The Uneaten Feast

Every so often, everyone needs a good cry. Not necessarily because of any one thing, although those are good, too, but every once in a while, after a lot of little tiny things build up and build up, sometimes you just need to let the dam go and let the tears out.

Well, I hadn't had a cry in a while, and this morning, I was thinking (quite randomly, I have no idea why) of a friend of mine, Shannon, and suddenly there are all these tears on my face.

So I stood in my room for a while, in the gray of the morning (it  had to have been about seven or so) and let the tears out. I didn't really have a reason for it, other than that I missed Shannon, and all the other people that thinking of Shannon reminded me of, and it occurred to me that people are a bit like Champagne bottles. Life shakes us and shakes us and then with one shake too many the cork comes flying out. Waste of good Champagne, usually. Needs to be drunk right away, if it doesn't all get lost in fizz.

I didn't have anyone to share champagne with this morning, which might have been part of the reason I lost my cork, so to speak. How much of who we are and how many of our gifts get lost in fizz when we don't have someone to share them with?

Hence the poem. Haven't written a poem in a good long while, but here it is. It's called The Uneaten Feast. I suppose, on a second read, it could be rather innuendo-laden, but it's really meant about friendship.


Like a cask full of spirits
stoppered to keep them in
so is a human heart straining its staves.

The sky was gray and the rain was soft on my window
and as the sky was weeping so I was weeping

I am a cask that has not been tapped
I am a drum stretched too tight
I am a loaf that waits to be split
I am a candle that has not been burned.
I am a stone turned in a strange river, and no other stone knows me.
I am a feast at which no friend eats.

The wine in the cask is rich with waiting
and the heart in me is weak with wanting
Take a chair at my table and let us drink together
And the warmth of my spirits will be warmth for yours.

Watchman Says "All's Well!"

Well, all's well that ends well, I think.

Since my last post, I declined the school job in the city that I really didn't want, accepted and started a job at a local museum that actually pays better than the city job would have in the long run, and began one of my two volunteer opportunities. Last weekend I attended a local Revolutionary War reenactment event and decided those were the people I would really like to be spending my time with, so I've got paperwork out to join the Northwest Territory Alliance so I can join their artillery unit and learn how to properly load and fire a nine-pound cannon, what Jack Aubrey might call a bow-chaser (were it on one of his ships.)

Revolutionary War Days was, in a word, amazing. I was struck at this event, as I have never been before, by the hospitality and openness shown by the reenactors and their families. The willingness to speak about their costumes, historical personalities, campsites, and all things in between was wonderful and welcoming. My dad and I spent ten minutes talking to a guy from Indiana with the Brunswicker regiment about German immigration and settlement patterns. This guy didn’t know us from Adam, but just by dint of us taking two steps into the campsite to admire some folding camp stools, he came over (abandoning his lunch) to talk to us. I’ve been to a lot of these events, but that’s never happened before, and it gave me a really good feeling about joining the reenactment game.

I’ve wanted to join a reenactment society for a long time. A LONG time. But there’s something really, really intimidating about approaching people in costume (people who look like they have made these events their life’s work) with the intent of asking them if you can join their party. I’ve always felt so very, very underqualified. No, I don’t already practice a historic trade. I can’t sew. I can’t even give you more than a grade-school level time-line of this war and some names and apocryphical anecdotes that are probably wrong anyway. I’d still like to join your club.

It’s a hard question for someone like me, who has a genetic need to go into an endeavor knowing everything, to ask, both because I know I know next to nothing and I hate having to admit that. I’ve long felt that in order to join one of these communities, I needed an in – someone already in the group with whom I could latch on, barnacle-like, and sneak into club meetings. Pretty much what I need is a reenactment apprenticeship. Actually, I need a sewing apprenticeship first, but I’ll take what I can get. And reenactment friends are not exactly a dime a dozen. The reason I was attending Revolutionary War days was because I had finally found such a person – a co-worker from my summer job, Jack, a retired teacher and sergeant for Hamilton’s Own Artillery, the local arm of the Northwest Territory Alliance specializing in artillery. Jack was just where I knew I would find him – right next to the guns, explaining his heart out. (Jack and I are very much alike in this way – we put ourselves wherever we will probably have a chance to lecture someone.) We talked for a while about this and that, and he said that when I was ready I should shoot him an email (pun not intended) to get in touch with their group commander instead of going through the NWTA’s website.

