Trekathon: Boldly Go Without Sleep for 19 Continuous Hours
By Roz Young April 27, 2009
I was thinking about how crazy we are to watch all 10 Star Trek movies in a row. Then, because I haven’t slept much in the last two days, I decided to call this collection of ponderings “trek thoughts”, or troughts. Which made me giggle.
First of all, mere mortals would never consider this journey a possibility. They are limited to their little boxes of conformity and common sense. Sure, you can think of it as a waste of time and pointless sacrifice of gummy bears to our relentless snacking, but Matt and I can justify our mission: It’s for the website. We couldn’t pussy out after a few movies when the internets depend upon us. I mean, real geeks out there would never visit a website devoted to geekdom if the authors couldn’t watch 19 hours of straight Star Trek.
This is bigger than just two microbiologists and 12 litres of coke. This is our duty. It’s a holy pilgrimage. And when we rolled up off the couch, bloated with sugar, covered in bed sores, peeling our eyelids from their crusted lashes, we walked out into the light. The LIGHT, man. Literally, it was Saturday afternoon by the time we finished. But a sense of accomplishment greater than the general nausea and fatigue washed over me. We did it. We emerged geekier than ever from our Trekathon. And it feels good. Well except for the burning eyes and incessant throbbing in my frontal lobe, but I can handle that with some Tylenol and a nap.
We decorated cupcakes in honour of the Trekathon. If you touch the sprinkles you can communicate with other trekkies across the world, but then you have to eat that cupcake (microbiologist rule #3). Luckily, Matt owns the movies on DVD, or we were going to have to kick it old school and break out our VHS tapes. Nelson was busy hunting cables to make all of this possible.
Interesting angle on the sweets and treats. They are docked at the cooling rack, preparing for launch! The movies are stacked ominously behind the cupcakes. We started the first movie on my laptop while Matt made BBQ chicken and I tossed the salad (no dirty jokes are suggested here, that comes later). My sister and her boyfriend arrived shortly after permission to come aboard was granted (ok, you can laugh here if you want).
Well into the movie marathon, I stopped for a quick snapshot of me with the next movie. Amazingly, we got through the first four without even breaking a sweat. We did break down into hysterical giggles at Vger’s anatomically suggestive robotics. At this point, we started a pot of coffee and offered the late night movie gods an oreo sacrifice. This pleased them, and we continued on our relentless pursuit of Trek glory.
Matt and Brian flash me the international salute of geeks, Vulcan style. Notice they are staying hydrated and seem cheery and alert. They are also still sitting up, a condition which quickly degenerated at the start of Star Trek V. It’s unclear if it’s the fault of the late hour, or the movie itself, that caused several people to succumb to unconsciousness. Brian has the most Trek-like chair, which was unfortunately the least comfortable.
My husband sitting in the manliest chair in the room, the rocker. It’s a tribute to his love for Star Trek that he was awake through most of the movies. Usually he’s asleep in the first 3 minutes. Later he moved to the floor and gave up entirely. Notice his enginerd ring… Nelson was the go to guy for Trek questions, clearly having wasted much of his youth watching Star Trek when he could have been watching Star Wars. That’s right, I went there.
Much to Brian’s approval, I am lightly salting the popcorn. After seeing this picture, I think my lopsided bun makes my head look a little like the Borg queen’s. It’s a hot look. We made two bowls of popcorn, one with copious amounts of butter and one consumable by regular human beings. This was a great snack idea, because people were starting to get sick from the maximum warp sugar intake.
There’s no rest for the wicked, or the pathologically demented Star Trek fans, so we ran our popcorn upstairs and started the next movie. It’s still dark out, so you can’t tell that a light snow storm is developing outside. Luckily, that kept it dark out for another 4 hours. Perfect time to be inside snacking and watching movies. And yelling, “Khan!!” at irregular intervals.
Jean took up her spot on the floor, a dangerous and noble choice. Taking the floor spot for the team meant that she was the first to be abducted to sleep. Luckily, her earlier napping meant that she was going strong for the last 4 movies. She was also the least cranky and probably didn’t suffer from the thundering headache that the rest of us felt coming on at about 1pm the next day (18 hours of Trek).
The glasses are off. Matt’s on the down hill slope. We actually all considered the possibility of packing it in at one point, but that was just the sugar talking. We knew we could do it. Matt peeled himself up off the floor, poured himself a cup of coffee, and ate another half dozen cookies to shock his system back to red alert. We soldiered on. I admit that through Star Trek V and VI, I was in and out. It wasn’t real sleep, but I certainly don’t remember everything that happened.
Keplah! We are into the next crew! I was pretty alert for these last few movies. Nelson was gone like Kirk’s waistline. We noticed that even in these movies, men like to wear handkerchiefs. The inappropriate jokes continued. Although, we had to do less work to come up with them once Data met the Borg queen. Just nasty. Picard continues to be the awesome.
By the time it was Saturday and the sunlight was streaming in, we had lost all ability to form coherent sentences. Still, we continued to podcast and attempt to sound interesting. This picture showcases our state of tapioca brain power. I can only imagine how much we sound like two babbling idiots hung over from Romulan ale. Jean is in the background still eating cupcakes. Amazing!
The end! Our mission was a complete success. No red shirts were harmed in the making of this Trekathon! As we sat around and spun stories of the hilarity and narrow escapes from certain sleepiness, everyone agreed that it was well worth wasting a little bit of our lives to watch these Star Trek movies. We’ve even agreed to try out other movie marathons. Next stop, Harry Potter to gear up for the release this summer!