Assistant Chief Counselor/Medical Officer's Log # 16 - "The Agony Of Defeat"

Posted on 29 Oct 2013 @ 7:18pm by Lieutenant JG Delainey Carlisle

413 words; about a 2 minute read

I think the Galileo has officially entered the Twilight Zone. I'm not talking about any of the horrible holo-vid remakes with that official title, or some as yet unknown interstellar phenomenon that we've yet to discover but will probably end up messing with us later. No, I'm refering to the theme, the emotional essence, of a now defunct source of entertainment that seems to perfectly capture my mood. My parents, may they rest in peace, had no use for what they called my melo-drama, but for some reason, if I incorporated references to sources of entertainment they enjoyed, it was no longer melo-drama, but a form of "creative expression."

Anyway, enough about my parents. For a mental health professional, talking about one's parents is one of the most horrendous cliches, and the only thing worse in my family than being melo-dramatic was being melo-dramatic and a walking cliche.

Back to my feelings. In my last log, I talked about what a nightmare confronting the Borg has been, how the Borg represent for all of us, regardless of background or species, some of our worst fears. Helplessness... Loss of control... Loss of one's soul. The Starfleet life is one of unpredictibility, to put it mildly, and it requires constanrt vigilance. In short, most of the time it takes a lot to rattle us generally speaking. If our experience hasn't yet taught us how to deal with higher than average levels of fear, the training we get at least forces us to think about how we handle it. So I don't think it's melodramatic to say there's few things that pull the figurative rug out from under us like the Borg.

If my parents were here, they'd probably liken the experience to watching that previously mentioned holo-vid. Suspense building slowly, punctuated by moments of horror and despair...followed by moments of sheer absurdity. Not that I'm calling a First Contact mission absurd. I'm hopeful, I'm excited....in a way. It's just... it feels crazy. Like experiencing the agony of defeat and the thrill of hope in two seconds flat. In the midst of *this* trauma and grief, it feels like we're all on the verge of either laughing or crying. There's this phaser at our heads and at the same time we have to take time for prim and proper procedure. It's like throwing a party while there's a serial killer on the loose.

Come to think of it...maybe it was Alfred Hitchcock presents...

RSS Feed