Who Do YOU Think You Are?

This is just another reason why I want to scrounge together some money to get an account on ancestry.com!

A few years ago, I heard about the show "Who Do You Think You Are?" on the BBC. My SO and I have found ourselves over the years watching more and more Brit-TV, and once I heard about that show I just had to see it. Unfortunately I have yet to find a way to watch it over here in the US, but now NBC has imported it over and started their own version. It is completely fascinating to me as I have always been very interested in researching my family and seeing the different ways of researching it and getting beyond road blocks is very uplifting.

I know a little about my background: My father was born and raised in a small village in southern Greece where he was witness to Italian and German invasions and attacks during World War II. As he got older, he eventually followed two of his three sisters (one stayed behind in Greece, as did his brother) to Canada. He said he came over with barely any money, braved the long sea voyage despite getting seasick, and started from scratch over in Montreal. He learned English from TV and a little bit of French-Canadian from those around him, and eventually he moved to the US and settled in Connecticut. I barely knew his mother, as she passed away when I was only four. What little I remember of her is that she didn't speak much English, would occasionally visit here from Greece, and we'd sit on the back porch eating lemons and watching the wildlife in the yard. My father's father passed away before my parents even met, and all I really know of him is that he found a huge and very ancient olive oil urn on the family farm that is now in a museum. I know a few details about the family history beyond that, but nothing too specific. At some point my great-great-etc. grandfather was enslaved by the Turks who had taken over Greece, and his dramatic escape from his captor led to his settling in a new town across the mountains. This is why our unique name split in two, and I'm curious how many other people with the same surname are actual relatives of mine.

I say actual because before my grandfather met my grandmother, he had decided to move to America. However, as he was about to get on the boat he apparently said he would never get on something that looked so rickety and he decided to stay in Greece. What happened next was a mystery: When Ellis Island put a website with all the names listed, we only looked for ours on a lark. We knew the family had gone through Canada before coming to the US but we were just curious. Then it popped up: My grandfather's name. So either someone bought or stole his information and tickets, and they signed themselves into Ellis Island as my grandfather. Where the heck did that person go? Who knows. Were they related to us? Who knows. That I guess is a dead end but it does probably account for the large number of people in the country with the name.

I know probably even less about my mother's family. My mother's mother, whom I get my middle name from, was born in Pennsylvania to a Polish and (slightly) German family. I don't know when either of her parents were born, and where their families were from. I believe both were born in this country, but I don't know too much about them. My grandfather was born in Connecticut and is (supposedly) 100% Lithuanian. We had always heard the family name was changed when they came over from Lithuania, but have since discovered that it was my great-grandfather who had actually decided to change it after living here. I recently got to see the grave of my great-great grandparents on that side, and it was pretty amazing to not only see the names and dates but the actual surname that was brought over. How and why it was changed actually remains a family mystery, supposedly surrounding some sort of tragedy.

My great-grandmother (my grandfather's mother) never talked much to me about her history, but I do know bits and pieces. At some point, her mother owned a saloon which was also supposedly a brothel. I have no idea where this was or if it was actually a brothel, but I think that is a pretty interesting nugget to find! However, I don't know anything about her parents beyond that and who knows where they came from and when they came from there. My grandfather has tried to research it, and some of his cousins tried to go to Lithuania where we apparently still have some family but as most of the records have been destroyed we don't know much. I do know at some point they had a horse farm over there, but that was taken away as the family was forced out by the higher ups.

I would love to know where all these roots go. What other surprises await on the branches of my family tree? I can't even begin to imagine. Is my father's family actually all Greek? At any point, was my mother's family Jewish? She has often been assumed to have Jewish roots by people when they first meet her, and even my Ashkenazi SO (who not only is from about the same area as my family, but also recently found they had originated from Scotland before that) has said that part of the family looks like they could have been Jewish at one point. Highly likely he has said, given the areas they came from.

Of course the celebrities on "Who Do You Think You Are?" have not only their own money and power behind them but that of NBC (and to an extent, the BBC), so they probably have an easier time getting over all these road blocks. This research is sadly expensive, but the longer I wait the harder it is going to be to fill in the missing pieces.

