![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garranOkay! I originally wanted to post this, complete, as one piece, but that's getting ridiculous, so since I finally have a fair section done, I figure I may as well post that much. With luck, more shall follow.
(This was begun last Wednesday, which is why it occasionally behaves a little schizophrenic about which day it's being written on.)
I'd imagined before the trip that J. might take the day or two at his house post-con to show me around town, or take me to meet some of his friends; in fact (aside from the very pleasant time hanging around and talking with the other Detroit-based group[1] and J.'s family), Monday and the first half of Tuesday were spent lounging around, reading and watching anime. This was also pleasant; I have no complaints. Tuesday afternoon around 4:00 eastern, cola and I said goodbye to J. at the airport, and, at 11:00 Pacific, were finally waved on by the distinctly unimpressed customs officer[2] and into Vancouver. I am home.
(The anime we watched were the first volumes of: Read or Die TV, which I seem to have liked better than J. - it didn't please me so much the first part of the OAV, and none of the characters evoke such fondness as Yomiko (Maggie and perhaps Nenene come closest), but it was still more than pleasant enough to make up for this if unlike the OAV it cares about its plot - and Witch Hunter Robin, which I seem to have liked better than cola, at least inasmuch as I want to watch the rest of it. The tone of it was stuck in my head through the whole plane ride, and there's something about the title character that catches at me.)
It was strange, this morning, to wake up in my own bed, and it's strange to think that I can't just take a short walk to see so many of the people I talk to regularly anymore. As often when I take a grand trip, I marvel at how intense it was; a weekend is a very short percentage of my life to have generated such a concentration of memories. And for an unlikely, very recent moment, I was living that.
J. is organizing a Waitility group travelogue, to which I intend to contribute, but it feels worthwhile as well to write a specific personal account, my perspective undiluted, so I'm making a slow attempt to do that here. It also provides me a place to make observations to my weblog even though I've already mentioned them to everyone with exactly the same phrasing, like, "talking with _Quinn and J. in person is remarkably congruent with talking to them textually," and, "the people who keep me up all night online do the exact same thing in person".
There were a couple major examples of this latter phenomenon. The first was Wednesday, the night I arrived, after we'd all eaten dinner, _Quinn had been dropped at his motel, five minutes or so of furious BarkingAtJay had been placated, and cola and I had in fact been put to bed at some sensible hour, like midnight. I lay awake in bed for about fifteen minutes, and during that time had a minor epiphany: that as solid and real as meeting J. and _Quinn had been, the rest of the trip would be as well. I'd been having little realizations like that about Otakon almost regularly, for months, that it would be realer than I'd heretofore been supposing, and each time I thought that I'd finally noticed that it really would happen, until a starker understanding replaced that. This was probably as close as I was going to get to anticipating it before the real thing pushed all expectations aside, I thought, and after considering that for a time I decided I'd like to share it with someone; I knew J. was still up.
And then, three hours (and much quiet conversation, computer use and manga-borrowing on my part) later, we were both still up, gleefully dumping out a packet of iced cream sandwiches[3] so that we could cannibalize the box as an appropriately sugar-imbued cardboard backing for our freshly printed cutout Wizards of Kitty[4].
(May I mention that the stroke of genius to put one's WoK in the back of one's badge, so that it showed when the badge flipped around, was first my idea? I may? Thank you. The badge was designed to spin freely, so it flipped constantly; in a strong breeze, it spun like a windmill.)
The second came Friday when, after watching the anime music videos[5], I found myself in a group of Megatokyo folks planning to go to the rave; wanting still to socialize, but not being the dancing sort, I borrowed J.'s phone and called Alpicola to see if he and Rachan were doing anything interesting. Apparently, what they were doing was inviting people like me to their hotel. J. decided to walk me over to their room (#1223, as will remain burned into my memory for who knows how long), though whether for some sort of fraternal concern for me or a desire to stretch his storklike legs[6] a bit in fresh air and relative solitude before losing himself in fervent bacchanal, I don't recall if he said; perhaps a combination. He took his leave shortly after we got there.
