Why We Love The Doctor: Part I

In November, Doctor Who will celebrate its 50th anniversary. 

This is the first instalment of a series of me being an existental geek.

(For reference, I’ve so far only seen the Ninth and Tenth Doctors and the next episode I’m going to watch is “The Pandorica Opens”. I don’t like the Matt Smith portrayl that much yet, and David Tennant is, as they say, "My Doctor")

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The Doctor has three great enemies  the Daleks, of course, the Cybermen, and the one people leave out, himself. He is his own worst enemy.

A Dalek

Both the Daleks and the Cybermen have had their emotions removed.

The Daleks are a race bent on exterminating all things not Dalek. They’re little ugly one-eyed octopus looking things inside a robotic casing made of Dalekanium They are not impossible to escape—its just extremely very not likely. The creator of the Daleks took out their emotions to make them better fighters.  

A Cyberman

The Cybermen, on the other hand  are not alien. Sure, they were created in the alternate universe, but they are native, so to speak, to Earth. They are humans who have been “upgraded” by having their brains put into a metal suit and having emotions neutralized, because the man who created them found emotions to be too painful.

David Tennant as The Tenth Doctor

The Doctor’s most dangerous enemy is what attracts us to the show. Not only are we watching a man fight threats beyond our imaginations, we are watching a man fight himself. The Doctor is the last of his species. Although he is an alien (Gallifrey, in the constellation Kastaberous) he is exquisitely human. He looks like a human (or, as he puts it, humans look like Time Lords as Time Lords came first) As he puts it, being a Time Lord is “A sum of knowledge. A code. A shared history. A shared suffering” (The Doctor’s Daughter). Being a Time Lord was having a connection with your people that all humans long for. (People=members of the same species, relatively generic, human=Homo sapien) The Doctor had all of that, and he blames himself for its destruction in The Time War. He had it all, and now he has nothing at all. He grasps out for a companion all the time, knowing that they can stay with him forever, but he cannot stay with them forever: at the start of the most recent revival (2005), the Doctor is already 900 years old. No human can possibly live that long. He is truly and utterly alone in the world.

In Loving Memory of Mr. Baird

Yes, I already posted about his death, but as a mentor of mine, I think I can post twice. That, and it's my blog. This is his official obituary.

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Roderick A. Baird II of Pelham Manor, NY, educator and author, passed away on February 4th with dignity and grace surrounded by his loving family. He was 62 years old.

Born January 8, 1951 in Utica, New York, he was the son of Jane Baird and the late Roderick Anthony Baird of New Hartford NY. He was a loving friend and older brother to John Baird, Billy Baird, and Andrea Gilbertson. He is survived by his wife of 37 years Nancy, their 3 daughters Megan, Tara and Lesley and a granddaughter Genevieve. He is also survived by son-in laws John Sutton and Paul Tusting and several nieces and nephews

Rod had a long, successful, and fulfilling career. He spent over twenty-five years in the magazine business. He worked for The New Yorker from 1975 until 1988 in the advertising sales and marketing departments, rising to National Sales Director. In 1988, he founded SalesConcepts Associates, Inc., a national publishers rep firm that develops markets for consumer magazines. In 1996, looking further for an outlet that reflected both of his passions for athletics and media, Rod created The Natural Athlete LLC, a sports event-marketing group and magazine, The Natural Athlete. In 2000, he sold his majority interest in these companies to pursue his real passion, teaching. For the last eleven years Rod Baird has been a high school English teacher at Ardsley High School. His experiences in the classroom inspired his book, Counterfeit Kids: Why High School Students Can’t Think. Rod Baird was also an avid skier. He was a mogul freestyle coach and ski instructor at Stratton Mountain VT for more than 20 years. He has inspired kids of all ages to fall in love with skiing, to conquer their fears and most importantly to have fun. Rod Baird lived his life to the fullest and used every opportunity to learn and teach life’s lesson to his students.

Rod was an accomplished entrepreneur, educator and author but most of all he was a loving family man and friend.

Rod Baird graduated form New Hartford High in 1969, and in 1973 from St. Lawrence University with a BA. in English and German. He spent his junior year abroad attending the University of Vienna, Austria. He was a proud brother of the Beta Theta Pi Fraternity. It was his passion for literature and writing that led him to earn his MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College and latter obtained his teaching certification from Columbia University Teachers College.

