Yay friends!
Apr. 15th, 2013 12:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livI don't know how many times in the last 10 years I've titled posts something with the theme of my friends being awesome, but it's still true.
Last weekend I went todoseybat's party and it was full of free-floating, interesting conversation with lots of people I'm always glad to spend time with, including khalinche, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
timeplease, ewt and others, people I haven't seen for years including aphenine, as bat and I go back a long long way and our social circles have merged considerably, and lots of interesting new people. I stayed over and so managed to squeeze further conversation from the after-party, with pseudomonas and morwen and blue_mai as well as doseybat and pplfichi, doing the tired nerd thing of browsing Wikipedia and Google Streetview and learning random stuff about the world. It was especially interesting to follow up on some of the Eastercon conversations about London with blue_mai who has some serious expertise in London history. Bounce!
I had to come home after lunch on Sunday in order to run a Yom HaShoah memorial at synagogue. Yom HaShoah is the Jewish day for commemorating the Holocaust, and having been so infuriated with taking part in the secular event on Holocaust Memorial Day recently, I wanted to do it properly. I asked people to bring information to help them remember, which made the community feel involved. One of the congregants lost first-degree relatives in Terezin (Theresienstadt) and has been doing some research into their lives and what minimal information there is about their deaths, so it was really important to incorporate that into community remembrance. Some of the readings weren't really successful, because not everybody in the community really knows how to pick something appropriate for the setting. I think I may need to exert more editorial control next year, but in other ways it's more important for people to express themselves and to feel part of the commemoration than to have a very polished event. And I was able to live up to my own views that you don't aestheticize this kind of thing, you read survivor and victim testimony and you try to remember, you don't have a multimedia Experience aimed to manipulate people's emotions.
Then I went back to work for three days, and thenrysmiel came to visit. We had a completely wonderful time, having set aside those few days just to enjoy eachother's company and eat nice food and have fun, since we have way too much geography most of the time. We pretty much didn't stop talking other than to sleep, and I am absolutely glowing. I had social stuff in London again at the weekend, so I was able to travel as far as the city centre with rysmiel on the way to the airport, and continue talking for just a few more hours. Unfortunately some other passengers got annoyed with us for having a conversation in a (not Quiet designated) train carriage, so we had to spend most of the journey talking in whispers. I could get very annoyed by such bad manners, but on the other hand we have this deep joy and the curmudgeons evidently don't, so mostly I feel sorry for them.
Anyway, I metdoseybat and pplfichi for dim sum at the wonderful Joy King Lau. I was particularly excited by the water chestnut paste, which was one of those gelatinous things right on the edge between sweet and savoury that really don't happen in European or more anglicized Chinese food. And then we got to spend the afternoon and the following morning drinking tea and setting the world to rights and geeking out about cameras and academic careers. And the batmother was around for some of it, and she's always great. Bounce again!
Sunday afternoon we beached in the Pembury formirrorshard's birthday party. This was really brilliant, partly for the venue – I haven't been to the Pembury for far too long – which served me a particularly tasty wheat beer called London Fields, and some interesting cider. Partly for getting to see mirrorshard and merrythebard who are brilliant and we don't quite overlap as often as I'd like in real life. Partly because the group contained a whole bunch of people I feel really comfortable with, goths and geeks and people who find everything interesting and a really high proportion of people wearing purple. Most of the new people I met quickly turned out to have multiple second-degree connections and not only through the hosts, so we had several wins Kevin Bacon style games (including the strict version where you only count connections through shared body fluids, ahem). I was exceptionally happy and bouncy anyway, because by the time the party got started I'd been talking non-stop to people I really like for about 5 days solid. And on top of all those other very good things, angelofthenorth and gwyddno were there, and it's been far too long since I saw them. There are some specific ways that I'm able to be myself with that crowd that I don't get to express very often, not that my life is particularly restricted in that way, but still, it was a joy.
And you know another reason why my friends are wonderful? I've not only been too busy to be online for most of the past week, but I've had technical problems with internet at home so haven't even briefly checked in. (Turns out that my router had somehow reset itself, not to factory defaults but to some other combination of settings, so nothing could find the wireless at all and I assumed the internet was out. Even after I'd figured that out troubleshooting was fiddly, but anyway, I am back online.) So while I was completely ignoring the internet, everybody went on having highly civilized discussions about contentious topics like death, disability rights and sex even without me being around to moderate, so thank you all. I will try to get back to your cogent comments over the next few days.