I do wonder what strange coincidences I'll find though. Sarah Jessica Parker, who once played a Salem witch in the movie "Hocus Pocus" in one of her early roles (and where I first saw her), assumed her family was just European Jewish as that was all they knew of. However, through the show they discovered an ancestor from Connecticut and from there they traced her family back to Massachusetts in the 1600s. Surprise! She had an ancestor who was an accused witch in Salem, although her trial was the last one held and they never prosecuted her.

Emmitt Smith was on the next episode I watched, and while he traced his family both back to a white slave owner and a tribe in Africa, one of the keys to his past was in a book numbered "22" which, he pointed out, was coincidentally always the number on his jersey.

I'm still watching Matthew Broderick's episode right now and he has a similarly strange coincidence as his wife had. He pointed out he had played a civil war soldier in "Glory," and then was shocked to find out his great-great-grandfather had actually died in battle in the civil war (and through that research they were able to put a name to an unmarked grave).

So what coincidences will I find in my own tree? Who will I find there? I can't wait to find out.

I'm a Bad Blogger

So yeah. I fail.

I was so excited about my "LOST" blog, and then I never got to keep up with it. :( Sadly, my access to the internet and television have been severely limited ever since I started my journey. If I had more time, perhaps it'd be easier. However, by the time I get to watch the new episode, I don't have time to go back and re-watch the old ones. Life has gotten in the way, yet again.

With Asteri's 11th birthday coming in now less than two months, I'd like to say I've been hard at work getting all that done and thus have a valid reason why I didn't keep up with the topics of this blog. The website revamp too has unfortunately suffered a similar fate, being pushed aside for life. The thing with that is, I have to meet the deadline for a variety of reasons so I need to start trudging along and facing life as well as these tasks at the same time. Otherwise I'm left without a release, and with regrets of not getting all my projects completed when I wanted them to be.

I have some exciting things planned, and granted a lot of the work has already been done but that is just the beginning of what needs to be accomplished. Here's hoping I find a way to fit it all in.

Raised by Another after Sundown

First off, forgive me because I had already re-watched episodes 1 through 9 prior to coming up with this project. I thought about going back to watch them now and restart, but when I realized my next episode would have been “Raised by Another” if I kept going… well, I thought that was perfect considering last night’s episode, “Sundown.” I will eventually go back, but I’ll work that in later. Besides, for now until I get into the swing of things… this may not take complete shape just yet.

Now, the last episode (“Solitary”) saw Sayid meet up with Rousseau, learn about the “sickness,” “the monster,” and of course… the whispers. This episode begins with Claire having a dream about a very creepy looking Locke (with one pupil black) and then getting attacked. Charlie ran over to Claire after hearing her screams, and saw her hands were bleeding. Jack cleaned her up and they have a discussion about her OB-GYN. Now, at this point, neither they nor we know they are brother and sister. That is an odd thing I keep reminding myself, even watching the pilot and seeing Claire was one of the first people Jack helped.

Things I note during the episode:

- Initially, I thought Kate would end up with Sayid when the series started.
- As soon as the psychic got freaked out and made Claire leave the first time, I thought for sure he saw an evil future for her and her child. As did many others. Looking back, FORESHADOWING! Which yeah, we figured anyway…
- What would Charlie do if he were still alive and seeing what Claire is like now?
- Hurley has always been awesome, and wow he actually did lose a lot of weight during the course of the show.
- He showed signs of a leader in the beginning, with making the list of people who were on the plane. (Hey, is that meaning something considering Jacob and his lists?)
- Did Thomas get some sort of visit from Widmore/Abaddon/someone that scared him away from Claire? Perhaps he was promised fame for his art in exchange for not staying with Claire and the baby. Perhaps that is why Widmore has Thomas’ painting? (Although, granted, that painting of Widmore’s was technically shown earlier than Thomas was painting it.)
- Haha, I love that Hurley was creeped out by Locke.
- When I first started to watch LOST, I never read spoilers. Yet I knew as soon as I saw Ethan that he wasn’t on the plane.
- Aww, Jack and Claire are fighting like siblings even though they don’t know they’re siblings. Cute.
- Shannon made up just as many awesome names for things as Sawyer did. Craphole Island. Rape Caves. God’s Friggin’ Gift to Humanity. <3 I miss Shannon… (I realize I am in the minority. :P)
- Hurley melted Sawyer’s heart faster than Kate ever could.
- “Do you know ‘Catch a Falling Star?’?” Hmm.
- Wait, her dad used to sing it to her? Was this her step-father, or Christian? Was he around at all when she was a child?
- As everyone speculated back then, the Island somehow made Claire’s pen not work. Perhaps that was Jacob’s doing? Or MIB’s? Who knows at this point!
- “Someone promised me it’d be different.” What? A couple raising your son in LA and you not raising him on an island? Well, Jack and Kate were for a while. In LA. :)
- So the psychic (Richard Malkin?) told Claire the couple would meet her and she had to take flight 815 to do so. Technically, she did meet Kate and Jack because of that. :)

