We're here, we're queer...wait a minute, where the hell are we?

Since I was already planning to leave from Boston, and since a carload of people is more interesting than a car without company, and since I wanted to make sure that at least a few people attended the panel on Furry as an identity category, I drove to Star Market and loaded up the Camry with some of the finest selection of Boston furs, and pointed the car west. verse immediately started to feel carsick, and apparently I was upset that I was having trouble hearing postrodent talk, as I kept trying to turn up the volume on the car radio to hear qer better. We couldn't find any Dramamine to help verse out at our first rest stop, and the Boston Chicken we found ended up somehow causing me some immediate digestive problems that meant a bit of an extra emergency stop, but we finally arrived the Central Inn in New Britain, the only place to stay in the whole town, I think. At $50 a night for a room with a king-sized bed, I didn't even care if they didn't replace the used disposable glasses for us when we were there. It was almost cheaper than the two Harvard parking tickets I'd already managed to acquire earlier in the day.

The conference was on a college campus just one local highway exit from the hotel so it was no trouble to get there. It took a while to find the actual conference, as the organizers had neglected to actually specify which building on this mostly-deserted campus they'd be in. We eventually found the poorly-attended cookies-and-soda mixer, and had a mellow good time hanging out with each other and some of the organizers until they kicked us out of the room. Getting back to the hotel was not trivial. To start with, we'd taken an odd route through campus. The highway entrances were pretty hidden and highly assymmetrical, so that it seemed the exit for the hotel actaully fell south of the North entrance, and north of the South entrance, and there was also a risk of sneaking off the small highway on to other small highways without noticing. We just kept exiting and turning around for the better part of an hour before finding our way back.

We snuck out on Saturday after our furry panel, and thank goodness that we only had to turn around twice to figure out how to get back on to Route 84, and once in the NY section of the directions, so that we got to the spanikopita and zabliagione and margaritas with hottubbing Unitarians event only about a half hour late, and even with the majority of our facepaint washed off. My eyes were tired from the unaccustomed contact lenses I'd bought the day before, and the steam, by the time we headed back.

No one was left on campus when we got there around midnight, though we'd promised to check. But I guess that driving off campus that late in a car with out of state plates and a missing hubcap, then swerving a bit so as not to get on the highway the wrong direction, attracted the attention of the local campus police, and the next thing I knew I'd been cornered into a dead end with flashing lights. It took them a while to take my paperwork, and to tell me I'd been swerving. By the time they called in the second police car with real police, and were calling in all of my paperwork loudly on the radio, I was pretty sure that although I was driving fine except for the exhaustion and confusion, that my BAC at 2 drinks and 120 pounds, three hours earlier, was perhaps not zero, and that I was going to get called in for DUI and as such, lose my severance pay from the alcoholic beverage company that had just laid me off earlier that week. After about half an hour total, I was given my papers, a good night, and bad directions back to the highway. After a bit more driving around confused , and since I thought it unwise to turn around near campus, we hit that special hour in the night that combined with the right stress level in which it seemed just right to rename the New Britain environs “Hell Chunk, CT” and my usual level of intelligent vitriol was reduced to describing the police as “motherfucking fucker fuckers”.

The drive back to Boston was moderately uneventful, though the ride back to Harvard from verse's was perhaps not via the very best route, and the one hour parking meter choice for overnight parking meant crawling out of bed not much after I'd finally fallen into it. I took a reprieve from parking tickets by sneaking my car up to Arlington for the bulk of the next day, but still managed to both do the meter wakeup dance and collect another Harvard ticket on Monday through exquisitely bad luck and timing. Not only that, last night I got myself inexplicably lost on the way to choir practice. I think my car needs some sort of an exorcism or recalibration or something. Anyone have a good recipe for magical AAA oil?

Oh, you wanted to hear about the actual con programmming?

Overall, the con was a lot of fun, smaller than last year, with the same friendly diverse interesting activist core of people, but a lot fewer drop-ins, probably due to the more remote location and the increased price, which may have driven away some of the poor student and activist types, and didn't actually succeed in keeping the organization that ran the thing from ending up with about 3K in debt at the end of it all.

The con was on “queer standard time” (why do all fringe communities seem to have a constitutional inability to respect each others' time?), which meant a late start, but they actually did okay in shortening the opening plenary accordingly. Robin Ochs, the organizer of lots and lots of bi women's stuff in the Boston area, said this and that and sent us on our merry ways. There was lots of great programming planned - two or three sessions I'd happily have attended per slot. First choice ended up being Raven Kaldera's session on Trans-Spirituality. I was impressed with Raven when I met him last year, for his ability as a storyteller, his success in running a family-tribe of significant size and logistics, and his rewrite of “Dancing with Bears” as a gay clubbing anthem at last year's con. He's written a book relevant to the topic, Hermaphrodeities, which I'm hoping to review as part of the new BBI gig, as I want to encourage more books for the advanced pagan to exist.

After the worst squashed sandwich, stale cookies, and underripe fruit lunch ever was a session called “Be the Bomb that You Throw”, on out-there personal activism, run by Sister Phyllis Stein, one of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who was dressed in full nun-garb. It reminded me of my own style: I look “normal” enough that people are forced to reevaluate when I'm not quite what they were expecting. But I am also working on being more out about most of my life on a day to day basis, and reminding myself that that sort of thing can be more societally useful than just pure vanity is a good thing.

The furry panel we ran was not hugely attended, but the small group there had a good time. Each of the panelists fell into what are probably typical roles for us all: lediva attracting interest and being excited about things (she earned her furry toaster for recruiting by the end of the con, by dressing all weekend and continuing to talk about furry to every one who was interested, but not quite interested enough to choose the panel out of the overabundant programming schedule), postvixen trying to make qer way through the mass of ideas that qe'd been putting together for the few days before, tangent to wonderful tangent, and me playing panel mom, trying to make sure all of the attendees got heard, trying to keep responses short and encouraging and relevant.

The expected Sunday morning poly panel, which I'd decided to do out of laziness rather than stretching my boundaries more, turned out to have been replaced by a screening of the documentary “When Two Won't Do”. The film has been getting mixed reviews in the poly community, the filmmakers being called either “brave and honest” or “people who are setting back the work of the poly community twenty years”. It's a personal documentary of the life and times of a geeky filmmaker couple exploring polyamory, with one of the two partners being relatively resistant. Their story's not pretty, and in particular the suicide of one of the people in their web of relationships part way through was very disturbing. If nothing else, the film showed that large amounts of self-analysis and exploration don't necessarily guarantee any real communication. I haven't yet decided whether showing something this conflicted when we don't have something more optimistic available is good or bad, but it makes me want to add making a somewhat sunnier piece to my imaginary project list.

The last session I attended was a presentation of a medical/psych literature review of the work on the relationship between transsexuality and mental illness. The brief result: the trans community looks overall like the rest of the population in terms of other mental problems, though there is also a lot of faulty research which makes some pretty bad assumptions out there, especially when you look at racial and economic minorities. The presenter was one of the people who had caught my eye last year, though I'll insist watching him talk was not the only reason I went. I need to brush up my dabbler's knowledge of psych stuff a bit again, though.

Fine people, fine Chinese food (with the fortune-cookies-that-must-be-obeyed), a collection of contact info I may actually get organized enough to use this year, and a determination to get myself some vistaprint business cards closed the event for me. I'll be back next year.