0004 Dalera 21: Repurposing

Life is not static. Everything is change.

So, the first and foremost reason for the update is to announce, formally, that Jessie and I won't be at Anthrocon this year. Ashe will be running the writing track in my absence, for those of you who actually go to it or are interested. He ran it for a year or two before I got involved, so everything's fine there. Thilya, I'll be calling and canceling my room reservation, so anybody looking to get into the Courtyard, I'm about to free up a week.

Now, as to why we won't be there....

This is a much longer story than it has any right to be, but everything of late has felt curiously cinematic. Things have been just a little too well-timed, a little too accidentally-meaningful. Whoever's writing my story has decided that I need to be some kind of morality play, I guess.

Anyway! Onto the good bits.

So, everyone remember the house? Everyone remember the bankruptcy? Remember how the bankruptcy was supposed to resolve the ongoing costs of the house? Remember the egregious water bill? Remember how the bank was going to take care of the water bill? Remember how the bank was supposed to have foreclosed on the house by now?

Yeah, that was a really nice dream.

A couple of weeks ago, now, I got a letter from a legal team in Pottstown that doubles as a debt-collection agency saying that I owed approximately nine-thousand dollars plus "potential legal fees" stemming from a civil complaint against the property for unpaid water bills. I called the legal team, and they said that they had a legitimate complaint against the property and that, as the deedholder, the responsibility was mine to resolve. I told them that I had declared bankruptcy over a year ago and that the house wasn't my responsibility any more, and they reiterated their ability to win a judgment against me since I was still the legal deedholder. I told them I'd have to talk with my bankruptcy lawyer and asked them for copies of the relevant paperwork and a name I could have my lawyer contact. That did dampen their ardor a bit, but they didn't say they would drop the case. I got my name and some details, and I told them I'd let them know my decision.

Then I called my bankruptcy lawyer and told him what was going on. He was shocked to hear from me, and then he was even more shocked to find out that the bank had yet to foreclose on the property which I had surrendered over a year ago as part of a bankruptcy that I had discharged over six months back. He did mention that it was a national crisis, this paralysis in the real estate industry, but he didn't have any solutions. I asked him about the water bill, and he reiterated his belief that not paying it and letting it follow the house as a lien was the right move at the time, but he also said that that information had been predicated on the idea that the bank would've foreclosed by now. Further, he did repeat that because the deed was still in my name, the bill was still technically mine as long as the house was. I asked him about the legal status of a property lien being converted to a personal liability via a debt-collection action, and he refused to state an opinion, saying that I was getting into consulting-fee territory and that he wouldn't take the case besides, as that sounded like actual litigation talk. I asked him what happened if the bank never foreclosed, and he said that it could very well be the case that I'd just owe the water bill in perpetuity. That filled me with unhappy, but I thanked him for his time.

I could've just... paid the bill, I suppose. I have the money in savings to cover what I presently owe without any legal fees, and if I step up to the plate and volunteer to pay it, I probably could even negotiate it down, but right now this bill represents all of my savings. I would be wiped clean if I had to pay it back, and that would be Bad. So, I did some research, I put my writing talents to work, and then I faxed over a small mound of paperwork to the legal firm:

• a six-page letter detailing the house's history of frozen pipes, the cost of the water bill during the three years that the house was occupied by six people, the lack of any homeowner's insurance in my name, the forced-lender policy that Countrywide—now Bank of America—has on the property, the bankruptcy, my lawyer's advice, and, ultimately the explanations as to why I feel I'm not legally obligated to pay the bill, which amount to "that bill's obviously the result of frozen pipes from Winter 2008, it should've been covered under an insurance claim against the forced-lender policy that Countrywide should've made and I can't, Countrywide has failed to discharge their obligation to foreclose in a timely fashion, and the house is up for sheriff's sale in two months anyway."
• exerpts from the sheriff's sale website from March showing that the sale was stayed
• exerpts from the sheriff's sale website in April showing that the sale was stayed
• the foreclosure case history from the county showing that Countrywide had asked the court to stay the sale without explanation
• a copy of the legal threat from the bank's lawyers to sell my house at sheriff's sale on July 29.

The proverbial ball is back in their metaphorical court at this point. I think I have a legitimate case, but more to the point, I think that by hitting them with a fairly-detailed set of documents explaining that I have a position that I'd be willing to defend in court, I'm hoping that I can convince them to drop the matter, call me to offer a settlement, or even just delay the matter until the sheriff's sale resolves the matter of deed ownership. None of these are guarantees, of course, but this is the current plan. I can't exactly dazzle them with dexterity, so I'm going with the bafflement route.

Unfortunately, the practical upshot of this is that the money into which last year I dipped to cover the gap between savings-dedicated-to-pay-for-Anthrocon and savings-for-general-use is completely tied up, in case something doesn't go my way. Because of other bills, both on-going and one-off, I've only managed to put about twelve-hundred dollars towards the con budget, and we worked out that the total cost would be between sixteen and two-thousand, depending on the ability of everyone else we had in the room to pay us back immediately.

Four-hundred dollars, especially in a good month with some conscientious budget management, is pretty easy. We could've made that, I think, and then just gone. However, this is where the other half of the story enters, and where some of you will just have to be patient at only getting part of the story.

