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Despite what it looks like, I am not following up Beatles Week with Vanilla Ice Week (regardless of Brent’s suggestion).

On Saturday, a bunch of Careerians went to an Indiana Ice hockey game (weirdly, their webpage has an ad before you get to any content.) It was only the second hockey game I’ve ever been to, and while it certainly was fun, nothing occurred during the game that would elicit a reaction anywhere near this:

From L. to R: Jen, some of Melissa’s hair (I think maybe she’s glad she didn’t show up in a picture where I look like a raving loonie), me, Jodi, and Melissa (a different Melissa!)

That picture actually shows up on on the Indiana Ice website, in the photo gallery for this game, along with a few other pictures of our group (thanks, Jonell, for finding them!). I think we can all be glad there is no video of me trying to get a free T-shirt by whooping and hollering. What’s a little loss of dignity in the face of getting a free T-shirt? Sadly, it didn’t pan out, so lost some dignity for nothing. That probably would have happened without the prospect of a free T-shirt anyway, so I’m okay with it.

As I’ve mentioned, the game was fun. Hockey’s kind of like a fast moving, more violent soccer. While no actual fights broke out (much to Lee‘s disappointment), there were plenty of solid hits. It was relatively high-scoring for a hockey game (4-3) and even went into overtime and ended in a shootout, so it’s hard to complain about the lack of a fight.

What was more interesting to me was the immediate sense of community bestowed by the game. I’d never been to an Ice game before and was only barely aware there even was a hockey team in the state, but there I was rooting for the Ice like I’d gone to school with each of them. Collective pronouns were par for the course – “We need a goal!” “Our guy just smacked into that other guy!” and that kind of thing. It wasn’t just me, either. We were all rooting for “our” team, made “ours” because it says “Indiana” right on their jerseys and we, being Hoosiers, had to root for them. If it had been two Indiana teams, we would have had to choose between them using a complex algorithm using geographic proximity, experiences in the respective towns, and location of family and friends.

I was again reminded of the Jerry Seinfeld bit where he talks about sports (paraphrased): “You got a guy on your team and you love him. He’s the greatest guy there is. During the offseason, he gets traded to a different team, and when that team plays against your team, you hate the guy. He’s the worst guy ever. What’s different? The guy hasn’t changed. All that’s changed are the clothes he’s wearing. We’re rooting for laundry, basically.”

I’m not a full-on Sports Guy by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t memorize stats, I barely know the players on my favorite teams, and I don’t plan my day around watching games. Even so, I find it’s easy to get excited in the sports atmosphere. There’s a sense of camaraderie with the other fans, even if you’re rooting for different teams – rivalry is its own specific sort of camaraderie – and it’s a good feeling to have that connection with other members of the human race, even if it’s for something as unimportant as a minor league hockey game.

It was a good time, and I really only have two quibbles:

1. Our team lost.
2. They never once played “Ice Ice Baby” in the arena, a song that you would just assume would be their theme song, wouldn’t you?

It took me a little over a month to finish up a week’s worth of posts. My very first post on the subject figured something like that might happen, so it’s nice to see I’m right about some things. The holidays played havoc on my writing “schedule,” and I appreciate your patience.

I enjoyed Beatles Week and I hope you did, too. In fact, I enjoyed it enough that I Imagine (ha! fooled you – that’s a John Lennon song, not a Beatles one) I’ll do posts under that banner in the future and stick them under the Beatles Week tag, even though they won’t be a week’s worth in a row necessarily. I like to think that I’ll make the first week in December Beatles Week every year, but we’ll just see how that goes.

For posterity’s sake, all of the Beatles Week posts are collected here.

I’ve been a science-fiction fan for as far back as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories of watching TV with my dad (before we became a “no TV for kids” family) were of Dr. Who and Star Trek. After the “no TV” rule, I became a voracious reader (which was, I think, part of the intended effect) and I discovered sci-fi books. I don’t know what my official starting sci-fi books were, but I remember reading books based on Dr. Who pretty early on – stick with what you know, right? – and Star Trek novelizations were a staple for a long time, even into adulthood. There isn’t much to them, but familiar characters make for enjoyable reading, and they were a quick read.

Of course, I eventually discovered Asimov and Bradbury and Gibson and a hundred other authors who no one’s ever heard of. There was a Science Fiction subsection of the Fiction section in our local library, and it amounted to around three shelving sections, not much in the grand scheme of things. Our school library tended to focus more on biographies and the like (though they did have Lewis), so I tended to read and re-read a lot of the same titles from the local library. I distinctly remember they had a total of three Star Wars novels, and I read them a couple of times each.

Sci-fi sort of gets lumped into the same category as romance novels most of the time. “Worthless” and “stupid” get thrown around a lot in discussions, and depictions of laser guns and robots don’t do much to dispel those notions. When sci-fi is done well, though, it can be a fantastic tool for observation of the human condition. The addition of the fantastic can allow for a clearer view of the normal. Even the original Star Trek series was able to address issues that would never have made it past the censors in a “regular” show. It might seem strange to us these days, but having a multi-ethnic crew in the latter half of the 1960s was huge. America was gearing up for a Cold War, and here was a Russian on the bridge. And did you know that Star Trek featured the first interracial kiss shown on television? Pretty groundbreaking for a “stupid sci-fi show with lousy sets.” Hidden under the trappings of sci-fi, the writers were able to bring topics like racism and genocide to the table, with an eye towards generating discussion.

Of course, along with all of that, sci-fi sets the imaginative mind on its way. In sci-fi, space travel is as common as getting on an airplane. Robots do all the menial work (until they get too big for their britches and turn us all into batteries, of course). Communication is instant. Computers run everything. Any of that sound familiar? If vacuuming is a bothersome chore to you, you can get yourself a Roomba. Do you have a cellphone that flips open? Why not just call it a communicator? And, really, it’s a pretty short hop from “Don’t tase me, bro!” to “Don’t phase me, bro!” if you think about it. Sci-fi has not only imagined the future, it has in many cases shaped the future.

Is it so hard to imagine space travel, then? Space Tourism is a commonly used phrase already, and the assumption is that it will happen, it’s just a matter of time. Once more people are doing it, it’ll get cheaper and better. The question, as I see it, is where are these space tourists going to go? Is it enough to escape Earth’s atmosphere, orbit a few times, and come back? Initially it will be, though $200k for the privilege seems steep. People have been talking about Mars a lot in the last few years, so there might eventually be a base there. I’ve said it before, but I think we should start with a base on the Moon. It’s closer, and I think still being able to see Earth might help people there still feel a connection to it.

With all of my talk of love for sci-fi, though, I won’t be catching any flights to the Moon any time soon (assuming they start happening soon, that is). While I love the idea of space travel and I love the thought of being able to see Saturn’s rings up close and I’m curious about what it feels like to be free of gravity, I can’t get past the idea of being in a little tin box in the vastness of space. It’s the same reason I never want to be in a submarine, really. A man-made environment surrounded by an environment that will kill you with the only thing keeping it at bay being the man-made environment? No thanks. How many times have you had to get your car repaired in the last 5 years? There are no tow trucks for submarines, and even fewer, I suspect, for spaceships.

It’s strange, this dissonance – I love the thought of “future,” of a shiny and bright place replete with robots, of an address in the Sea of Tranquility, but I can’t bring myself to imagine getting there.