But in the midst of this bounty of blessings, something inside me is still reticent about the whole reenactment business. Maybe it’s the feeling of outsider-ness. Maybe it’s the horror stories I’m hearing from the educators at the museum where I work. What if I’m a total Revolutionary war failure? What if I want to join the local World War Two reenactment group (when I find it) or the SCA? Is that considered defecting? Do I get court-martialed for that? Drummed out of the army? Or, god forbid, tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail? (If they’re the super-serious types my co-workers warned me about, option three sounds the most likely, in the interest of continuing historical accuracy.)

Making New Friends (I Hope.)

One of the wonderful things about summer vacation is that one finally has time to do fun things with fun people.

Unless, of course, one has all the time in the world…and no people to spend it with.

Now that I’ve finished college, I feel like the next several months of my life, hot or not, are going to be like one long summer break – friends in distant climes, family busy elsewhere, and little old me, stuck with nothing to do and no one to do it with.

I tried really hard to find something to do with my time. I checked out a boatload of books from the library. I bought 20 feet of rope and tried to learn how to do decorative knotwork. I started watching the birdfeeder in my backyard and identifying birds. But all these activities are things I can do alone, and after a month, I’m bored. I have one friend within driving distance of my house, and to be honest, we’ve been friends for so long I’m not sure how we’re still friends with each other. Our tastes are totally different.

So, in order to solve this problem, I took it first to the person to whom I present all my problems – my mother. She told me to join a book group. Easy enough. Now I have to FIND a book group, so I turn on my computer and google “Book Groups Near REDACTED HOMETOWN.”

What I discover is a lovely little site called Meetup, an online forum/water cooler of sorts for people who want to find (or start) groups of their own to, you know, meet up, and do things. And to be sure, I found a few I thought would be cool. (Renaissance dance? Sure, I want to learn renaissance dance! Sign me up!)

Unfortunately for me, one of the perks of living near a big city is also a problem – you live NEAR a big city, not IN the big city. I can’t drive 45 minutes to a strange part of Chicago to go to Renaissance dance practice, and it’s far enough away from downtown that I can’t take the train, either. I was finding all sorts of meetups left, right and center, and every single one of them was in the CITY, right where I couldn’t get. Get me an apprenticeship with someone who can help me navigate the city bus system, and that might change, but for now, I’m marooned out in the suburbs and I still don’t have anything to do.

I also seem to have proved that nothing ever happens in the suburbs. My life is full of fail and loserness.

So I took my problem to the other person to whom I present all my problems – my dad. My ever-so-helpful father was amazed that I hadn’t heard of Meetup before. ( I lived on a college campus, Dad – if I wanted to meet people I shouted down the hall or baked a loaf of bread and left the door open.) He suggested that if I couldn’t find a group, I should just start one of my own instead.

A brilliant idea, to be sure – but what did I want a group about? Birdwatching? Science fiction? Women’s issues? Writing fanfiction? A steampunk discussion group? I can’t start a group based on something I WANT to learn about. I feel like I have to chose a topic I already know a little about and move from there.

I’ve been trolling around and one of the ideas I keep coming back to is the Book and Movie club, where every month (or whatever) you read a book and then get together to watch the film adaptation and discuss the book and the movie. I can do that. I like books. I like movies. I like comparing the two, and I'm sure some other people do, too. I'd even take suggestions from other people. We could host it on a rota.

Does anyone have any other ideas? My hobbies seem to be brilliantly idiosyncratic.