In the last month, several people in the Embassy have had a lot of revelations and discoveries about life desires, ambitions, and status. I'm not at liberty to get into a lot of details, but at the very least, I can disclose that Jessie and I both have collars now, that we have tags marking our collars in the other's possessive, and that we have wrist cuffs which match the collars. The dynamic of our relationship continues to evolve, as we do, but some of the power relationships have taken a curious turn, in ways that have proven to be absolutely wonderful. In addition, and more importantly, though, we've both recently become much more honest and open about a lot of things that we're hoping to get out of life, and out of each other.

Unfortunately, most of these things cost money.

So, on our way home from a recent trip to visit some friends, the subject of past costs and future desires arose, and we both started detailing all the things we wanted, all the things we had put off purchasing because of one or another reason, and this time our list of desiderata far outstripped our ability to pay for it all. New clothes, new shoes, some particular pieces of kink gear we'd expressed desire in having, paying off the car early to have money to do other things, et cetera. Both of us were angry at how things came together and frustrated at how we had finally come to all these discoveries about ourselves and each other, only to find that the money just wasn't there to pay for any of the intermediate steps we'd need to get where we wanted to go.

That was when I put Anthrocon on the table.

Really, that's what happened. I knew we could finish saving for the con, I knew we could make it work, but I also knew that in so doing we'd be delaying a lot of other Nice Things that we both wanted. I still want to go. I'd love to go. I'd love to see my friends on the other coast again and spend time hanging out with everyone I care about so much from the area. It's just that... when you put the value of five days of entertainment on one side of the table, and you weigh it against everything else that we could do with that money, it's hard not to feel that we're both better served by letting the con go one year and picking it up next.

Of course, this means missing the one Anthrocon that the theme is actually something close to one I can appreciate. While "OMGAliens" is ludicrous on its face, what some of my friends have done with the idea have been nothing less than brilliant, and I really was looking forward to seeing what folks did with it at the convention. Still, I have to believe that the trade-off is going to be worth it, if only because of all the other things I know are coming soon in their place.

Plus, the chance to see Jessie's eyes light up when we went and picked out a bunch of new summer clothes for her was worth the exchange instantly.

leaving all these opportunities behind

0003 Radera 01

So, another month, another lack of update.

Really, it's not that I don't care about this thing any more. It's more the case that I get caught up in doing things and I don't really think about telling folks about it. I just don't "blog" the way most people do. Rather than talk about what's going on right now with my life, I tend to save up and dump it all out into large blocks, and then I forget stuff between when I start saving and when I figure it's time to post. So, chalk it up to use differences, more than interest fatigue.

So, this serves as a prelude to answering the question, "what has th' buni been doing for the last six weeks?"

Despite the removal of one user from my IRC server and the subsequent disappearance of a few others, the universe has not imploded, nor did I really expect anything like that to happen. I did expect a much larger hew and cry about the whole affair, but on the whole people seem to be pleased with the outcome. The community doesn't appear to have splintered, and in fact seems cohesive enough to assemble an anthology of short stories posted to the Shifti, though I'm not involved in the project directly. Still, things seem to be on an even keel there, so I'm not inclined to do too much rocking.

Anthrocon came and went during the downtime. I'm usually uncomfortably enthusiastic for AC, but this year was a little weird. Everything felt very last-minute, very rushed. Part of this was my own inertia; I didn't get the hotel situation resolved until the last minute, and we ended up having to change rooms twice during our stay in Pittsburgh. Part of it was a general lack of planning on my part, and I confess part of it was the ever-present sensation that I've failed in my own goal to have something for the dealers' room. However, as always, I went and had a blast and look forward to going again next year.

Of course, one thing that I've lamented for years is my lack of anything worth selling in the dealers' room. So, my plan is for AC next year, if not for some con prior, to have Beautiful World ready for publication by then. I'm actually further along on this project than it seems. I've broken the halfway mark for a science fiction novel—forty-thousand words—and I'm not yet halfway through the development. I've charted it out, and as long as I'm finishing a chapter every three weeks, I'll have enough time left to get the novel into publishable shape in time to get some advance copies for Anthrocon next year.

Unfortunately, this isn't coming without a price. I'm sure somebody has noticed by now that links to three of the chapters I'd posted previously have gone missing from my website. This isn't an act of censorship so much as it's an attempt to preserve the "publishability"—if that's a word—of the rest of the book. I'm not sure if this is an actual concern, but I'm in better-safe-than-sorry mode. This also means that I won't be posting any more parts of the book to my website, and when FA comes back up, I'll be removing some of the previous sections. I'm not entirely happy with it, but it seems like the best of a set of questionable alternatives.

Now, what this also means is that I'm looking for a shortlist of folks who'd be interested in serving as alpha-readers of the new parts of the story as they become available. One of the things I'll confess quickly and eagerly is that feedback is a large part of what helps drive the creative beast, and I'm making strides with generating that internally, but I'm also aware that other people reading my stuff helps me feel like making more. I don't think I want the universe involved in this process, but I'd love to have a pawful of folks interested in helping me make the book better. I'm not sure what I can offer right now for services rendered other than, like, autographed copies, but I'm sure I can come up with something.