(Sidenote - I referred to just about everyone I met by their handles, and still in person found myself thinking of them by such rather than their real names (the exception perhaps being Alpicola, whom I find it a little easier to think of as 'Rob' now); this held true even in cases like Caduceuskun and codepoetica, both of whose civilian names had far fewer syllables. Similarly, I had a few remarks about how firmly I remained Garran. I was pretty comfortable with this[7], though upon getting home I found myself in a sort of reacclimatization where I thought of myself in the third person by my real name a lot.
For some reason, though - and I'm really not sure why; perhaps just because I had occasion to say it a lot (and I wondered if I ought to? hm) - I quickly became self-conscious about saying the name-pair "Alpicola and Rachan", and I'm aware on a couple of occasions of having sought out ways to avoid saying it, without actually avoiding referring to them.)
The room gathering contained the core four whose room it was[1], Nathanbp and Tanetris, with briefer appearances by Izuko and the elusive 'Dani', glimpsed there in realtime for the first time. During the first five minutes or so, I jumped over Izuko's legs (he wouldn't let me by), and then crawled under his chair to get out; I didn't think I was particularly graceful in either of those things, but it was in response to this, if you've been wondering, that Tanetris started referring to me as a ninja. (Izuko is, along with Brentdax, one of the people who startled me because I was subconsciously expecting them to look like their avatars. He's also a pathological liar (or else the secret identity of Rumiko Takahashi, in which case, apparently Chibi Usa has appeared in PGSM).)
Much conversation ensued - this was probably one of the most, hm, vital social occasions of the weekend, familiarity not having imbued the semi-laconicism that it often has with the Waitility folks - and people let me sing to them, after which, to my astonishment, they thanked me (except for Shannon, who glared icy daggers of hate at the back of my head). It got later and later, and I somehow failed to become tired (or bored); finally, around 4:30, people began to fall asleep, which I took as a polite suggestion that it was probably time for me to get back to my own hotel. I hugged people and departed, getting briefly lost as I set off east thinking it was south but recovering with the help of the con schedule's map, and staggered in at last to my own bed, where I discovered that I was tired after all.
Thursday
I've now been through both Ohio and Pennsylvania for the first time, though I don't think I could make any statements about what it's like to live in either state, as we passed through no habitable areas, but only the interstate and rest stops. The rolling, wooded landscape of each was both pretty and relatively familiar; I was surprised, though maybe I shouldn't have been, at how little there was in the average window-view to remind me that I was in a foreign nation (compared to what it's like to drive through the western American deserts, for example), though the occasional huge flags, exotic license plates[8] and subtly deformed prices and speed limits helped to correct for this. My place at the back amid the various CD collections quickly earned me the moniker 'DJ Garran', but I think I need to grow more adept at reading the mood of a vehicle and matching it in music before I can wear it with pride; I also wish I'd realized that my fellows wouldn't want to listen to the same band twice before I spent my opportunity to educate _Quinn on the Beatles on Revolver, when I had Abbey Road, possibly my favourite album, in the car.
"This is an automated parking garage. Please pay in the second floor elevator lobby before returning to your vehicle..."
Our good luck travelling Thursday left looking satisfied with itself as we were standing in the preregistration line. Too hot for any conversation very lengthly or involved, but generally heartened by the peculiarly joyful sight of so many otaku in one place, I stood, endured, and coped in little ways, like standing in J.'s shadow, until we came to the place shortly before the entrance where the building belched blessed air-conditioning, like a save-point before the final boss. You could hear a collective sigh rise up as new sections of the line stepped unexpectedly into its area of effect.
(A minor vigil for people I knew proved fruitless; aside from a morning phone call to Alpicola where it was decided not to bother coordinating our travels, and a later cryptic text message about how my eery double was lurking behind someone, dressed as Death (this turned out to be from Joshlamont), we had no contact with other Megatokyan travellers Thursday at all.)