As for the rest, I will say honestly I got a migraine toward the end and wasn’t totally focused on the task at hand. I’ll have to rectify this bad ending later when I go back to watch the beginning. This is a work in progress, most definitely.

Yet Another LOST Experiment

Chances are, even if you've never watched a minute of it you probably know that LOST is ending this year. It is all over the TV, the internet, print, and radio, popping up in random places like weeds pushing through the ground. Well, weeds don't always have to be bad things. I find dandelions quite pretty and a lot of people I know enjoy eating them with olive oil and lemon juice, so I can't really get too much LOST information.

If you don't give a rat's ass about it one way or the other, this will not interest you in the slightest. If you are someone that has grown sick of hearing about Others and the Smoke Monster and a million other things you can't begin to understand, then I invite you to walk away now lest you decide to virtually chuck tomatoes at me. When it comes down to it, I'm committing myself to doing this "experiment" (I guess it is more of an exercise) for no one but myself. Well, maybe that is a lie, because who knows what theories/ideas I will inadvertently spread and... um... my non-LOST friends will probably thank me for having somewhere else to dump these conversations.

So enough of my usual long-winded text, let me get down to it: I randomly decided to re-watch the LOST pilot the other day and it of course made me want to keep watching from the beginning. Unfortunately, I'm also following it in "real-time," meaning last night I watched "Sundown" with amazed eyes and creeped out ears. However, while re-watching "Solitary" (Sayid's first flashback episode) I realized how amazing it would be to follow that with this year's season premiere. This show is certainly a well-crafted series of layered novels in disguise as a television series. Maybe that is why I'm drawn to it. Even in the "bad episodes," the writing is something to admire. To date, the only other television series which has managed to capture me the way LOST did in the beginning is what I've seen so far of "Caprica" after happening to catch the pilot's re-airing prior to the series' premiere on SyFy. That, however, is another post.

What will I be doing exactly? I think it might be fun and interesting to re-watch the series while watching this last season, comparing what happened before with what is going on now. I will try not to put spoilers for future episodes anywhere (I went 9 months without reading one, but since this season's premiere I've succumbed to temptation a few times), but if I do I will give fair warning. However, if you are not caught up to the latest newly aired episode then do not expect to be unspoiled. For the record, I'm currently on eastern standard time but do not always get to watch the episode the night it first airs due to unreliable access to cable. I've been lucky lately, but Hulu and ABC.Com work just as well!

So stay tuned... or keep reading... or whatever. Go visit another web page or order a pizza. You have free will, right?

Being a Writer in the Real World Kinda Sucks

Earlier today a friend was telling me about a new project she is working on and after very excitedly talking about it she ended things with a statement that she assumed I thought she was crazy. My response? "You're not crazy. You're just a writer."

While it may be true that many artists, writers, musicians, comedians, etc. do have some serious issues, in reality... who doesn't? The thing is that anyone that does anything which is creative tends to be a little more passionate about things. Plus, with creativity comes the things that are created. To me, her descriptions weren't weird because I've been spending my spare time working on my "Once Upon a Mushroom" project. I've been writing about a gnome going on an adventure with a talking dog, and that really isn't that insane compared to other works out there. Furthermore, it isn't even subject matter which makes the creative types seem a little nutty, it is the insane amount of research, note-taking, and even doodling that occurs in conjunction with it.