When Worlds Collide

In string theory, the universe is given as being composed on a gigantic membrane, a large flat surface that ripples, flows, and in some cases, runs into other membranes like it, causing the universes (yes, in string theory there are multiple universes) to collide. If you watch Fringe, you know that funky things happen when universes collide, like what happened in last week's episode, Jacksonville.

Yeah, I know, string theory. Something you probably thought would never be mentioned on this blog. But it's interesting stuff, though, really. If you are looking for a book, I recommend The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. Good stuff.

Back out in the real world, we don't necessarily have worlds colliding on a quantum level, but I at least have my internet life and my real life colliding quite a bit this week over the matter of reviews.

Normally I'm pretty open about the fact that I lead this 'other life' on the internet. I write a blog that I love to tell everyone about. I use Facebook. I Skype. I write a lot of fanfiction. And, perhaps more importantly about the fanfiction, I review other people's stuff. Not as much anymore as I probably should in order to remain an active and participating member of my community, but enough. And I start running into trouble when people from my real life outside the internet tell me they'd like me to read their stories and review them.

Okay, that's not the troubling part. The troubling part is when I read them and I don't like them.

It's one thing to get a review from someone you don't know saying "I didn't like this for reasons A, B, and C listed below" and another thing entirely when you get a review from someone you DO know saying "I don't like your story for reasons A, B, and C listed below." When someone asks you to read something in person you feel obligated to like it and say nice things.

Especially troubling is when the person you're reviewing for is older than you (so theoretically you should be defering to them in matters of style and expierience) and you have more experience in the online community. I've been writing (and publishing, the publishing-and-exposing-for-critique part is important) online for six years -- the person in question has been writing and publishing online, as far as I can tell, for two.

Let me explain for the fanfiction laypeople in the audience-- In the online community, because many participants lack what in the real world might be called credentials to show that they're experinced in the field and because the age of the participants ranges across such a wide continuum, legitimacy is defered to those members of the community who have been participating the longest. I've been writing for six years. I have well over three hundred reviews on those stories, with several of them having a chapter to review ratio of 1 to 20. Chapter to review ratios mean that not only have a lot of people read it, but a lot of people have liked it enough to review. It's one thing to have a hundred chapters and six hundred reviews -- that's six reviews a chapter. Nothing special. It's another thing to have twelve chapters and 150 reviews. That's twelve reviews a chapter, a much more respectable number. The LOTR rewrite is averaging seven or eight reviews a chapter, not surprising given that the fandom is large and the original population has moved on to writing and reviewing other things.

Ergo, six years of writing fanfic and review ratios like that give me...well, I don't know, something like a bachelor's degree, maybe even a master's degree equivalent in fanfiction. At least that's what I like to think of it as.

And so we're at a bit of an impass. I'm supposed to defer to her in real life, but in online life, she should be defering to me. Meaning it's going to be hard for her to take my critique and it's going to be hard for me to give it. I don't want to write a long and disinterested review because for reasons of online etiquette no one gives those disinterested reviews and for reasons of proximity I don't want to tell her flat out that I didn't like it because then she can come up to me in person and say "Why?"

I'm also having the same problem not with fanfiction but with editing and workshopping we're supposed to be doing for my Writing Essays course. This week we turned in copies of our essays to our workshop groups and this afternoon we'll be getting together to discuss revisions. There are three other people in my group.

I had no problem finishing and editing two of the essays.

The third was a disaster. Okay, maybe I'm overstating a little bit. The first two were funny, relatable. The third was...an essay. We had a topic, and Essayist Number Three wrote about his topic. It was neither funny nor engaging nor even very well written. It was words on a page, and they weren't even cleverly placed. And I don't know how I'm going to tell him that in workshop today after I'm in raptures about the other two essays.

Anyway, we'll report back this afternoon and tell you how it went. Meanwhile, I think I'm going to type up my notes to my online/real-life freind and see how rocky that road gets. Maybe worlds colliding won't have to be a diaster after all.