Raxacoricofallapatorius

Raxacoricofallapatorius. Makes me giggle every time. Go ahead and say it a few times. After awhile, it begins to roll quite freely off the tongue, really. It is possibly my favorite word to say, and it is the key to a part of me that I've only recently decided to embrace. I AM A SCI-FI NERD!!

For those of you who don't know, Raxacoricofallapatorius is the home planet of the Slitheen family, featured in a couple of episodes of arguably the best television show in the world, and inarguably (meaning, I absolutely refuse to hear any argument to the contrary) the best television show in Britain, Doctor Who. The Slitheen family enjoys sucking out people's insides and using their outsides as disguises for the purpose of penetrating such governmental strongholds as 10 Downing Street in the always-vain effort to destroy/enslave the inhabitants of earth/the universe typical of the hostile/misunderstood alien races against whom The Doctor and his varying plucky sidekicks often find themselves pitted from week to week.

I doubt that any of you is surprised that I'm a sci-fi nerd. I'm not very cool to begin with. I mean, my dad is a sci-fi nerd, so I didn't really have a chance! I grew up immersed in Star Wars, Star Trek--the original and The Next Generation--and the old Doctor Who, long before the Slitheen ever descended from, say it with me, Raxacoricofallapatorius. (That WAS fun, wasn't it!) I suppose I could have overcome the whole sci-fi thing if I had really wanted to. But I didn't. And I've realized recently that there's a very good reason for that...but we'll save that one for later.

I admit I've been a little less than prompt in writing this second post. It isn't for lack of trying. I have several half-finished posts sitting in my account, languishing in word purgatory, just hoping I'll finish them off and send them out into the world. It seems that every time I started a blog, I realized I either had too much to say or nothing significant to say, and so I would just put it away and try another day. And then last night, something dawned on me. I was having a blogging identity crisis! The problem wasn't so much with what I wanted to say as with who I wanted to be. Tossing oneself into the blogosphere, right out in the open like this, forces one to begin defining things. And I just wasn't sure which me to be.

Then I was sitting in church last night and my pastor said something that clicked in my head. He said that in our culture, we look to build our identity, to create it, from the things that we do or have or achieve, or from the way we look or our skills, etc. But that's insane! (His words.) Yeah, insane! (Mine.) It's backwards! Because my identity is already defined for me. God has told me who I am right there in the Bible. The challenge is not creating an identity, but living out the one I already have! I keep trying to do it backwards by taking what's outside myself or what's in the future and molding myself so that those things become my identity, when it would be so much easier to do it the way I'm supposed to and just embrace who I am already according to the One who made me in the first place and let the things that are outside me and in the future mold themselves around that truer identity. To quote my 12-year-old self, "Duh!" Man, it's tiring being an idiot. Maybe that's why I'm exhausted all the time.

So what does, together now, Raxacoricofallapatorius have to do with it all? Well, I think I'll tell you tomorrow, because there's alot more to this story and our attention spans just aren't what they used to be. So practice saying Raxacoricofallapatorius (see, it's getting easier) real hard, and as a treat tomorrow I might even tell you about the Shadow Proclamation, the Medusa Cascade, and the skies of Gallifrey--before the great Time War against Davros and the Daleks, that is.