In other news, I've successfully paid off the bankruptcy, which means that the thousand-per-month drain on my budget is now gone, to soon be replaced by a seven-hundred-per-month car payment, if my estimations are right, as well as gas and car insurance which should round me out to the money I'm presently "saving". So, no real movement ahead, but I'll have my own transport again, which will go a long way towards restoring my confidence in my ability to get ahead. Right now, the most likely vehicle on my list is a hybrid Ford Escape, not because I want an SUV but because nobody makes a hybrid station wagon that I wouldn't have to import and I can't afford to hold out until next year for some of the theoretical sixty-miles-to-the-gallon BMW or similiar. Plus, I can fit inside the Escape, or at least I'm led to believe that I can.

Speaking of fitting, the Weight Chart is back online. I found a scale with a 400-pound capacity, and I'm rather embarrassed to admit that at the beginning of the measurements, I needed it. The current trend shocks me, but today's lunch will likely change the direction of the red line for a day or two, mostly because I was in a hurry and ate faster than I could register it. That and portion control seem to be my biggest bugbears, but even there I'm getting better, little by little.

I actually weight to a doctor about my weight, and I learned a few interesting things I'd rather not have known. Rather, I'm glad i know them, but I'm not happy about them being facts, or even historical trends. Basically, whatever my weight was when I was eighteen, give or take two years, is my body's "set point", and most of the natural tendencies will be to maintain that number. Since I weighed 350 pounds at eighteen, I'm likely going to be fighting uphill forever. I've looked into bariatric surgery, but what I'm seeing in the latest reports is that it's a six-year "fix" that ends up not actually solving anything and compounds outstanding problems with new dietary fuckery. Most of the drugs combatting weight loss lead to side effects worse than the weight itself causes. So, apparently the sane goal for someone of my size and history is 315, which is ten percent of base body mass. I'm headed in the right direction, but it's likely going to be a long, painful road.

I'm not saying I'm giving up on the goal. I'm merely setting the expectations for myself and everyone else. Failure is likely, for reasons that have nothing to do with how hard I try or how much I want it.

That one thing aside, though... things seem to be shockingly good. There've been a few dips and wobbles here and there, but they're all things that can be resolved through talking and effort. I'm still not exactly the most social person alive, but I'm feeling better about casual interaction than I have in a while. I still have a pretty big back log of rants on various subjects, but the urge to drop trou and shit into a text file has gone down significantly in the last few months, even if the subject matter is itself fascinating. I really don't have any reason to bitch.

Perhaps that more than anything is driving the silence. I'm just... happy with my life, for the most part, and the elements with which I'm dissatisfied are all things on which I'm actively working. Happy people don't make waves. I'd love to be up for challenging the system and burning the world, but really, I've got it good right now, and I don't want to blow it.

Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?

0002 Zelera 11: Review

Bwah.

Six weeks since I've posted anything in my diary. I'd say I'm slipping, but I've actually been updating with other content, for once, which is something I didn't think would be happening again any time soon. So, here's the last-episode recap:

1. Everything for Anthrocon is prepped. The room is reserved for a week, the plane tickets are for the same time period, and I have ten days of vacation reserved at work. We leave Seattle on the 23rd of Byeta and return on the 2nd of Jeva. For those of you on the Gregorian Calendar, that's July 3 to 10. I've also got a day off of work on either side to make sure I don't immediately compress into a tight ball of shock and misery upon touching ground in Seattle after the closest thing I have to a yearly church retreat.

   It still feels a little weird to say it like that, but cons are really the closest thing I get to being in a large crowd of people and yet still feeling like I'm around people who have a hope in hell of understanding. This isn't to say that they will, but it's a damnsight more likely than taking an average random collection of strangers off the street. Of course, when I say "understand," I mean more in the general sense of "empathize with the nature of my existence,"which is a concept that I don't really think we can easily express in English.

2. I got a FurAffinityaccount. I did feel kind of dirty about it at first, but a very large part of that stems from the fact that the typical writer on there is... not that good, comparatively speaking. The furry fandom in general is a much more visual medium than it is a verbal one, with the consequence and subsequent cause that the bar for what is considered good writing is a lot lower than the bar for what is considered good illustration. Thus, more people who write mediocre stories get praised for good work, and the bar falls farther, and so on and so forth. So, I was a little leery of even trying to wade into the pool.

   Of course, the truth is that I'm already in the pool, and up until now I've really just been sort of standing around sulking that nobody was playing with me and bitching about how bad things are. So, this is really my attempt to jump into the deep end and maybe start reversing the previous trend. It may not work, but if it does then things are great, and if it doesn't then I'm really not out anything except a bit of dignity.

3. Coincidental with the FA account, I've started a new ongoing storytitled, "Beautifuil World". The history for the setting is... complex. When I was driving cross-country from Pennsylvania to Washington, one of the many topics that arose during the trip was a new MUCK to replace or supplant or support Puzzlebox, and the idea upon which I hit was that of a virtual world in which the inhabitants all knew that they were in a virtual world, and could operate as such. Digital sentiences, hackers, and uploaded minds all interacting in a realm limited only by the creativity of the players involved.

   The idea ended up not going anywhere as a MUCK, mostly because I didn't feel like investing the energy to try to create one and code it up and maintain it. However, the idea for the setting remained in my head, lingering around and making faces at the other story settings in which I'd been working. So, with the creation of the new account, I decided to go ahead and indulge the idea and give it a bit of freedom. Since then, I've already written eight-thousand words, which isn't bad at all for me given my usual pace of writing. If I keep this up, I'll have a novel by the end of the summer.