A Little More Homework to Do

     IT MUST HAVE BEEN some crazy stunt to teach us about Theatre of the Absurd. After all, our teacher not showing up for three days during that unit, thus forcing us to do mindless sub-assigned busy work, would be just the thing to give a “real life example.” Mr. Baird never missed school.

     February became March, and then came the “permanent sub.” We knew it was something more severe than a funny little joke. We knew it was bad. Rod loved to teach. He sold a prosperous business to be able to do it. It was not something he was doing for his livelihood. And he was good at it, too. He made everything accessible, including himself. I cannot tell you how many times I spent lunch with him discussing how God is sick or dying, if still alive at all. He would rebut, as a devil’s advocate, and I would ask him why God has let children be raped. His suggestion was that these things all happen for a reason, so there must be a reason why my Existentialism in Literature teacher, Mr. Roderick A. Baird II, died of pancreatic cancer.

     I denied it. It could not be true. It just didn't make sense, at all, why he could be suffering. And I had just stopped cutting myself, in February, when he left— it must be as Beckett said it: the tears of the world must be in a constant quantity. And that is when I got angry. It must be my fault; after all, if I had not stopped my self-injury, there would not have been a tear to go to him. Or was it my theory proving right? Is it true that once a person knows how the world works on an existential level that they are despised and tortured by God? Every day, I am thankful that I never shared that theory with him. It seemed it was my fault that he had fallen ill. There was nothing to be done.

     I cried at night in bed for hours before sleeping, and once I fell asleep, I was awakened by The Dreams. Of holding him in my arms one last time. Of just seeing his face. Of his death. I was again in the undertow of depression.

     A person with a psychological history such as mine rarely believes in God, and I am no exception. But I prayed to God. For the first time in my life, I went to church. I asked God to heal him. I asked God to make it okay. I entered a hypomanic phase, believing that God is good and He would make it okay. As quickly as it came, it left, leaving me in a dysphoria.

     We, being myself and my psychologist, are finding that I do not suffer from just the symptoms bi-polar depression. I have a severe non-verbal disorder and ADD. Some put me on the autism spectrum  I exhibit traits of post-traumatic stress disorder. I live with Borderline Personality Disorder. And as it is that I have been experiencing the slings and daggers of these illnesses since a very young age, the weekly hour—which is never really enough—in a therapist’s office has been a source of reason and a time to reflect from a hectic life.

     Some people have epiphanies in the shower: I had this one on the couch of a PhD. I can learn more from Rod’s death than his life. I when I first told him I knew of his diagnosis, he asked me to make him a solemn promise. I promised him that when my depression came to haunt me, that I would push it away like the ugly intruder it is, and remember how much he loved being alive. That is his dying wish for me. To be happy. A man that only knew me for six months, I realized, in some capacity, loves me. It seemed a foreign concept. But there is more meaning than that to his death.

     Rod has finally assigned me some homework—something he was not exactly fond of in class. The assignment consists of this: I must learn what he wanted to, but will not be there to teach me. I must learn how to be truly happy even when there is immense sadness and tragedy in my life. I must learn the philosophy of Plato, read the works of Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Sartre, perform the lines eloquently penned by the Bard and the mysteriously perfect ones plays Beckett. I must, or at least attempt, to understand, why he had to leave the Earth so soon, and why it is going to be okay. After all, I know that a person cannot leave this earth until they have done what the Universe put them here to do.

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Rod Baird was born on January 8th, 1951 and 

passed with dignity and grace surrounded by his 

loving wife and daughters on February 4th, 2012.

     Rod Baird has been a high school English teacher for 

eleven years. He is a graduate of St. Lawrence University. He earned his MFA degree in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College and attended Teacher’s College/Columbia University.

     Before teaching, Mr. Baird worked for The New Yorker for many years, then founded Salesconcepts Associates, Inc., a national firm that develops markets for consumer magazines. Later he started The Natural Athlete LLC, a sports event-marketing group. In 2001, he sold his businesses to become a teacher.

     Mr. Baird is the author of Counterfeit Kids: Why They Can't Think and How to Save Them, available on Amazon.

A memorial mass will be held on Saturday, Feburary 16th at 10am at 

Our Lady of Perpetual Help, 559 Pelham Manor Road in Pelham Manor, NY.

In lieu of flowers, his family asks for donations made to: 

The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Pancreatic Center or The Stratton Mountain Clinic