I talked to lots of cool people about interesting things, introduced
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adrian_turtle to many of my friends so they could see how cool she is, got too little sleep, occasionally felt disconnected from things, but mostly had a good time.
I arrived Thursday, a clever plan to avoid missing half of Friday. Perhaps too clever, since there wasn't much morning or afternoon programming (just the Gathering in the afternoon), and Thursday through Monday is a long convention.
Part of feeling disconnected was, paradoxically, because there were so many people there (over a thousand, significantly larger than the usual Wiscon). Lots of my friends had made lunch and dinner plans well in advance; I tried to do so as well, but with less organization and less success. Not only that, but most of my pre-planning was for breakfasts, meaning 8:30 wakeup calls for 9:00 dates with
brisingamen and
peake on Friday,
wild_irises on Sunday, and Donya and Allen (WANOLJ) on Monday. Brisingamen, Peake, and I have run into each other so often at Michelangelo's that it made sense to make it a plan this year.
oursin's journal for that day says that she had tea and a sticky bun with me, and we were then joined by them, but I'm fairly sure the three of us rendezvous'd in the hotel lobby, and in fact I spent some time during the con regretting not having gotten to sit down with Oursin (every time I ran into her, she already had plans). If I completely forgot a deep and meaningful conversation, I'm sorry. I do remember Brian Attebury coming over after a bit, and them talking about sf criticism.
When I asked
wild_irises if she was free for a meal with me and Adrian, she said yes, observing that she always likes to meet people who make her friends happy. The three of us had a nice long conversation, and then Laurie Marks and her wife Deb walked past (Michelangelo's is like that), Wild Irises introduced us, and within 60 seconds Deb and Adrian were geeking happily about hand tools. In my weekend role as Adrian's secretary (scribe as well as social secretary) I made a note of Deb's contact information, and gave her both mine and Adrian's.
I tend to aim for meal groups of four to six at cons; there were more fours than sixes this time, some threes, and Sunday night Adrian and I had a quiet dinner by ourselves after I admitted to feeling somewhat overwhelmed. Thursday night was six plus a baby: Janet and Matt, their infant daughter Alice, two British friends of theirs,
bookzombie and
pennski his partner Penny (not on LJ AFAIK), and one person I cannot call to mind. We went to a French restaurant that someone remembered from the year before: good food and good conversation. We got back to the con a bit after ten, and I found the OddCon party uninhabitable (the OddCon people are very fond of flashing lights, which hurt my brain), and the con suite close to empty, so I went to bed early. That would have been useful, if I'd gotten to sleep reasonably quickly. It was a strange bed, and (as Adrian pointed out after she arrived on Friday) I'm not used to sleeping alone, even in my own bed.
Friday the two of us had dinner with
kate_schaefer and Glenn Hackney, who are good company. Kate said that my love life was complicated; I immediately disagreed, because for the most part it doesn't seem so, unless scheduling counts as inherently complicated. It took me a long time to get Kate to admit that
cattitude is real, but I don't think she'll be claiming I made up Adrian.
One aspect of spending the weekend saying "This is my girlfriend Adrian
isn't she cool?!" was that I was talking about polyamory more than usual, and with friends who aren't themselves poly (rather than relationship-geeking with poly friends). Lenore asked about how my relationships work. I told her that if she wanted a more useful answer than "very well" I would need a more specific question. She clarified, and I told her a bit about my/our relationship structure (though not in great detail).
rdkeir said that he didn't think he could be polyamorous, because one relationship is difficult enough, and mentioned that there are probably people who assume that a close friend whom he visits moderately often is his girlfriend. I told him that, from what he's posted, and told me in the past, it seems closer to a brotherly than a romantic relationship. I noted also that it might be easier for me to read it that way, because I expect people to be straightforward about such things; someone whose paradigm is cheating quasi-monogamy might assume he's doing that.