4. Pathia has moved in with Jessie, Tanya, and I. The apartment's a little cramped, but with some judicious juggling of suitcases and other things, we should be able to wedge everything into the available space. She's already working again, and she seems pleased with that. It's not a brilliant job, but Washington State has some pretty flash labor laws, so she's making decent money.

5. My job at T-Mobile remains stable, even "good" by some standards. I got a fairly decent raise at my annual review, and tomorrow I'll get a good-sized bonus check that will go a long way towards covering the currently outstanding credit card debt.
6. The house in Pottstown still hasn't sold, but at least the work is done, and the showings have picked back up. Two last week, and one the week before that actually looked ready to buy until an attack of cold feet occurred. I can't blame them for that; I had a few of those myself when Jessie and I were shopping for a permanent residence.

I think that pretty much covers everything. Anything I've missed, I can add later.

I feel happy.

Another year, another Anthrocon.

As always, I come away from them on Sunday night thinking I'm going to be alright, and the day after I'm exhausted and nearly unable to function. Last year, I was unemployed when the con hit, and I had all day Monday to recover without really thinking too much about it, and prior to that my memory is kind of vague. I know I was working at HMS in 2003 and ISI in 2002, but the memories of work afterwards are something of a blur at this point. All I really know for sure is that yesterday at work I was utterly exhausted, and that I came home and collapsed last night and slept until dinner, then went back to bed and slept until 06h00 this morning, when I finally felt vaguely normal-for-me again.

The con itself is almost inevitably fun, or at the very least emotionally refreshing. I told a friend of mine yesterday
that it very much felt like going to church for the weekend, and I know that probably sounds crazy, especially in light of the fact that I'm horribly unchurched—or perhaps underchurched or mischurched depending on point of view—but there is a sense at the con that I am around "like-minded believers," even if I'm not. People walk around in ears-and-tail or full fursuits and nobody thinks of them as weird... or at the very least such opinions tend not to be loudly expressed. There's a higher sense of casual intimacy that's at once very comforting and very offputting, but it too is strangely familiar, moreso than the standoffishness of casual life. Even the vocabulary and vernacular of the group is subtly different in ways that make me feel more included than I typically do with the majority of people.

So, Anthrocon—and likely other furry gatherings as well—always give me the sense of "coming home" that other gatherings don't. I can only imagine this is how other people feel about Bible camp, or a family reunion. It's a
place where certain beliefs are just assumed true, and there's less for me to have to explain when trying to make myself understood.

This year, though, things were rather awkward for a number of reasons.

Normally I'm staff at AC, and this year was no exception to that, but I felt more out of the loop than normal. SusanDeer used to be the programming director, and I served as writing-track advisor and nominal assistant director of programming. Last year I carried a radio and did all the running Sue couldn't, and even in prior years I at least served as a sounding board for the schedule creation process. I was used to a certain level of involvement with the whole schedule creation process, hearing about the panels that related to my track, ofering suggestions about what could go when, and generally learning about the process of building a schedule. To be quite honest, I thought to some degree that when Sue announced her retirement from the board to focus on her career that I was going to end up with her job.

Instead, KuddlePup, the programming director for MegaPlex was offered the role, a fact that at first relieved me. I wasn't quite sure I was ready to fill the role of programming director for the largest furry con in the world, and that somebody else was willing to do it meant I had more time to learn about it before having to face it myself. However, from the get-go things were a little more complicated. KP's in Florida, and I'd never met him before, much less worked with him in any sort of official capacity, so I really didn't know what to expect as far as personality went. I did get the chance to meet him at AC2004, when he ghosted Sue's position alongside me, and he seemed nice enough, but my brain being the broken piece of hardware that it is, I still wasn't really that comfortable. Plus, getting in touch with KP proved to be a lot more difficult than I'd expected. All in all, it never really felt like I was working with KP so much as he and I were both working around each other to get to the same goal. 

The schedule is a good example of that. As I said above, I was used to having some level of information aboutthe panels before they went into the schedule, and at least marginal information about the schedule itself before it went to press. The first time I saw the schedule is when Jessie—as designer of the pocket program—came to me and said, "I've noticed a few problems." In the two months prior to that, I hadn't heard anything from KP about the schedule at all, so I didn't even know it'd been started until the proposed final draft was Publication's control.

At this point, we were about two, maybe three weeks out from Opening Ceremonies, and our press deadline was in a week, so at the risk of stepping on some toes, I put together a replacement schedule based on what I knew of Sue's practices and sent it to Kage with a polite note saying we'd spotted a few issues and here was our suggestion. This got forwarded to KP, and after a few more rounds of back-and-forth on this-can't-go-there and that-can't-go-here and these-two-things-can't-happen-at-the-same-time, we ironed out something that everyone seemed to like, and it went to press.

At Closing Ceremonies, Kage praised KP's schedule work. At least somebody got some recognition.

Then again, Kage said a few other things at various points that irked me to some degree or another, mostly relating to this year's theme of the convention, "Heroes." During the opening ceremony, Kage called for all the EMTs, firefighters, police and military personnel to stand and be recognized. While I can hardly say I'm surprised by such an action, it seems blatantly propogandistic and reinforces the idea that heroism is tied to profession, and further tied to a certain social view. I had much higher hopes, and was greatly disappointed by what felt like unnecessary pandering to a very antithetical worldview.