Last weekend I went to
doseybat's party and it was full of free-floating, interesting conversation with lots of people I'm always glad to spend time with, including khalinche, timeplease, ewt and others, people I haven't seen for years including aphenine, as bat and I go back a long long way and our social circles have merged considerably, and lots of interesting new people. I stayed over and so managed to squeeze further conversation from the after-party, with pseudomonas and morwen and blue_mai as well as doseybat and pplfichi, doing the tired nerd thing of browsing Wikipedia and Google Streetview and learning random stuff about the world. It was especially interesting to follow up on some of the Eastercon conversations about London with blue_mai who has some serious expertise in London history. Bounce!I had to come home after lunch on Sunday in order to run a Yom HaShoah memorial at synagogue. Yom HaShoah is the Jewish day for commemorating the Holocaust, and having been so infuriated with taking part in the secular event on Holocaust Memorial Day recently, I wanted to do it properly. I asked people to bring information to help them remember, which made the community feel involved. One of the congregants lost first-degree relatives in Terezin (Theresienstadt) and has been doing some research into their lives and what minimal information there is about their deaths, so it was really important to incorporate that into community remembrance. Some of the readings weren't really successful, because not everybody in the community really knows how to pick something appropriate for the setting. I think I may need to exert more editorial control next year, but in other ways it's more important for people to express themselves and to feel part of the commemoration than to have a very polished event. And I was able to live up to my own views that you don't aestheticize this kind of thing, you read survivor and victim testimony and you try to remember, you don't have a multimedia Experience aimed to manipulate people's emotions.
Then I went back to work for three days, and then
rysmiel came to visit. We had a completely wonderful time, having set aside those few days just to enjoy eachother's company and eat nice food and have fun, since we have way too much geography most of the time. We pretty much didn't stop talking other than to sleep, and I am absolutely glowing. I had social stuff in London again at the weekend, so I was able to travel as far as the city centre with rysmiel on the way to the airport, and continue talking for just a few more hours. Unfortunately some other passengers got annoyed with us for having a conversation in a (not Quiet designated) train carriage, so we had to spend most of the journey talking in whispers. I could get very annoyed by such bad manners, but on the other hand we have this deep joy and the curmudgeons evidently don't, so mostly I feel sorry for them.Anyway, I met
doseybat and pplfichi for dim sum at the wonderful Joy King Lau. I was particularly excited by the water chestnut paste, which was one of those gelatinous things right on the edge between sweet and savoury that really don't happen in European or more anglicized Chinese food. And then we got to spend the afternoon and the following morning drinking tea and setting the world to rights and geeking out about cameras and academic careers. And the batmother was around for some of it, and she's always great. Bounce again! Sunday afternoon we beached in the Pembury for
mirrorshard's birthday party. This was really brilliant, partly for the venue – I haven't been to the Pembury for far too long – which served me a particularly tasty wheat beer called London Fields, and some interesting cider. Partly for getting to see mirrorshard and merrythebard who are brilliant and we don't quite overlap as often as I'd like in real life. Partly because the group contained a whole bunch of people I feel really comfortable with, goths and geeks and people who find everything interesting and a really high proportion of people wearing purple. Most of the new people I met quickly turned out to have multiple second-degree connections and not only through the hosts, so we had several wins Kevin Bacon style games (including the strict version where you only count connections through shared body fluids, ahem). I was exceptionally happy and bouncy anyway, because by the time the party got started I'd been talking non-stop to people I really like for about 5 days solid. And on top of all those other very good things, angelofthenorth and gwyddno were there, and it's been far too long since I saw them. There are some specific ways that I'm able to be myself with that crowd that I don't get to express very often, not that my life is particularly restricted in that way, but still, it was a joy.And you know another reason why my friends are wonderful? I've not only been too busy to be online for most of the past week, but I've had technical problems with internet at home so haven't even briefly checked in. (Turns out that my router had somehow reset itself, not to factory defaults but to some other combination of settings, so nothing could find the wireless at all and I assumed the internet was out. Even after I'd figured that out troubleshooting was fiddly, but anyway, I am back online.) So while I was completely ignoring the internet, everybody went on having highly civilized discussions about contentious topics like death, disability rights and sex even without me being around to moderate, so thank you all. I will try to get back to your cogent comments over the next few days.
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