A Rediscovered Interest

Rewind a little more than 11 years, to December 2002. I was about six months pregnant with my son and about to begin the most difficult time of my life. I was not aware of that at the time though, as I sat down to watch the first episode of the new TV series "Firefly".

I remember thinking it was an excellent show, I liked everything about it. Unfortunately, it was the only episode I got to see, for reasons I would rather not go into. With too much other stuff going on in my life, that one bright spot just before the darkness fell faded to the back of my mind and was all but forgotten.

Fast forward to about a month ago. I watch TV very rarely. Anything I want to see is available online or on DVD so I just do not see the point. This evening I suddenly felt an inexplicable urge to turn the lightbox on for a while and is it happens I came into the middle of an episode of "Castle".

I liked it a lot. The dynamic relationships of the characters, the interesting cases, the mystery, the twist. The whole time I was watching though I kept thinking "why does that guy look so familiar?". After the episode I did a websearch for the show, found out the actor's name and looked up what else he had appeared in that I might recognise him from. A name on the wikipedia page stood out: "Firefly".

Suddenly the light from that lonely bright spot that had been pushed to the back of my mind for so long burst free. I remembered watching the pilot and how I had really enjoyed it, and after some searching I found a website where I could watch the whole series online. I was up all night watching all 14 episodes back to back and when the last episode ended, I looked up the movie "Serenity" and watched that to.

I spent the next week looking up information online about the series, the movie, the actors and other things they had done. Since it all got started with my watching "Castle" I looked up everything I could find about that show to.

This is how I became a "Fillionite". I discovered that Nathan Fillion is not only an extraordinary actor, but also seems to be a genuinely good person. I dug up everything I could find online, old interviews, videos from convention appearances, anything really. The more I found out about him, the more creeped out I got though, because he seemed to be so much like myself.

Then I stumbled on some videos that featured his charity work, and discovered that he apparently cares about the same things I do: children's right to education and health care.

Despite my son having been born with a cleft palate, thus putting us into contact with medical professionals throughout his early childhood, I had never heard of "Operation Smile" until I saw the videos from Nerd HQ featuring Nathan Fillion. Right away I felt that this was a charity I could get behind and wondered why I had never heard of it before. A quick websearch showed that the charity has a Swedish branch, but I could find no mention of how to contribute other than an account number for sending donations.

I have found that this is typical for charities in Sweden. They rely entirely too much on word of mouth to spread their messages, then give you an account number or a deposit slip, and hope you will use it. I do not think the number of people who actually use that number or slip is as large as it should be.

I may not have an abundant income, but there are billions of people in the world that have less than I do and I always want to help when and where I can. So, today I sent in an application to Operation Smile Sweden to do whatever volunteer work I am qualified for. Because every child deserves a smile.