Don't get me wrong. It's not that I don't support the police, the military, firefighters or doctors. I do. I believe they
put their lives and their values on the line every day, and I recognize that. However, I also believe that our society as it currently stands is rapidly losing another class of hero, the ideologue willing to combat the rising public sentiment that disagreement is tantamount to treason. Where is the recognition for teachers who stand up for reason and logic in the classroom against the proponents of abstinence-only education and "intelligent design"? Where is the support for the foster parents who are taking in and raising all the children born because their parents didn't have access to timely abortions, or proper child support that would let them raise their own children? Where is the praise for the journalists who were willing to report unpopular news stories that challenged public sentiment and ran contrary to official doctrine? Where is the admiration for the political activists that overthrew dictatorships in Uzbekistan and Ukraine without firing a single shot? Why are we as a society pushing this one particular view of heroism tied more into profession than ideology, and why is someone as allegedly intelligent as Uncle Kage supporting it uncritically?

It's not even that some professions are heroic and others aren't. There are those in the so-called "heroic jobs"
who have done their own share of questionable activity. What of the environment of evangelicalism at the Air Force academy, and the removal of a chaplain from her post because she dared to challenge it? What of the story of Rodney King? What of the EMTs who pointed and laughed at a victim in an auto accident, denying her critical treatment and contributing to her death because she was a pre-operative transsexual? Fine, yes, recognize the heroes who exist, but don't treat every cop, ambulance driver and soldier as a hero just because of zir job. That'd be like treating every lawyer as crooked and shady, or every judge as impartial to the law. Essentialism can only
get one so far in life before it runs into these kinds of problems, and the fact that nobody seemed to notice this or care bothers me.

Of course, the conbook was loaded with glurge about the WTC Debacle, firefighters, police, military, and a few references here and there to the medical profession. I submitted a story that I felt did an adequate job of challenging the prevailing views, but it felt like mine was the only one to do so, and as a result I probably spent far more time than necessary hawking my story to the few who I knew actually read the conbook, hoping to get them to read past the sugar coating and see something a bit meatier and savory. I can only hope I succeeded, but I probably irritated more than a few folks in the process.

I have, since starting this post, been informed that Kage did bring up the idea of marrow-donors as an
alternative hero, and he did make mention to heroes being "anybody you looked up to," and I'm quite glad to learn of this. However, I think my point still stands that the overwhelming majority of images and words and actions were in support of a very limited range of interpretations of the concept of heroism. This is as much the fault of the fanbase as it is of the chairman. To be sure, there were other stories and art in the conbook depicting Good Samaritanism and other, less obvious forms of heroics, but they were in the minority by a wide margin.

After this unconscious pandering to the majority view, Kage called for a moment of silence for the victims of the London bombing the day before, and I used the opportunity to quietly leave the proceedings. It's not that I don't feel sorry for the dead or their families, but again I feel that this was an inappropriate expression of solidarity. I don't know anybody that died, or anybody that knew anybody that died. I had no reason to grieve, and I'm willing to bet neither did the vast majority of people in the room. However, like the WTC debacle, it would have been politically inappropriate to say as much, and yet to stay and participate in this moment of silence felt like an affront to my beliefs. Let me choose the time and place and manner of my grieving, should I feel the need to do so. Don't push it into the public arena and presume that I feel a certain way. Don't make an issue of something that by all reckoning the survivors themselves aren't discussing openly. Honor my right to express myself if I choose to do so, but don't use the podium as a tool to convince me that I should feel a certain way.

While I'm on that subject, in fact, don't use this kind of tragedy as an excuse for why people didn't come to the con. The predicted attendence was three thousand, based on past projections. Six hundred people did not cancel because of bomb blasts on another continent. If you run the percentages of attendees based on last year and you see that Europeans as a whole were vastly under-represented, then maybe you can use it as a point, but I have difficulty believing in absense of such statistical analysis that this had anything to do with our numbers.

Now, all of these complaints aside, I really did have a good time at the con, though as always I was exhausted by the end of it. I never seem to get enough sleep, partially because I was sharing a double bed when I'm used to a king, partially because I never sleep well in hotel rooms as a general rule even when I have enough space, and partially because as a member of staff I was pretty much busy all day every day. Even though I'm not in an active-duty position like Operationss or Registration, when a programming issue arises I have to help solve it, and this year that meant running back and forth between panel areas trying to make sure everyone had the space necessary to actually fit. 

Saturday was the worst day for this. As a writer, I'm usually disheartened by the lack of interest in the writing panels, and so I was elated for all of about two seconds to discover that one of the writing panels had more than quadrupled its expected attendance, but this turned quickly to horror when I realized I had nowhere to put them. The animatronics panel had run long and they had assumed that they could simply use up the gap time since "nobody needed the space for another hour". This meant an emergency reshuffling of people into other places, which quickly propogated along the chart on Saturday from about 14h00 through to dinner.

Then Mr. Albee had to be located for his 15h00 panel; he'd lost track of time and was chatting amiably with folks in the dealers' room. To be fair, he was mortified when he discovered he'd missed the first fifteen minutes of his scheduled chat, and he practically ran from his table to the room where he was scheduled to discuss his animation. He's a nice enough fellow, I suppose, but it felt at points like the con book, badges and the other swag that people get as part of their registration were all loaded with advertisements. It's one thing to give a free promo to a guy because he's the guest of honor. It's another to become that person's private marketing company for three days.

