X-Message-Number: 19062
From: "Mark Plus" <>
Subject: Effective dreamers versus SF fans
Date: Mon, 13 May 2002 14:28:08 -0700

A few years ago on the A&E cable channel I saw a documentary profiling 
people who had chosen to undergo "Human Transformations," as the show was 
titled.

One of them was an American woman named Cindy Jackson, 
<http://www.cindyjackson.com/>.  Cindy had grown up in a small farming town 
in Ohio, and as a child she decided after receiving her first Barbie doll 
that some day she would live the sort of life she imagined Barbie would have 
if she were real, -- a sort of life which was apparently not available in 
Ohio.

When Cindy came of age, she left Ohio and moved to London, where she thought 
a real-life Barbie would live.  For a few years Cindy scraped by on various 
jobs, including working as a rock musician.  In her late 20's she inherited 
some money from her father (I gathered she and her bucolic parents were 
somewhat estranged), and she decided to spend it on the first of a series of 
cosmetic operations to make her look more like Barbie.  I would describe her 
as plain-looking before her transformation, but certainly not unattractive.

Eventually Cindy was able to turn her experiences into a profitable 
cosmetic-surgery consultancy business, and has since then had the money to 
indulge in various aspects of her instantiated-Barbie fantasy, including 
being able to move in elite British social circles and attract glamorous 
boyfriends.  I'm not sure whether she's succeeded in finding her real-life 
Ken doll yet, however.

Another person profiled on the show was a guy who was thoroughly obsessed 
with "Star Trek."  You know: the sort of loser who has all the episodes and 
movies on videotape and a house full of Trek collectibles, dresses up in 
Trek costumes to attend conventions, and so forth.  The show presented his 
"lifestyle" as an attempt to live out the humanistic ideals of Gene 
Roddenberry's vision of the future, or something to that effect.

Now, after reflecting on both examples of human transformation, I concluded 
that both of these people had some serious emotional problems.  But I found 
myself respecting Cindy Jackson a lot more than the Trekker geek.  Cindy 
could have stayed in Ohio, married a blue-collar guy, let her weight balloon 
and spent her free time reading romance novels while imagining she was the 
Barbie-like heroine.  Instead, she has exerted herself against considerable 
odds to live out her personal dream, even if it seems a bit twisted to me, 
and to a certain extent she has succeeded.  I don't know if she considers 
herself "happy," of course, but she does have some tangible results to show 
for her efforts, including apparently wealth.

The Trekker guy, by contrast, couldn't possibly instantiate his dream in 
real life, given the way he defined it.  There's no "Starfleet Academy" to 
apply to.  If the majority of SF fans are like this guy, then it's not 
surprising that they aren't interested in cryonics.  They would rather live 
in their fantasy worlds than try to do something both unusual and 
extraordinarily hard in the real world.  People who have a personality more 
like Cindy Jackson's might be better candidates for cryonics marketing, if 
there were a way to identify them demographically.

Mark Plus

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