TITLE: Dear Annie ("Singularity")
AUTHOR: Mara Greengrass
AUTHOR'S E-MAIL: fishfolk@ix.netcom.com. Feedback is better than chocolate.
PERMISSION TO ARCHIVE: Yes, just let me know.
CATEGORY: Gen
RATINGS/WARNINGS: G
SUMMARY: Hoshi writes home after the events of "Singularity."
DISCLAIMER: Enterprise and all its crew belong to Paramount and many other entities with expensive lawyers. I am making no profit from this story.
NOTES: Apologies if I got the name of Hoshi's dish wrong, it's just a guess. The cake is real, though. My husband made it for me once, and I've never forgotten it. My gratitude, as ever, to Captain Average, the superhero who likes hockey.
* * * * *
Dear Annie:
Do our obsessions define us in some weird way? I've always rather thought so, but if it's true, I'm not certain what to say about the past day or so, not sure what our unconscious minds have said about us.
It all had to do with radiation, T'Pol tells me, and a strange confluence of events involving a black hole, a trinary star system, and human physiology. (Doesn't that sound like the beginning to a really stupid Starfleet joke? "A black hole, a trinary star system, and an ensign walk into a bar...")
This strange kind of radiation--which T'Pol started describing but stopped when my eyes visibly glazed over--had a strange effect on the human prefrontal cortex, as well as its equivalent in Denobulans. All of us, except T'Pol, became absolutely obsessed by something, to the exclusion of everything else.
I know what you're thinking, that I became obsessed with some translation, some quirk of the universal translator, or some odd feature of a language. (Heck, you think I'm obsessed under *normal* circumstances!) But that wasn't it at all.
No, I became obsessed with cooking the perfect pot of udon. (The same dish my mom made the first time you came to visit, even after we explained the whole vegetarian thing. I'll never forget the look on your face when she said, "But it hasn't got any meat, just fish.")
You might be wondering why I was cooking in the first place. Well, Chef got sick, and since we were on our way to visit a stellar feature not noted for its language abilities, there wasn't a great deal for me to do. I thought cooking would give me a nice break, just like when I used to cook those elaborate dinners for everyone in order to avoid working on my dissertation. (I've never managed to exactly duplicate that three-layer Drambuie-soaked chocolate cake. Tracy keeps asking, though.)
What happened to everyone else? Let's see...the Captain spent all his time writing and rewriting the preface to a biography of his father, while poor Liz got it into her head that she needed to delete all of her personal letters and logs. (We're still trying to recover them.)
Trip designed the perfect Captain's chair, although he ended up scrapping his idea when the radiation wore off, and Phlox tells me he tried to redesign Travis' brain. I'm glad T'Pol got there in time to stop him.
Malcolm became obsessed with new security protocols, which I'm happy to say worked despite their odd cause, and Travis tells me he couldn't rid himself of the idea that he was going to lose his position on Enterprise for dereliction of duty. Oh, and though I haven't talked to him, I hear that Rostov became obsessed with cleaning his quarters, and ended up coming to blows with his roommate over it.
The question, I suppose, is whether these obsessions say something deep about our personalities, or did we simply become obsessed with whatever we happened to be doing when the radiation affected us? For instance, at any given moment, Malcolm is most likely to be working on our security protocols (although I would imagine he sleeps occasionally) and Trip is most likely to be tinkering with something. (It might have been worse: What if Trip had become obsessed with fixing the warp core and he'd somehow damaged it?)
I certainly used to use cooking as an escape, something you know I inherited from my mother and grandmother, so I suppose I could see how it could become an obsession. I don't generally think of Michael Rostov as the neatest person, but there may be something in his psyche I don't know about. Something to ponder in my spare time, I suppose.
Our salvation was the difference between human and Vulcan physiology, but I'll admit there's a small part of me that wonders what T'Pol might be obsessed by, given the push we received. Would it be her work, or is there some less logical passion roaming in her brain? Inquiring minds want to know.
But T'Pol wasn't affected, and when the rest of us finally collapsed over our obsessions, she discovered that the fastest route out of the radiation--the only one fast enough to save our lives--required two people to navigate through. Now, Travis was sedated, so he couldn't pilot, but I did wonder why she didn't pick the beta or gamma shift pilot.
Of course, Captain Archer is a damn good pilot, but I do think it's interesting that her first instinct was to get *his* help. More things to ponder in my spare time.
I'm happy to say that everyone has recovered well, just a few bumps and bruises. I'd love to write more, but Chef made me promise I'd come help him clean up the galley. I'm afraid I made a bit of a mess. Oh, and I've got to remember to apologize to Crewman Cunningham for my rude behavior.
Unfortunately, the poor guy made the mistake of trying to get between me and the perfect pot of udon.