Inside, the air-conditioning was everywhere, and I found myself much more comfortable except for how heavy my backpack was getting. From the ranks on ranks of potential badges, I chose the Risky Safety version, both because it was the only anime depicted I had actually seen and because I thought the giant butterflies seemed vaguely poetic. Mission complete, we set off again[9] for Hagerstown, the hour-from-Baltimore town where we'd reserved a motel; our luck, of course, had already left without us.
"This is an automated parking garage. Please pay..."
I cravenly fell slept through a lot of what followed, so I can only describe disjointed pieces of it. There was a very long time where the car did not move, and was surrounded by many other cars in a similar predicament. After that was through, our procession by very small increments having brought us at last to the Hagerstown exit, J., _Quinn and special guest star, the Baffling Map, performed their homage to that excellent They Might Be Giants song, "They Got Lost". It was somewhere in the grumpy interplay around this last that J.'s phone rang, and the scamp talked on it for about five minutes before deigning to tell me that it was Rachel (my Rachel, con-present in plushie form, masamage on the forums; to be fair to J., he'd never gotten to speak to her by voice before, but I've always liked calling him a scamp).
Talking to Rachel is very pleasant; we smiled at each other with our voices for a while and I told her about how I was exhausted but excited, and after everyone had some time talking to her (and we'd managed to locate our motel) the whole car was cheerful enough again that when it was determined that the only nearby place to take our final meal was a Burger King, no one even burst into tears (I kid). Cola stayed in the car, though.
Odd things that happened in the Burger King:
1. As J. and I watched in mute astonishment, the serving lady took two waiting packets of fries which were clearly ours and, as though it were the most casual thing in the world, dumped them into the garbage. At length, substitutes were provided.
2. The Sega agents after _Quinn had cleverly sabotaged one of the drink dispensing machines (by removing the nozzles and possibly putting up some sort of 'Out Of Order' sign we ignored), and when J. went to get a Sprite, the Sprite very nearly got him.
That night I fell asleep on _Quinn's air mattress, which is yellow, and so heavy-duty that one needs a hair dryer to blow it up, though it had still deflated by the time I woke up.
---
(End Act 1, "In Which Garran Went To Sleep Several Times")
EYECATCH:
(An SD-Garran wanders out onto the screen, against a colourful pastel background; moments later, all 30 or so other MT people from the con surge in and pile on top of him. His hat, thrown into the air by the sudden turmoil, drifts slowly to the ground.)
"OTAKON REPAATO!"
(Coming up: Act 2, "In Which Garran Wakes Up At Least Once")
---
I'll leave the footnotes outside the cut, to tantalize you:
[1]: Alpicola, Rachan, Shannon and codepoetica.
[2]: Though not nearly as black-hearted and cantankerous as the one we encountered going out, who among his scowling at us and probably putting special marks on our customs declarations so that we'd get pulled aside and our bags searched later, asked in a tone of genuine incredulity, "Why would you want to go to Detroit?" The people who did the actual bag-searching were very pleasant, though, and one let me borrow his stapler.
[3]: These would be important later.
[4]: The actual construction of these, though, would be accomplished by J. alone over the long car rides to come. Well, alone if you don't count the scissors, gluestick, and eyeglasses, with which, there is a compelling argument, he is actually a sort of cyborg.
[5]: Which were interesting - I'd had very little experience with the medium before - but none of which were magnificent. I suspect that I'd have enjoyed the event rather more if I hadn't been seated next to strangers.
[6]: Has anyone not yet heard the statistic that J. is 6'5", and weighs the same amount that I do? I am absurdly proud of this, as though he were my own work.
[7]: It turns out that not only will I answer easily to Garran, but hearing it come up in conversation is enough to wake me from a minor doze.
[8]: For some reason, I saw something like five people from Florida.
[9]: After cola and I, ten minutes later, had realized that the reason we couldn't find _Quinn and J. was because they'd been ushered efficiently outside by staffpeople who somehow missed us, and _Quinn had given us a baffled look. Oh, and there was a brief interlude before that while the registration lady stared at my shiny BC driver's license in something like awe.
