Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

Saturday we had an Otakon meeting. It's getting close to deadlines for the program book, and I'm the editor this year, so naturally, I had to be there to nudge people in person. I needed to collect write-ups on a number of different events taking place at the convention this year, so I had printed up last year's listings and distributed them to the people who should be updating them.

Some of those people weren't there, of course, and some I didn't recognize from their name, so I had to have them pointed out to me. But I took care of most of that at the beginning of the meeting.

It was a small room, considering how many people were jammed in there, and it got so humid it was like a steam bath. I guess it's always hard to tell how many people will show.

I would have worked with the laptop on battery power, but The Gryphon tells me that lately, his laptop has been acting funny if you use it on battery power. I'm beginning to wonder if it would be worth it for me to get my own.

Fortunately, the business meeting was fairly brief, basically consisting of reports from the different section heads. Then we had a break for lunch. The Gryphon and I had picked up some food at a rest area on the way there. In his case, it was a sandwich. In my case, I had yogurt and fruit. So over the lunch break, we made the rounds greeting people and taking care of business.

When we came back from break, there was just a little more business before the con chair gave us time to meet with members of our departments. I met with the publications group, and we talked a little about program book design. The guy who's doing the template for it showed us his thoughts and solicited input, particularly from the previous publications head who's a graphic design professional.

Then we discussed this year's badges. They're handling them in a slightly different way, so we were discussing the look and what to do with color on the various specialty badges. I can't be too specific, because one of the reasons we change the badge design every year is to cut down on fraud.

When that meeting had basically run its course, I started mingling with friends. The Dormouse was hanging out with Batman. They were the only people there from the LARP department, so I guess you could consider it a meeting. I know they do a lot of conferring over e-mail and in person, so I don't know how much they needed to get done.

Meanwhile, I tracked down a few more people to nudge them about program book write-ups.

The Gryphon, who is once more the head of human resources, met with the Special Ops people. I knew that would take awhile, so I just drifted around and talked to people. I caught up with The Invisible Man. He told me that he's been really busy with his work. He's got a lot of big projects coming up soon.

I also talked to the head of logistics this year, who's cut his hair really short so that it looks bristly. Everyone wanted to touch it. He told us he's looking for a job right now.

Eventually, we tried to get some people together to eat. The con chair was inviting people to eat and go bowling, but we couldn't join them because we had to get back for our animals. Even though we had a dog sitter coming twice that day, we didn't want to be out too late.

We got a small group together: me and The Gryphon, The Dormouse, Batman, The Pirate and a Spec Ops staffer who knows The Gryphon from his gaming group, PAGE. We perused the hotel's listing of restaurants, looking for possibilities. The Gryphon called a few places to find out about availability of tables, and the first two cited long waits for a party of our size. We decided to check out a place with the enigmatic name of House of Welsh, formerly Joe Theisman's Restaurant.

When we arrived, there was no wait for seating, as it was still pretty early. At first, the service was really good, as the cheerful waitress brought us extra water and extra bread by request. The food was good. I had the crab cakes (a perennial favorite).

The problem was when we wanted our check and boxes for extra food. She left us stranded for a long time, maybe as long as half an hour. I didn't check my watch. I'd just had a call from our dog walker, who had stopped by for her second visit and fed Una, as well. I knew we could relax a little.

We didn't really care, because we were having a great time talking and joking around. The conversation ranged wildly, from pop culture, as The Pirate berated Ed Furlong, ex-boyfriend of Soleil Moon Frye, a.k.a. Punky Brewster. Apparently, Furlong left her after she got a breast reduction.

We also talked quite a bit about politics, in particular the recent revelation that the NSA is collecting phone call information. I joked that it's our patriotic duty to dial as many random phone numbers as we can.

This led to a discussion of airport security, with both Batman and The Pirate sharing stories about being strip-searched because of flying somewhere on a one-way ticket: Batman back from North Korea and The Pirate from Chicago to New Jersey after driving his sister's truck out there for her.

The Pirate's story was funny, because apparently his multiple piercings set off the detector, and so when they took him off to the side, he dropped trou in order to prove he wasn't packing a weapon.

When the waitress finally returned, she explained that the bartender had dragged her away to assist with something. I wasn't really clear on why this meant she couldn't prepare the bill and grab us some Styrofoam boxes, but she was so apologetic about it that we gave her a decent tip anyway.

Even though we spent some time chatting in the parking lot, we eventually got in our cars and headed home. The Dormouse wasn't much for conversation on the way home; he fell asleep about 10 minutes into the ride. The Gryphon and I talked about various things, mostly Otakon related, until we got home.

We were pretty tired when we got back but didn't want to go right to sleep, so we stayed up and watched part of a Mythbusters marathon on the Discovery Channel. I fell asleep on the couch, and my dreams had a strange soundtrack: a narration that was partly scientific experiment, partly jokes and lots of explosions. The particular episode was about methods of mind control, and I dreamt that someone had cut open the front of my head and created a door there so they could access my brain.

Copyright 2006 by Alyce Wilson

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