Finally, the improv panel scheduled for late Saturday night after 2's ever-popular Rant and the Masquerade got delayed because we discovered at the last minute that the puppet show that had been in that room earlier had not dismantled their stage, on the grounds that they were going to be using it the next day. So, we tried to find another room in which to put the Masquerade, only to find out that we didn't have one big enough that wasn't already being used for something else! So, after much hemming and hawing, we finally elected to dismantle the stage for the puppet show and leave them a note explaining what happened. Technically they should've torn down their own equipment after they were done, but I wasn't going to argue at that point.

The two panels that I ran seemingly went off without a hitch, at least. Eye of Argon is always a hoot, and now I
know there's a "lost ending" which should add another three paragraphs to the reading. This should mean another
half-hour of bleeding eyeballs and smelling salts for the audience. Then there's the Iron Author competition which
challenges writers to come up with the worst possible furry story given the required elements. I'm a little embarrassed that this year's cliché list didn't add anything new, but I blame the hell of my regular job over the last month for that. Next year's will be better, I assure you. Or is that worse?

As always, I saw too many people to name that I wanted to see, didn't get to spend nearly the time with people that I wanted to spend, and came away from the event feeling like the whole affair wasn't nearly long enough for the opportunities it presented. Hopefully one year I'll have enough of my act together that I'll feel un-disorganized enough to actually do all the things I want to do. I doubt it will be any time soon, but I can hope. In the interest of furthering this goal, I hereby present a few basic Buni-At-Anthrocon-Handling Instructions:

No groups larger than six people

I cannot stress this one enough. Six is about the maximum number of people that can sit around a dinner table and have a mutually-beneficial conversation that won't break up into smaller groups. Six is about the maximum number of people that can actually make a coherent plan without requiring a voting methodology. Six is about the maximum number of people that can easily get seated at a restaurant without requiring special arrangements necessitating half an hour's wait. Six is also about the limit of people around whom I can be at any one time before I have to start filtering people out to pay adequate attention to others. Thus, when a group hits six people, we make a decision and go. I'd rather have a dinner on time with six people—or even two or three or by myself—than stand around waiting for half an hour trying to see if "just one more person" wants to be invited. This is no offense to anyone, people. This is purely me and my broken brain. If you are person number seven—or eight or nine as the case may be—I am not trying to
snub you by not waiting up for you.

Groups larger than six are acceptable if they happen spontaneously and without effort

As always, every rule has an exception. If there are nine of us standing outside the video game room and we all say "let's go eat at the pho place across the street!" I will not ask three of you to leave, nor will I suddenly decide to go elsewhere. I just know that we spent a lot of time at AC waiting for individual stragglers and sending runners to find people and delaying the acquisition of foodstuffs to cram into our gutsockets, when we could've simply called and said "we'll be at the pho place across the street if you want to join us" and then just gone to the pho place across the street. If the others wanted to join, they could find us there.

Room parties are great as long as they're in other people's rooms

This one may seem a bit odd, but it comes back to th' buni and her need for a hutch in emergency situations. I need somewhere to go to shut down mentally if I get overwhelmed, and if there's a room party in my room, I can't go there to take a bad brain break. At one point, I had to get up and leave my own room because there were too many people present doing too many things at once, and I honestly didn't know where I was going to sleep that night because of it. No offense to anyone who was present, but I can't do that again. 

I'm sure I'll think of more requests and requirements as next year's con draws closer. For now, I'm just content to sit back and wait for the rose-tinted afterglow to settle into place so I can think about everything that happened with fondness instead of mentally picking it all apart. I've got some questions remaining about how things will work when we move to Pittsburgh, and a few things to work out with other staff members, but it's nothing that can't be resolved, I'm sure. I'm definitely looking forward to it, and everything that follows.

See you next year. 

Every year, I have to put together a bio for the Anthrocon staff booklet. Trying to find a new way to say the same thing every year has always been a bit of a challenge, but the fifty-word restriction has always been the single biggest shut-out. Trying to express "who I am" in fifty words or less has never been an easy task.

Last year I decided to deliberately break the form by writing a bio that hit exactly fifty words and cut off in mid-sentence. I thought this was terribly clever, but I discovered that someone else had come up with the same idea!
Convergent though, certainly; I didn't get the idea from the other party. I was, however, still disappointed to see that my originality had not been all that original.

This year, I think I've come up with something that not only easily comes in under the fifty-word limit but also should be in a form that others will not so readily adopt. Therefore, I present to you the Buni Alphabet:

1. Anthropomorphs.
2. Buni!
3. Computers.
4. DEVO.
5. Existentialism.
6. Furries.
7. Gender theory.
8. Humanism.
9. Illuminatus!
10. Jessie.
11. KALLISTI.
12. Linguistics.
13. Modernism.
14. Null Manifesto.
15. Objectivism.
16. Posthumanism.
17. Qiti!
18. Role-playing.
19. Stories.
20. Transformation.
21. Utopia.
22. Viridian.
23. Writing.
24. Xenophilia.
25. Yacatisma.
26. Zoomorphs.