(This was begun last Wednesday, which is why it occasionally behaves a little schizophrenic about which day it's being written on.)
I'd imagined before the trip that J. might take the day or two at his house post-con to show me around town, or take me to meet some of his friends; in fact (aside from the very pleasant time hanging around and talking with the other Detroit-based group[1] and J.'s family), Monday and the first half of Tuesday were spent lounging around, reading and watching anime. This was also pleasant; I have no complaints. Tuesday afternoon around 4:00 eastern, cola and I said goodbye to J. at the airport, and, at 11:00 Pacific, were finally waved on by the distinctly unimpressed customs officer[2] and into Vancouver. I am home.
(The anime we watched were the first volumes of: Read or Die TV, which I seem to have liked better than J. - it didn't please me so much the first part of the OAV, and none of the characters evoke such fondness as Yomiko (Maggie and perhaps Nenene come closest), but it was still more than pleasant enough to make up for this if unlike the OAV it cares about its plot - and Witch Hunter Robin, which I seem to have liked better than cola, at least inasmuch as I want to watch the rest of it. The tone of it was stuck in my head through the whole plane ride, and there's something about the title character that catches at me.)
It was strange, this morning, to wake up in my own bed, and it's strange to think that I can't just take a short walk to see so many of the people I talk to regularly anymore. As often when I take a grand trip, I marvel at how intense it was; a weekend is a very short percentage of my life to have generated such a concentration of memories. And for an unlikely, very recent moment, I was living that.
J. is organizing a Waitility group travelogue, to which I intend to contribute, but it feels worthwhile as well to write a specific personal account, my perspective undiluted, so I'm making a slow attempt to do that here. It also provides me a place to make observations to my weblog even though I've already mentioned them to everyone with exactly the same phrasing, like, "talking with _Quinn and J. in person is remarkably congruent with talking to them textually," and, "the people who keep me up all night online do the exact same thing in person".
There were a couple major examples of this latter phenomenon. The first was Wednesday, the night I arrived, after we'd all eaten dinner, _Quinn had been dropped at his motel, five minutes or so of furious BarkingAtJay had been placated, and cola and I had in fact been put to bed at some sensible hour, like midnight. I lay awake in bed for about fifteen minutes, and during that time had a minor epiphany: that as solid and real as meeting J. and _Quinn had been, the rest of the trip would be as well. I'd been having little realizations like that about Otakon almost regularly, for months, that it would be realer than I'd heretofore been supposing, and each time I thought that I'd finally noticed that it really would happen, until a starker understanding replaced that. This was probably as close as I was going to get to anticipating it before the real thing pushed all expectations aside, I thought, and after considering that for a time I decided I'd like to share it with someone; I knew J. was still up.
And then, three hours (and much quiet conversation, computer use and manga-borrowing on my part) later, we were both still up, gleefully dumping out a packet of iced cream sandwiches[3] so that we could cannibalize the box as an appropriately sugar-imbued cardboard backing for our freshly printed cutout Wizards of Kitty[4].
(May I mention that the stroke of genius to put one's WoK in the back of one's badge, so that it showed when the badge flipped around, was first my idea? I may? Thank you. The badge was designed to spin freely, so it flipped constantly; in a strong breeze, it spun like a windmill.)
The second came Friday when, after watching the anime music videos[5], I found myself in a group of Megatokyo folks planning to go to the rave; wanting still to socialize, but not being the dancing sort, I borrowed J.'s phone and called Alpicola to see if he and Rachan were doing anything interesting. Apparently, what they were doing was inviting people like me to their hotel. J. decided to walk me over to their room (#1223, as will remain burned into my memory for who knows how long), though whether for some sort of fraternal concern for me or a desire to stretch his storklike legs[6] a bit in fresh air and relative solitude before losing himself in fervent bacchanal, I don't recall if he said; perhaps a combination. He took his leave shortly after we got there.
