Thanks for the Memories

So I took the last trip to St Louis that I'm going to be able to afford for a while. Incidentally, I managed to keep myself within budget for the entire weekend, thanks in no small part to a now-wealthy friend with a penchant for spoiling me.

It just so happened that a midnight showing of Serenity was scheduled at the Tivoli, which was a nice surprise. After a thoroughly mediocre tribute band blew out our eardrums with a sound setup that had no business in a movie theater, I watched Serenity start to finish for the first time since learning of the existence of Firefly.

SPOILER WARNING!!!!

It's funny how my perspective changes. Up until Friday night, I had always built Zoe up to be a character that was dead inside. In my interpretation, she had lost everything worth fighting for long before the audience meets her. After the battle of Serenity she, like Mal, continued to exist out of pure spite. During the series, she finds somebody who makes her feel just some tiny spark of life once more, and Joss "I-hate-my-characters-and-want-them-all-to-suffer" Whedon kills that somebody off suddenly and unceremoniously. Shortly after this, Zoe charges headlong into a group of rabid monsters, very obviously trying to get herself killed.

Again, it was always my interpretation that the only reason Zoe was still walking around and hand't simply laid down to die was that she was a warrior to the core, and she couldn't not be fighting something. I thought this theory was supported by the fact that she only tried to kill herself when she could do it while fighting something.

After seeing the movie, having a brief conversation with Evan about it, and thinking it over, I find this interpretation to no longer be supportable. Yes, Zoe is a warrior, but her suicide attempt was a momentary break from her usual self, rather than a culmination of it. Looking back, I can see all kinds of little things that prove this, but none quite so much as the final scene. At her husband's funeral, we see her in a white dress. White is a universal color of hope, and a symbolism of the unknown (and therefore potentially good) clean slate that the future always brings. If the writers had truly intended to portray her as someone who would never again be happy, she would have been wearing black.

END SPOILERS!!

So yeah, my mind was mildly blown as I learn that I was misreading my favorite character in Firefly. Not really interesting enough to be worth the three paragraphs I spent explaining it, but nobody reads this thing anyway, right?

See what I did there? That's irony. It's funny.

I had lunch with Terra the following day, we went to a Thai restaurant. We are both in agreement that, while tasty, their noodle dishes use actual, store-bought Ramen noodles. Then we went to some thrift stores. I found the perfect shirt for three dollars, but it was just a tiny bit too small. I did buy Dreamland, because it has that guy from the Mac commercials ("I'm a Mac, he's a PC, notice that I'm young and attractive while he is old and stupid") and because it was only $3. Also, I want to know how a movie recognized at Sundance could end up in a bin.

That evening, I went bowling with some of Renny's friends and Dre's old college friend Brian. I don't know if it was the Thai food or what, but I wasn't feeling well at the outset of the evening. I should have politely declined the bowling and drinking frenzy that was promised, but it was my last night in St Louis and I wasn't about to be stopped by a little exhaustion/headache/oh-crap-is-this-H1N1!!?!?

So out I went, and I bowled one of the best games of my life. Although that's not to say that I bowled well.

Dre and Brian hadn't seen each other in years, so they spent the whole evening catching up. I didn't really know Renny's friends very well and I have a hard time making impressive introductions when my cranium feels like it's giving birth to Athena, so I ended up spending the majority of the night nursing a drink. Oddly enough, however, I enjoyed it all the same. After we bowled a game, we headed out to a rooftop bar on the strip, and I think I must have spent nearly an hour just sitting by the railing taking in the view. See, I really love St Louis. It may be the friends and the memories that make me love her, but the brick and mortar that make it up have always symbolized them. Since I didn't have any of said friends to hang out with, I just looked at the city I used to call home and happily reminisced with myself about good times. I'm sure it sounds boring, but I had this really nice introspective brood vibe going on, and in the end it was certainly better than staying home.

All in all, it was a fun and eventful trip, and I look forward to the day I can do it much more often.

This has been,
BS