My husband's family are like Vulcans. They are quiet and measured. Logic rules over the heart. If you mess with them, you might think you won; however, you will never know the jokes and disdain that will follow you for the rest of your life.
Here is the basic difference between our families. Klingons want you to know you've been destroyed. That's the be all and the end all. In T's family, the villain's awareness of their own destruction doesn't matter. Vulcans are not threatened by the continued existence of their vanquished and diminished enemies. What the miscreant thinks isn't important, and his/her awareness is inconsequential. It is an interesting difference, don't you think?
We have tempered and changed each other over the years. I no longer walk up to strangers and tell them I like their hair. I rarely jump up from my airline seat to scream at the person behind me for kicking my seat. He has learned to apologize and works hard on the empathy thing. This is the truth: together we are better than we are apart.
I still can't walk away from a fight, but I am now self-aware enough to wish I could.
Your family thinks you are the quiet one? They don't know the depths of your anger or how brave you are. Your other half is not like you and that's fine. Love and admire you both.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Chilly. I always have to laugh when my family refers to me as soft, or the quiet one. I think our families often never really know who we are. And thank you for the "brave" commendation. I think my fear of being seen as a weak Klingon propels me into many situations. We are all victims of our upbringing.
DeleteIt's interesting how opposites attract, isn't it? I like to think I tend toward the Vulcan myself, but I have my Klingon moments!
ReplyDeleteFun to think about, isn't it? T and I share common values, politics, world views, so that's how we manage to thrive. But the extrovert/introvert thing has been rough at times.
DeleteThis may - fundamentally - have something to do with a TV series but since it clearly doesn't relate to The Sopranos, The Wire, Seinfeld or the Larry Sanders Show (these being the only TV series I have seen) I'll have to wing it. Colette occasionally pretends to be old but that's all a nonsense. Her spritely prose ("rip your heart out with their (sharpened) teeth") immediately proves that her birth certificate is a chimera, that she is of the here and now. One is only as old as one's prose.
ReplyDeleteI, however, belong to the Dark Ages. Adolf Hitler could have been my grandpa and while I was being suckled he was alive and well, just a few hundred miles to the south-east, checking the sales figures for Mein Kampf and dreaming of world domination. By the time he was reduced to cocking a handgun in the bunker I was ten and may already have written my first short story. If memory serves me, it was about a boxing champion.
For me Klingon is an item of apparel, specifically for the legs. Of ladies whom I had not yet learned to call women. It was the calling card of many brave GIs, temporarily resident in the UK, getting ready to beard Adolf in his den. British ladies who lacked Klingons made do with a brown dye which suggested - rather pathetically - their legs were clothed.
Vulcans is an abbreviation for vulcanologists, those who earn a crust by studying volcanoes. They are recognisable by their singed eyebrows.
Had I written the above post it would have taken a different - and duller - tack. Be grateful that Colette got there first and be careful not to mess with her siblings.
Boxing is my favorite sport. In fact, it is the only sport I will willingly watch. Do you still have that first short story? I can't help but wonder what you said at ten.
DeleteAnd yes, it is two of the alien races in the Star Trek world, a number of related TV series dating back to the late 1960's. I'm also fluent in Dr. Who.
DeleteThe story was hammered out on my mother's twin keyboard typewriter (ie, no shift key). Even if I had cherished the story I doubt the paper on which it was written would have survived the intervening seventy years. The only thing I can remember about the story is a phrase "the eye-gouging trick", which suggests that the boxing match wasn't exactly fair and square.
DeleteYou mention the 1960s. By 1960 I been working for nine years both for the newspaper and for the Queen (ie, as Junior Technician air wireless fitter in the Royal Air Force. What I used to call national service and your parents called the draft.).
I have never seen Star Trek, Star Wars or Doctor Who but by the 1960s I had - in my own intellectual defence - read Moby Dick. The generic word alluded to but never spelt out in the first part of my comment is "nylons". Klingon is a corruption of (I think) Klingfast, a brand of nylon stockings.
The comment started out as one of my typical humdrum contributions until I was reminded I was, for a time, a contemporary of Adolf Hitler. Hence the persiflage.
I had to google Klingon and Vulcan to get a sense of what these creatures are. Ah... I lean towards quiet Vulcan, but can be provoked enough to let a Klingon emerge.
ReplyDeleteThanks for playing my game.
DeleteYes, we're Klingons too... I think tho' that The Man would be a Vulcan Hybrid of some kind, lethal when he has to be but preferring not to have to obliterate Enemies if he can avoid it. He knows I'm way more of a Take No Prisoners adversary, so he often tempers my urge to go on the Warpath and have the Rampage!
ReplyDeleteHa! Always nice to have a partner who balances us.
DeleteI also have some extrovert/introvert issues with my husband, but we somehow managed to keep it healthy and calm so I'm not complaining :)
ReplyDeleteThere are pluses and minuses. I think I would be exhausted living with another extrovert.
DeleteMr. Spock really messed me up for life. I am always looking for logic. These days, I don't find it much.
ReplyDeleteLogic does seem to be out of style these days, it's true. Let's try and bring it back, okay?
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