(Sidenote - I referred to just about everyone I met by their handles, and still in person found myself thinking of them by such rather than their real names (the exception perhaps being Alpicola, whom I find it a little easier to think of as 'Rob' now); this held true even in cases like Caduceuskun and codepoetica, both of whose civilian names had far fewer syllables. Similarly, I had a few remarks about how firmly I remained Garran. I was pretty comfortable with this[7], though upon getting home I found myself in a sort of reacclimatization where I thought of myself in the third person by my real name a lot.
For some reason, though - and I'm really not sure why; perhaps just because I had occasion to say it a lot (and I wondered if I ought to? hm) - I quickly became self-conscious about saying the name-pair "Alpicola and Rachan", and I'm aware on a couple of occasions of having sought out ways to avoid saying it, without actually avoiding referring to them.)
The room gathering contained the core four whose room it was[1], Nathanbp and Tanetris, with briefer appearances by Izuko and the elusive 'Dani', glimpsed there in realtime for the first time. During the first five minutes or so, I jumped over Izuko's legs (he wouldn't let me by), and then crawled under his chair to get out; I didn't think I was particularly graceful in either of those things, but it was in response to this, if you've been wondering, that Tanetris started referring to me as a ninja. (Izuko is, along with Brentdax, one of the people who startled me because I was subconsciously expecting them to look like their avatars. He's also a pathological liar (or else the secret identity of Rumiko Takahashi, in which case, apparently Chibi Usa has appeared in PGSM).)
Much conversation ensued - this was probably one of the most, hm, vital social occasions of the weekend, familiarity not having imbued the semi-laconicism that it often has with the Waitility folks - and people let me sing to them, after which, to my astonishment, they thanked me (except for Shannon, who glared icy daggers of hate at the back of my head). It got later and later, and I somehow failed to become tired (or bored); finally, around 4:30, people began to fall asleep, which I took as a polite suggestion that it was probably time for me to get back to my own hotel. I hugged people and departed, getting briefly lost as I set off east thinking it was south but recovering with the help of the con schedule's map, and staggered in at last to my own bed, where I discovered that I was tired after all.
Thursday
I've now been through both Ohio and Pennsylvania for the first time, though I don't think I could make any statements about what it's like to live in either state, as we passed through no habitable areas, but only the interstate and rest stops. The rolling, wooded landscape of each was both pretty and relatively familiar; I was surprised, though maybe I shouldn't have been, at how little there was in the average window-view to remind me that I was in a foreign nation (compared to what it's like to drive through the western American deserts, for example), though the occasional huge flags, exotic license plates[8] and subtly deformed prices and speed limits helped to correct for this. My place at the back amid the various CD collections quickly earned me the moniker 'DJ Garran', but I think I need to grow more adept at reading the mood of a vehicle and matching it in music before I can wear it with pride; I also wish I'd realized that my fellows wouldn't want to listen to the same band twice before I spent my opportunity to educate _Quinn on the Beatles on Revolver, when I had Abbey Road, possibly my favourite album, in the car.
"This is an automated parking garage. Please pay in the second floor elevator lobby before returning to your vehicle..."
Our good luck travelling Thursday left looking satisfied with itself as we were standing in the preregistration line. Too hot for any conversation very lengthly or involved, but generally heartened by the peculiarly joyful sight of so many otaku in one place, I stood, endured, and coped in little ways, like standing in J.'s shadow, until we came to the place shortly before the entrance where the building belched blessed air-conditioning, like a save-point before the final boss. You could hear a collective sigh rise up as new sections of the line stepped unexpectedly into its area of effect.
(A minor vigil for people I knew proved fruitless; aside from a morning phone call to Alpicola where it was decided not to bother coordinating our travels, and a later cryptic text message about how my eery double was lurking behind someone, dressed as Death (this turned out to be from Joshlamont), we had no contact with other Megatokyan travellers Thursday at all.)
