Many people over the years have asked me why I have such an interest in Star Trek and generally speaking, time has not permitted me to give an adequate response to this. Frequently I have found that people who ask are just looking for a sound bite and anything long and involved was uninteresting. I have just finished reading William Shatner's 'Get A Life' and he for one spent an entire book looking for longer answers. So in that vain, I figured I'd put this up on the off chance a visitor here was as curious about such things...
In the beginning...
My family had always been fans of the show to a limited extent. Personally, I couldn't see what was so appealing about it. The Original Series was some dumb old TV show with cheap sets and even worse effects. TNG was a regular fixture in my home and I have to admit I did like it, although I can't quite recall why. I was the last of my family to be converted, but I certainly became the biggest fan they had ever seen. I attribute this to TNG's 'The Best of Both Worlds', The TNG Technical Manual, and most importantly the following story...
When I was ten years old, I had an appendicitis. Anyone who has gone through such a thing knows that it is incredibly painful and dreadfully life threatening. To make matters worse, the surgeon who operated on me, a fellow ironically named Dr. Cuttington, botched the operation. It was December, I had just moved and switched schools two months previous and it was rapidly looking as if I would be spending Christmas in the Hospital, a truly depressing concept to someone who as a younger child has watched Christmas videos year-round. At the first onset, the pain was so excruciating that I had to be given a Gravol just to stop screaming. I would wake up, scream for about 2 minutes, and then promptly pass out. I'd be out for just long enough to regain some strength, say ten minutes or so, and then begin the cycle again. Once in the hospital, even after the operation, I was in terrible pain. Great efforts were made to distract me from what I was going through, but none of it helped. After a certain point I had to be left alone. My exhausted mother needed to get some sleep and other various family members had to get on with their lives. Before she left, I saw a TV hanging from a swing arm. "Is that a TV?" I weakly asked a nurse. It indeed was. Although it was costly, I asked my mother to pay to have it activated for me. I'm sure many parents out there would know that when your child is in such a condition and his life in question, such a request, no matter the cost, could go unanswered. That night I tried to distract myself from the pain enough for me to get some sleep, but even the TV wasn't making it possible. Nothing could hold my interest long enough, nothing was so involved that it caused me to think. Then, channel flipping desperately, I found an episode of TNG. I had found my salvation. Through the wonders of syndication, for great stretches of time, there was always an episode on somewhere. And when there wasn't, I thought about the ones I had seen until I fell mercifully to sleep. It became my lifeline. I was grateful, and am still grateful, for the efforts put forward from my family. An Aunt I only got to see maybe twice a year paid a visit. My sister and mother put aside their differences to see me. My uncle bought me a musical clown, which truth be told was perhaps the ugliest toy I've ever seen, but his heart was in the right place and each of these things eased my suffering, but not as much as Star Trek. At one point it came time to do something rather painful. I don't readily recall what, but I know they needed to distract me from it. They put that small TV on and thankfully a TNG episode was on and I barely felt a thing. I even watched TOS episodes so that I would better understand references made in TNG and for distraction when no TNG was readily available. With The Great Bird of The Galaxy looking over me, I managed to recover sufficiently to be released a handful of days before Christmas. I am proud to say that no Christmas has yet come to pass in which I have not been at home.
Why the website? Dark Enigma, long before he had even heard the name, turned to me one day and said, "Let's make a website". At first I didn't want to, but upon realizing that I had nothing better to do at that particular moment, I acquiesced. I had recently found a bunch of spoiler sites providing 'inside' information about upcoming episodes and the crazy thing was, they were generally correct. However, the various sites I frequented often had vastly different information or under different episode names or connected to different plot points. With a degree of common sense I found that I could reasonably piece these bits together to form a fairly accurate synopsis of upcoming shows. To help keep it all straight in my head, I put it all down in a .txt file. When Dark and I went to start the site, we decided we might as well make it about Star Trek as we both liked the show and it seemed a popular theme on the net. Once signed up, we had no idea what our content would be. We didn't want to be another carbon-copy site, just redisplaying things they had found on the net. You know the type, they have a picture gallery, a list of links, and maybe a joke or two and they never get updated. Then I remembered my .txt file and the rest is history.
So are you, like, a Trekkie then?
Well, I have been to a convention, but just one. I own two tribbles; one of them can talk. I have every TNG, DS9, and VOY novel currently in print as well as some reference material. Recently I put some of my trivia knowledge, which I don't mind saying is vast, into a trivia bot which you can play on IRC (on Dal.net in the channel #trektrivia). Show me any five minutes of footage and I can probably tell you what episode it's from. I can explain to you how warp drive works and tell you all about recent technologies based on Star Trek technobabble. Am I a trekkie? I prefer the term Trekker, but it really makes no difference. Does Star Trek run my life? Of course not, how could it? It's just a television show. If I had to describe what Star Trek means to me in one word it would be: Hobby.
The Greater Meaning
So does that mean I don't get anything out of it but entertainment? Absolutely not. A positive vision of the future, an occasional place to escape to when life gets too stressful, a way of meeting new people...these are all great qualities of this phenomenon that I have availed myself of. But if I had to thank Star Trek for any one thing, it would be for all that I have learnt from it. From science to morals to understanding the much lamented 'Human Condition', the things that I have learnt adds in one way or another to my understanding and enjoyment of life. From school to work to personal relationships, Trek affords me certain insights and perspectives that I would not have known otherwise. Why do I do this? The site, the triviabot, the novels...well, as a wise man once said, "It was fun"