Anthrocon is already turning into something of a blur. That's how it felt at the time, too. Either I was helping Sue run programming, I was in my room sleeping, or I was out chatting with friends that I hadn't seen in a year or more. The only time I ever really got to just sit was during Uncle Kage's Story Hour, which is usually the single biggest "panel" at the convention and hardly a respite from the hordes.

I finally got to meet Ben Goodridge in the flesh, which after seven years of knowing him is probably a good thing. Strangely, we hardly talked about writing at all, but we did at least get the chance to play a quick catch-up game before hastening off to go attend to other duties. I also got another chance to see LeDiva, which is always good. I wish she lived closer; she seems the sort of person around whom I could really enjoy spending a lot of time. Plus, the Lansdale area can always use more gamers.

The only thing I personally didn't like about how things went is that I found out after the fact that I was supposed to be running a panel. The annual reading of the Eye of Argon had been scheduled Friday night, but I had had to work that day and so when Sue asked me if I was going to make it, I said I hoped I would. She thought I had confirmed that I would run the panel. I only thought she wanted me to participate. So, an hour after the panel
started, she called me frantically on the radio asking me where I was and why I wasn't in the room running things! I'm still embarrassed about this one, frankly. Next year, though, I'll know better.

Hopefully, I'll also be able to get time off of work next year to attend. This year, I've been fighting the Project From Hell, a supposedly simple test exercise that has become my driving focus for the past six weeks and now has a hard deadline of Wednesday to deliver. If I thought getting it done before was a problem, now it's downright painful. I'm still not entirely happy with how the automated scripts are handling it, and I've got to run everything from scratch again. I started to do that over the weekend, but the array of hard drives at work ran out of space and so I couldn't get any work done over the time period I thought I would have to do raw processing. So, this is going to be a nightmare few days while I frantically try to get this cranked out to the customer by Thursday morning.

I'm glad I got the chance to attend. More importantly, I'm glad I got the chance to help make the con a better place to be.

---

Of course, the day after I get back from such an exhilirating weekend, the Cosmic 2x4 had to make its feelings known again. I got to test out my air bag today. The driver ahead of me sped up to pass a dump truck, then slammed on her brakes at the green light at the next intersection when the siren of an approaching ambulance sounded. Her brand-new 2004-model car jerked to a complete stop in about two feet, but my old 1990 brakes locked and I slid into her bumper.

I couldn't have been going more than about 10MPH when I hit, but it was enough for the sensor to detect potential driver damage and deploy the SRS—supplemental restraint system, for once—right in my face. I wasn't even going fast enough to hit the airbag. The seat belt caught me instead, and so I was treated to a faceful of scorched talc as the bag snapped out of its hidey-hole. The whole car stank until I rolled down the windows and let the car air out while the other driver ran around panicking that she was in her boss' car.

I don't think the insurance will get involved. Nobody got hurt, neither of the cars suffered worse than scratches unless you count my air bag, and the cop that arrived when the other driver's boss called ruled the accident as a no-faulter. Plus, the other driver's boss sent the other driver back to work by foot and then claimed himself as the driver of record on the accident, so I don't think he's going to try to file anything at this point.

I'll still be out a hefty chunk of change replacing the airbag, but even that's preferable to having to replace the car again.

Has it really been over a month since I last updated this? I keep telling myself that I'm not going to spend so much time away from the diary, 'cause when I do I end up with a batallion of things that I want to discuss, and I inevitably end up forgetting something that I considered utterly vital at one point. However, if I spend all day updating my diary, nothing ever happens that's worth noting. It's a classic problem—the polling problem, actually—in computer science, but that doesn't matter.

Anyway, the first thing of import that happened in the last five weeks was Anthrocon, which went far better than
I feared it would. Being on staff, I think, helped immensely. I even got the chance to help lead two panels with the guest of honor, Lisanne Norman. When the programming director of the con handed me the books and said "Go
read these," I was initially dubious, and the first book took a while to get its sea legs under it, but after that I've found them well worth what I spent on them. Ms. Norman managed most of the interviews herself, but she
said she was glad to have had my help through some of the rougher bits. 

In fact, the only thing that didn't go so well at AC was the room arrangement. The people with whom we were staying brought someone into the room that neither Jessie nor I knew while we were in the shower and then just sat there looking surprised when Jessie and I got miffed at them for not warning us we had company or, better yet, waiting until we were dressed to invite a stranger into the room. Then, they invited a fifth person—another person we didn't know—to sleep in the floor of the room without asking us first. True, their names were on the room and ours weren't, but there's this little niggling thing called common courtesy or so I thought. In the end, we left a check for half the room rate, expressed our disappointment and drove home for Saturday night. We didn't sleep there but one night, so in reality I probably shouldn't have paid more than fifty dollars, but I wanted to meet our "hosts" more than halfway.

They cashed the check and haven't tried to contact me about reimbursing me the extra, so I can only guess they're happy with how things happened.

That one minor scuffle aside, though, the rest of the event was quite fun, even if I did spend most of it running around looking for people and helping out in the Con Ops room. Next year, we're getting our own room and I'm going to try to get the days of the con as vacation so I'm not having to drive to work in the middle of it.