So while she was telling me how vast the amount of notes she has for her project it just seemed normal to me since, well, I created a wiki for OUaM because I had too many notes myself to keep track of. Heck, part of why I have so much junk in my house to sort through is because I have over 18 years of journals, sketch books, note pages, and so forth of my creations laying around. Knowing me, there's probably even a notepad tucked away in the kitchen somewhere that has the description of the main villain from "Shadow in the Mirror" (and don't get me started on how many dot matrix printouts and type-written pages that probably still exist at my parents' house).

However, the biggest issue with being a writer is that you tend to also wish you could write out your real life (and since I also used to do a lot of work with video editing and directing, I tend to also think of things in screenplay form many times). I have sadly found that I can (generally) figure out major and minor plot details in most movies and television series I watch just based on the tried and true devices as well as the writer's (and director's) styles. Sure sometimes I'm happily proven wrong, but more often than not I find myself realizing I could see the story unfold just from a mere plot summary.

Valentine's Day is right around the corner right now, and with it comes so many movies and shows about hardships in love. In the end, it is almost always a happy ending. Guy/Girl does something stupid to push other guy/girl away, a bunch of stuff happens, either guy/girl meets another guy/girl who starts out as a foil but ends up their "true love," or the original couple get back together. There is almost always a misunderstanding, but in the end people tend to live happily ever after (unless there's a sequel, or badly written fanfiction). Real life, sadly, doesn't work that way, and even the movies where it shows relationships more realistically still have the whole condensed-timeline thing working for them.

While pretty much everyone I know thinks "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" is one of the funniest movies they've seen, I ask them to imagine if it unfolded in real time. (By now, you should have seen it so I don't care about spoilers!) If we actually had to live through the time she was apart from the man she loved, because her own family didn't like the idea and wanted her to be with a "nice Greek man," would we still have laughed as hard? Being forced to not be with someone you love is not exactly a pleasant feeling. And yes, "Titanic" (again, you should have seen this already) didn't exactly have a happy ending but imagine how much worse that'd be living not only through the disaster, but going on all those years not being able to tell anyone the truth and knowing your (for all intents and purposes) "true love" died before you could spend your lives together. Every day, people deal with relationship roadblocks, however big or small, that they can't get over right away. I know people who were together over thirty years ago, remarried and had kids over the years, and then found their way back to each other recently. Sounds like good fodder for a story, right? Well, of course, but no one is going to want to wait thirty years for that pay-off in a movie (even soap operas don't spend much time on things anymore).

Right now, I'm going through one of the most adult things I've ever had to deal with in my entire life. Something I can't run away from, even though it'd be so easy to do it. How it makes it "adult" is the fact that I'm owning up to all the facts and dealing with it instead of being a coward. My entire life is changing, some for the better and maybe some for the worse, but the rest is still up in the air. There are certain things which are known to be true, and other things which are variables that could destroy that. Since no one can predict the future, no one knows how to proceed because at this point any answer could be the wrong one. Hindsight is 20/20, right? That is part of the problem: We can look back and figure out where things went wrong and how they could have been fixed, but since we're in the now that is impossible. All that can be done is to move forward and see what happens. Day by day, little by little, until the answer reveals itself. Now, if my life were a movie, I'd already know the ending. Of course, depending on the genre there would be several possibilities, but I'd have it figured out already. I'd know the outcome based on everything that has been given so far. Sadly, real life isn't some cliche (well, not usually). Plus, if you just edited out the time it takes between decisions and occurrences, these moments in life would still be a movie you could figure out.

Maybe I'm just rambling now, but to me at least it all makes sense. Trust me, there is not a moment that goes by in my life that I don't have set to music somewhere in the back of my head, with narration going and an idea of where I'd possibly take things if it were actually a story I was working on. That is just how I roll.

I'm a writer, and it does make me crazy sometimes. Then again, you kind of have to be.

"Once Upon a Mushroom"

I decided to jump right in and create a Facebook fan-page for my new project: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Once-Upon-a-Mushroom/248607449725

I hope to get back to you all with some better updates. Right now, "Real Life" is cray hectic. I'm hoping this helps, though.