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 _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=19062