Love,
Hoshi
AUTHOR: Mara Greengrass
AUTHOR'S E-MAIL: fishfolk@ix.netcom.com. Feedback is better than chocolate.
PERMISSION TO ARCHIVE: Yes, just let me know.
CATEGORY: Gen
RATINGS/WARNINGS: G
SUMMARY: Hoshi writes home after the events of "Singularity."
DISCLAIMER: Enterprise and all its crew belong to Paramount and many other entities with expensive lawyers. I am making no profit from this story.
NOTES: Apologies if I got the name of Hoshi's dish wrong, it's just a guess. The cake is real, though. My husband made it for me once, and I've never forgotten it. My gratitude, as ever, to Captain Average, the superhero who likes hockey.
* * * * *
Dear Annie:
Do our obsessions define us in some weird way? I've always rather thought so, but if it's true, I'm not certain what to say about the past day or so, not sure what our unconscious minds have said about us.
It all had to do with radiation, T'Pol tells me, and a strange confluence of events involving a black hole, a trinary star system, and human physiology. (Doesn't that sound like the beginning to a really stupid Starfleet joke? "A black hole, a trinary star system, and an ensign walk into a bar...")
This strange kind of radiation--which T'Pol started describing but stopped when my eyes visibly glazed over--had a strange effect on the human prefrontal cortex, as well as its equivalent in Denobulans. All of us, except T'Pol, became absolutely obsessed by something, to the exclusion of everything else.
I know what you're thinking, that I became obsessed with some translation, some quirk of the universal translator, or some odd feature of a language. (Heck, you think I'm obsessed under *normal* circumstances!) But that wasn't it at all.
No, I became obsessed with cooking the perfect pot of udon. (The same dish my mom made the first time you came to visit, even after we explained the whole vegetarian thing. I'll never forget the look on your face when she said, "But it hasn't got any meat, just fish.")
You might be wondering why I was cooking in the first place. Well, Chef got sick, and since we were on our way to visit a stellar feature not noted for its language abilities, there wasn't a great deal for me to do. I thought cooking would give me a nice break, just like when I used to cook those elaborate dinners for everyone in order to avoid working on my dissertation. (I've never managed to exactly duplicate that three-layer Drambuie-soaked chocolate cake. Tracy keeps asking, though.)
What happened to everyone else? Let's see...the Captain spent all his time writing and rewriting the preface to a biography of his father, while poor Liz got it into her head that she needed to delete all of her personal letters and logs. (We're still trying to recover them.)
Trip designed the perfect Captain's chair, although he ended up scrapping his idea when the radiation wore off, and Phlox tells me he tried to redesign Travis' brain. I'm glad T'Pol got there in time to stop him.
Malcolm became obsessed with new security protocols, which I'm happy to say worked despite their odd cause, and Travis tells me he couldn't rid himself of the idea that he was going to lose his position on Enterprise for dereliction of duty. Oh, and though I haven't talked to him, I hear that Rostov became obsessed with cleaning his quarters, and ended up coming to blows with his roommate over it.
The question, I suppose, is whether these obsessions say something deep about our personalities, or did we simply become obsessed with whatever we happened to be doing when the radiation affected us? For instance, at any given moment, Malcolm is most likely to be working on our security protocols (although I would imagine he sleeps occasionally) and Trip is most likely to be tinkering with something. (It might have been worse: What if Trip had become obsessed with fixing the warp core and he'd somehow damaged it?)
I certainly used to use cooking as an escape, something you know I inherited from my mother and grandmother, so I suppose I could see how it could become an obsession. I don't generally think of Michael Rostov as the neatest person, but there may be something in his psyche I don't know about. Something to ponder in my spare time, I suppose.
Our salvation was the difference between human and Vulcan physiology, but I'll admit there's a small part of me that wonders what T'Pol might be obsessed by, given the push we received. Would it be her work, or is there some less logical passion roaming in her brain? Inquiring minds want to know.
But T'Pol wasn't affected, and when the rest of us finally collapsed over our obsessions, she discovered that the fastest route out of the radiation--the only one fast enough to save our lives--required two people to navigate through. Now, Travis was sedated, so he couldn't pilot, but I did wonder why she didn't pick the beta or gamma shift pilot.
Of course, Captain Archer is a damn good pilot, but I do think it's interesting that her first instinct was to get *his* help. More things to ponder in my spare time.
I'm happy to say that everyone has recovered well, just a few bumps and bruises. I'd love to write more, but Chef made me promise I'd come help him clean up the galley. I'm afraid I made a bit of a mess. Oh, and I've got to remember to apologize to Crewman Cunningham for my rude behavior.
Unfortunately, the poor guy made the mistake of trying to get between me and the perfect pot of udon.
Love,
Hoshi