sure there was absolutely no way it could be taking out of context or misconstrued wound up making everyone on earth but him disappear. That’s just how things go: you can’t have wishes.

But that doesn’t stop people from thinking about what they would wish for if given the chance. Popular choices include world peace, unlimited money, and the chance to relive your life with the knowledge you have now. There’s a reason those are the popular choices – there’s a lot to like there. But, as all the stories, shows, and movies have taught us, all of those choices end up horribly for everyone. And forget about wishing someone back to life – The Monkey’s Paw, anyone?

Anyway, I know it doesn’t do any good, but just like every one else I’ve thought about it, too. I’ve probably put way more thought into it than is healthy, really. I’ve always found it a good mental exercise, I guess. Plus, it would be totally sweet if these came true.

So, in order of desire (meaning: if I only got one wish, it’d be the first one; if I got two, the top two; and so on), here are what I finally came up with.

The ability to understand, read, write, and speak any language. I can’t really explain why I would want this, other than I really, really like to know things. It would be SO cool to see pictures of hieroglyphics and know exactly what they meant. I would love to be able translate things perfectly into other languages. Still, I look at that wish written out and it makes me laugh a little. I mean, I took Spanish for a year and a half, but had no desire to do more than that. Part of it was that I knew I wouldn’t ever really understand it fully and the other part was that I wouldn’t have many opportunities to practice it, so I’d lose it. I guess it seems so much easier to just know it. It still looks weird to me, that wish, but it’s something I’d really like.

Wolverine’s healing ability. Man, how great would that be? I mean, he still gets hurt, but he heals right up, really quickly. No heart disease, colds, cancer, nothing. I don’t do dangerous things as a general rule, so it seems like maybe this one would also be wasted on me, but I wonder if maybe the ability to heal would spur me on to trying things I wouldn’t normally.  Maybe this one is only good if you can also have an adamantium skeleton?

Ability to time/space travel. I wouldn’t want a machine, just the ability to do it. Kinda like Christopher Reeve in Somewhere in Time where he just kind of goes to sleep and travels back in time, but more specific.  I’d love to travel back and see some of the great moments in history, but I’d even be interested in seeing some of the not-so-famous moments. It would be neat to see just day-to-day living in Ancient Rome, walk with Israelites as they wandered in the desert, see some dinosaurs, that kind of thing.

These kind of play into each other, of course. Conventional wisdom says if you were to travel back in time, the food would kill you because your body is unaccustomed to it. A healing factor would take care of that issue. Knowing how to communicate in any language would also come in handy to a time traveler, I think.

Go ahead and X-Files my ideas. I’m sure there are all sorts of holes in them that would cause Hitchcock levels of ironic lesson-learning or horrific endings.

Normally it’s my nephew that’s all about the Star Wars. My niece is more into the Disney Princesses as a general rule.  So when I received the following drawing of hers, I was more than a little surprised.

I mean, you see why I was surprised, right? It purports to be the end of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, but Chewbacca is clearly wearing a medal!

Well, being the good uncle that I am, I made sure to tell my brother that he should let her know that Chewie didn’t get a medal. I mean, if you let this kind of revisionism go, what’s next, right? Next thing you’ll know, she’ll have Greedo shooting first or some such nonsense. I just want her to grow up to be a Star Wars purist, and I’m sure my brother and his wife feel the same way.

Well, as it turns out, she gave Chewbacca a medal because she felt bad for him and felt he deserved a medal, too, so she gave him one. I guess I can deal with that.

Sweet kid.