Jen Wade's Party

Plus, summer seems to have arrived in time for April, as we've been having temperatures in the 70s and even the 80s, with sunny skies, which I think is unusual even for the Bay Area. This is just too hot too early, as far as I'm concerned! What happened to the nice blustery weather of a year ago?

Anyway, in other news I did read Lois McMaster Bujold's Dreamweaver's Dilemma, which is a collection of her short fiction and essays. It's basically for serious fans only, as its best story, "The Mountains of Mourning", is available in another volume, and the rest is sometimes interesting, but not especially notable.

The big activity this weekend was going to Jen Wade's birthday party tonight. Jen is a long-time journaller whom I've never met before, and Trish asked if I wanted to go, so I figured: Why not?

Trish came over and we went to dinner (to a decent - and busy! - Chinese restaurant in walking distance of my apartment), and drove up to San Francisco, getting there about 8:30. Jen had rented a club for the party, named - get this - The Make-Out Room. I was a bit surprised to find that it's basically a dive: Not much decor, grody bathrooms, dark lighting, etc. There was also a DJ playing rap music, very loud, which was a bit of a downer since it made it hard to hear people, and it's totally not my kind of music. But hey, it's her party. I just felt weird since I haven't been to a club/bar like this since college.

Anyway, other than that, it was a pretty fun time. Other than Trish, I had never met anyone there. (Lucy and Sei had both threatened to come, but neither did. Lucy, it turns out, was having a packing-induced panic attack. But there were many, many other journallers from the Bay Area there, since Jen is widely-read (more so than my humble effort, anyway!) and had invited all her readers, and asked them to bring friends. Boy, there sure are a lot of journallers in the Bay Area! And it's strange and a bit awkward to meet all these fellow journallers whom I've mostly heard of - but sometimes not - and often don't follow regularly because, like, there are only so many hours in the day, y'know?

So who was there? Well, for starters let's just assume that anything I might say about the number of attractive women in the Bay Area journalling scene can be taken for granted and move on from there, eh? No sense in making myself look even more foolish than I appear in this short paragraph (or than I do in my journal generally).

Sigh.

So. Lunesse made an impression with her latex pants. Actually, she seemed very outgoing and rather in her element in this sort of social situation. Like Jen, I've popped in on her journal occasionally, although haven't kept up consistently. (I must admit that I have a bit of a mental block about reading journals written under pseudonyms. No, it doesn't make a lot of sense, but there you go. I decided a while ago that I just don't worry about it much one way or the other.) There was also Jane, who I've read a few times. She arrived with another journalling friend whose name I sadly forget. (Not only did I forget some names from the night, but in some cases it was hard to hear so I may not have gotten it right in the first place!)

There were about three male journallers who all came in around the same time early in the evening, and all of them were medium height, medium build, and had black hair, which made it pretty much hopeless for me to remember them. I'm pretty sure one of them was named David, and it might have been David Siegel, but then again, it might not.

Perhaps the most interesting story of the evening was from Michael Walsh, who that very day had flown out from North Carolina, picked up his rental car, and moved into his temporary housing to nearly complete his process of moving to California. And then he drove the 50 minutes or so to San Francisco to attend the party! Amazing! Michael seems like a pretty hoopy frood, outgoing and intelligent and yadda-yadda-yadda and his description of his moving experience sounds exactly like mine. I think he has his head screwed on pretty well about looking for a permanent apartment, too. (Wish I had, way back when!) I wouldn't mind meeting up with him again.

There was also a guy that Trish called "the infamous Jay", who I guess must run an ISP or something like that since apparently many people have disk space on his system. Apparently he used to keep a journal. He seemed appropriately geeky for that background, wearing a t-shirt reading fsck, but he seemed perfectly nice. I think Trish was pretty excited to meet him, though.

Let's see. The woman who does Neurotica was there. Her site says her name is Mar, the Diary Registry says her name is Bellatrix, and I'm pretty sure she gave a different name during the evening. Gosh I have a bad memory. I only talked to her briefly, although that's more than I talked to Xeney, one of the more famous journallers whom I didn't realize the identity of until late in the evening, and who seemed even more tired than I was!

The evening was crowned by meeting Eleanor, who I've been reading for several months and who was probably the most vivacious person at the whole party! Even more into chatting and comfortable in the environment than Lunesse. She's also what I call (perhaps unfairly) a "touchy-feelie" kind of person, meaning she will randomly touch someone she's talking to (on the arm of shoulder, usually), which I am never sure how to react to, since it's totally different from how I am. It doesn't bother me otherwise, but it is... different. (I actually don't have tremendously strong "personal space" boundaries, but I tend to assume that everyone else does, which obviously affects my interactions.) But it was nice to meet her. Trish asked me afterwards if meeting her was "everything I expected." I wasn't quite sure how to respond to that... (I think she was teasing.)

I observed at one point in the evening that all the Bay Area journallers will spend Monday morning reading everyone else's entries on the party. So I wanted to make sure I get mine up before then! (The photo above is one I took so anyone who was there can put a face to the name and entry. Though it's a kind of funny-looking photo, I agree. I was having trouble taking a good one. Oh, and regular readers can get another look at my beard, for whatever that's worth.)

Overall it was a pretty good time. I think the loud music really did inhibit my ability to feel entirely comfortable; I suspect that my hearing (or maybe just my listening) is not the greatest, so I often feel like I lose every third word in situations like that. But overall I'm pretty happy with how things went. (Yes, I always 'grade myself' after a group social encounter like this.) It was a fun time, and I'm glad Trish asked me along, since I probably wouldn't have gone on my own.

I hope Jen had a good time, but she seemed to be dancing and happy later in the night (like, when we were leaving, around midnight), so I think she did.

Here are some entries that other journallers at the party wrote about it:

• Jane Ancheta
• David Andreason
• Trish Homis
• Lunesse
• Mar
• Jen Wade
• Xeney

This isn't the first time I've met a bunch of random individuals from some group I'm part of (if you can call journallers a group one can be "part of", although they're having a convention, so maybe so). Many years ago I met a number of members of my APA at the time in two separate groups, going to dinner each time. I became good friends with some of them, and I still get together with Bruce ever year and we keep an intermittent (print!) correspondence going to this day, eleven years later.

(Several years later, while in Madison, I got to know many people from two of my other APAs, who were involved in SF fandom, including my good friend Jim.)

In college I was very active on the talk.abortion newsgroup (if you're wondering what 'side' I'm on, then you need to read more of my site!) and I met one of the other voluminous posters on the group while in New Orleans. I also met at least one MUDder back in my brief fling with the medium.

I also met a group of Boston contributors to rec.arts.comics, though I'd never been terribly active on the group (strange to say) and had a hard time feeling terribly comfortable with them, for some reason. (The main impression I'd left on them before the meeting was how much I dislike Paul Levitz' 1980s run of Legion of Super-Heroes which I think was not a great basis for conversation. Plus, several of them were huge Mystery Science Theatre 3000 fans, a show which I have never had more than a marginal interest in - Lucy loves it, though - and they spent a lot of time discussing it.)

Many of my grad school friends I met first through the Internet. Including John, who (more or less) got me the job at Apple. And of course I met Ceej through the net.

Given how many of these folks became good friends of mine, I guess I do fine in these "blind date" situations. They actually don't really freak me out, but I always wonder what sort of impression I gave people.