Inside, the air-conditioning was everywhere, and I found myself much more comfortable except for how heavy my backpack was getting. From the ranks on ranks of potential badges, I chose the Risky Safety version, both because it was the only anime depicted I had actually seen and because I thought the giant butterflies seemed vaguely poetic. Mission complete, we set off again[9] for Hagerstown, the hour-from-Baltimore town where we'd reserved a motel; our luck, of course, had already left without us.
"This is an automated parking garage. Please pay..."
I cravenly fell slept through a lot of what followed, so I can only describe disjointed pieces of it. There was a very long time where the car did not move, and was surrounded by many other cars in a similar predicament. After that was through, our procession by very small increments having brought us at last to the Hagerstown exit, J., _Quinn and special guest star, the Baffling Map, performed their homage to that excellent They Might Be Giants song, "They Got Lost". It was somewhere in the grumpy interplay around this last that J.'s phone rang, and the scamp talked on it for about five minutes before deigning to tell me that it was Rachel (my Rachel, con-present in plushie form, masamage on the forums; to be fair to J., he'd never gotten to speak to her by voice before, but I've always liked calling him a scamp).
Talking to Rachel is very pleasant; we smiled at each other with our voices for a while and I told her about how I was exhausted but excited, and after everyone had some time talking to her (and we'd managed to locate our motel) the whole car was cheerful enough again that when it was determined that the only nearby place to take our final meal was a Burger King, no one even burst into tears (I kid). Cola stayed in the car, though.
Odd things that happened in the Burger King:
1. As J. and I watched in mute astonishment, the serving lady took two waiting packets of fries which were clearly ours and, as though it were the most casual thing in the world, dumped them into the garbage. At length, substitutes were provided.
2. The Sega agents after _Quinn had cleverly sabotaged one of the drink dispensing machines (by removing the nozzles and possibly putting up some sort of 'Out Of Order' sign we ignored), and when J. went to get a Sprite, the Sprite very nearly got him.
That night I fell asleep on _Quinn's air mattress, which is yellow, and so heavy-duty that one needs a hair dryer to blow it up, though it had still deflated by the time I woke up.
---
(End Act 1, "In Which Garran Went To Sleep Several Times")
EYECATCH:
(An SD-Garran wanders out onto the screen, against a colourful pastel background; moments later, all 30 or so other MT people from the con surge in and pile on top of him. His hat, thrown into the air by the sudden turmoil, drifts slowly to the ground.)
"OTAKON REPAATO!"
(Coming up: Act 2, "In Which Garran Wakes Up At Least Once")
---
I'll leave the footnotes outside the cut, to tantalize you:
[1]: Alpicola, Rachan, Shannon and codepoetica.
[2]: Though not nearly as black-hearted and cantankerous as the one we encountered going out, who among his scowling at us and probably putting special marks on our customs declarations so that we'd get pulled aside and our bags searched later, asked in a tone of genuine incredulity, "Why would you want to go to Detroit?" The people who did the actual bag-searching were very pleasant, though, and one let me borrow his stapler.
[3]: These would be important later.
[4]: The actual construction of these, though, would be accomplished by J. alone over the long car rides to come. Well, alone if you don't count the scissors, gluestick, and eyeglasses, with which, there is a compelling argument, he is actually a sort of cyborg.
[5]: Which were interesting - I'd had very little experience with the medium before - but none of which were magnificent. I suspect that I'd have enjoyed the event rather more if I hadn't been seated next to strangers.
[6]: Has anyone not yet heard the statistic that J. is 6'5", and weighs the same amount that I do? I am absurdly proud of this, as though he were my own work.
[7]: It turns out that not only will I answer easily to Garran, but hearing it come up in conversation is enough to wake me from a minor doze.
[8]: For some reason, I saw something like five people from Florida.
[9]: After cola and I, ten minutes later, had realized that the reason we couldn't find _Quinn and J. was because they'd been ushered efficiently outside by staffpeople who somehow missed us, and _Quinn had given us a baffled look. Oh, and there was a brief interlude before that while the registration lady stared at my shiny BC driver's license in something like awe.