The weekend after that, of course, was the Bash, and that went far better than expected. This year's host and Jessie and I had had some personality scuffles leading up to the event, most of which were successfully resolved
when we had the chance to talk face to face about things. I gave a talk on all the things that nobody had warned me would happen as I transitioned, which went very well even if it did almost not happen thanks to my anxiety
problems—more on that in a bit. The Monday after the Bash is typically a sight-seeing trip, on which I'm almost never interested in going and Jessie only is insofar as it's a chance to socialize with people who're going. We
thought there'd be other people at the hotel with whom we wanted to spend time, but they either all went to Mt. Rainier, or else they went on an impromptu day trip to downtown Seattle, so we spent the day watching television in our hotel room and bitching about the lack of other Bashers. We did get a few rounds of Mao that night, though, which is always a good thing. 

I know I've mentioned my anxiety issues before, and they're no less present now than they were, but the big situations that I feared would lead to my social paralysis seem to be behind me for the moment. I'm not saying I don't want to treat them, but right now I'm going to need to go see my doctor to get any medication to help or find a therapist willing to treat it that will take my insurance. Unfortunately, I have no vacation days left right now,
thanks to the Bash and my surgery from earlier, so now my options are take a day off without pay, try to get my boss to footniblick things to not make me lose any more time, or wait until I get some more vacation time. It's a
crappy set of options, but thanks to how things spilled out earlier I really don't have a better one.

Right now, I'm in a holding action with my own psychoses. Part of me knows I'm copping out and that if I really needed the time off of work I could use my non-vested annual leave, but another part of me is trying to save that for a real emergency since I have no sick time at all remaining until January of next year and there aren't any situations I'm facing in the immediate future that will necessitate me being medicated. I hope.

Yesterday marked the first anniversary of my Real-Life Test. As of yesterday morning, I will have spent one full year living as myself, as Kristina Davis, and not as the person whose name still (dis)graces my birth certificate.

Birth certificates and other government proofs of identification are still something of a sticking point for me; I'm still fighting the passport agency, though one thing has changed on that front that should clear the way for the rest to resolve. My surgeon is finally sending me my Letter, in which he says that I'm scheduled for thus-and-so date and should be given egress from the United States of America to be allowed to meet this obligation. Hopefully it will work. If not, I'm going to have a deuce of a time applying under my old name. I've already submitted the paperwork to the California Bureau of Vital Statistics to amend my birth records. If this letter doesn't do it,
maybe that will. I hope.

Looking back, it's hard to imagine my life before a year ago. I mean,  consciously, I can call up the memories, but they feel alien. I mention on my homepage that I have no intention of claiming I sprung fully grown into the world at age twenty-five, and yet it feels like that in a way. I know what I did, and I can recall specific events, but when I do so they don't seem like they belong to me. I feel like I'm reliving someone else's life when I try to think about it.

I don't suppose that's too surprising, really. I know several people who're going through the same transition who have all expressed at one time or another the desire to have their pasts buried and forgotten. We live in a society that still doesn't totally understand and accept, even if individuals do, and references to our past can get awkward. For the most part, I simply refer to myself as female as far back as possible, and yet there are times of my life where this simply won't work. I lived in a university dorm for a year, and I had a male roommate. No dorm would ever intentionally allow two strangers of differing sexes to occupy the same room, at least not in Texas. Thus, how do I talk about my pathologically normal roommate André without giving away the past?

Should I even care? My friends are an even mix of those who don't know and those who don't care, with most of the former eventually winding up as the latter, but I know someone right now fighting for employment because she
has a military discharge for GID. She's working at a grocery store because she can't get hired for anything better. It's heavily frustrating, seeing this kind of treatment and not being able to stop it, knowing that I could be subject to the same.

At any rate, I look back now at my first year and all I can say is that I wish I had known so much sooner. I envy some of my friends who're going through the change so much younger than I, but I hope that never interferes with our friendship. I can't help but wonder sometimes how much different my life would be now if I'd realized and accepted all of this when I was in college, or even high school, but I'm not enough of a Nostradamus to really know.

All in all, I'm happy with the decision, and I'd do it again in an instant.

---

Anthrocon was last week, and I still have mixed emotions about it. I'd been looking forward to attending for some time, but once I was there, it wasn't what I had expected. Rather, I wasn't able to do what I had hoped.

I simply do not handle large undirected groups of people well. I freeze up. I get silent, curl up in my corner, hope to go unnoticed and panic if I'm put into the spotlight. I can deal with small groups. I can deal with larger groups of people I know well. I can deal with large groups if we're all participating in some specific activity. I can even handle public speaking, since I'm the event on which people are focused. Past a certain point, though, I simply don't react positively.

When I went to Further Confusion with Jessie last year, I didn't really attend the con. I visited with Ryan, while Jessie went to the convention. When I go to the Bash every year, I spend my time socializing with smaller groups, and I grow distinctly uncomfortable when everyone is together. I wish I felt more comfortable, safer interacting with larger groups, but I never have, and it's only grown more acute since my transition. I don't even socialize at work events. I feel out of place and isolated. 

I wanted to attend, to have a good time, but I spent most of it either fighting off panic attacks or hiding in the women's room at the hotel while Jessie at least enjoyed zirself. I don't begrudge the roo for that, and in fact I'm very glad that zie had a good time, but I'm disappointed in my own inability to overcome something so seemingly simple.

With understanding comes growth, and with growth comes new possibilities. Either I'll learn to live with this part of my life, or I'll find a way to overcome it. Either way, I'm better off now than I was before, and I know how to avoid the worst of these sorts of situations.