Mostly, I was enjoying showing off Adrian to Wiscon and to the people who've been reading me burble about her for the past year, and Wiscon to Adrian. Partway through the weekend it occurred to me that, even if I were going to more cons, I'd picked the right con for the purpose, because Wiscon is definitely queer-friendly. At another con, I'd still expect my friends to be cool about it—someone who has a problem with same-sex relationships, or for that matter bisexuality, wouldn't be my friend—but the con as a whole might be less so, and we'd probably stand out more as a same-sex couple. (My friends are poly-friendly, whether or not they're poly themselves, but I only had one partner with me, so I don't know for sure whether we'll get weird looks if I manage to get Adrian and Cattitude, or one (or both) of them and Q, to the same Wiscon with me.)
I spent quite a bit of time hanging out in front of
elisem's table in the dealer's room, both to talk to her and because she attracted other interesting people. Sunday afternoon I was chatting with Emma Bull, and someone (I don't remember whether it was Emma) started to reintroduce me to Will Shetterly, but I smiled and said "I haven't seen you since you were running for governor." We proceeded to happily talk about trains, people, and other stuff for a while, including him expressing surprise when I mentioned that
zorinth is now taller than I am. I was vaguely disconcerted to see both Will and Emma with short hair, but that was less startling than
nnaloh, who has shaved half her head while keeping the dreadlocks on the rest. Nalo still looks good, but different enough that I blurted out "you shaved half your head" instead of "hello" on Friday afternoon. I suspect she's been getting that a lot.
Adrian and I had made a date with Elise for tea, Saturday afternoon. We went into the dealer's room to collect her, and she apologetically explained that she was cancelling all her social plans for the weekend, because of family stuff that had just come up. She then asked if we'd like to show up early to help her set up for the Haiku Earring Party, and a chance to talk. We accepted, of course. We sat in her room and talked while she finished her dinner, including about some of the family stuff. A few other friends showed up a bit later, and we all went up to the sixth floor to set up for the party. Elise hadn't had time to make enough earrings even for a typical Wiscon, so I and several other people made earrings as the party started. I'm not skilled with the pliers yet, so I got to have fun selecting and arranging beads, and other people bent the wires to make them into earrings. Meanwhile, Elise sat at the head of the table and gave people titles. I think that went a little slower than usual, because she was titling earrings she hadn't made herself or seen before. I didn't select a pair and write a haiku this year; it didn't seem to fit with having been one of the earring-makers. On Sunday, I found Elise, thanked her, and asked if she knew how much fun I'd had, and she told me that yes, she could see it at the time (I was sitting right next to her as she named earrings).
We didn't get tickets to the Dessert Salon. I never do: it seems not really worth the money (partly because the hotel doesn't really grok hot water for tea), and since they always sell out, I assume there are people who want to be there more than I do. Instead, Adrian and I had a quiet dinner together (I'd gotten over-stressed and needed to hide in the room for a little while, then be with just her (my other sweeties not being in Madison)), followed by a brief soak in the hot tub. We were downstairs again a little before 8:30, grabbed slices of cake that were left on the dessert buffet (the other reason I don't buy tickets: the hotel caters two desserts per ticket, and some people only want one), walked into the big ballroom, and discovered that Kate Wilhelm had already started her Guest of Honor speech. She talked about her life as a writer, always writing in many different genres, as she had read when she was growing up, with a small nearby library that sorted things only by the Dewey Decimal system (the first story she sold was "The Mile-Long Spaceship," to John Campbell, but she also wrote mysteries, westerns, romance, mainstream fiction, probably other things). Near the end, she described telling stories to her granddaughter, who at age 4 told her one evening that the ending she'd come up with was wrong, and provided a better one.
Scott Custis came up to the podium long enough to apologize for the glitch that had them start the GoH speeches early, and introduce Jane Yolen. Jane also talked about her writing career, and about her much-loved husband David Stemple, who died a few months ago. She wrote poetry while he was sick, and some after his death, and read some of it to us. She also speculated on writers seeking/working with a somewhat scruffy Muse (she had a better adjective than "scruffy"), the bad-boy Imagination, and the Time Fairy. But there is no Time Fairy, if there were someone like her would have written a hundred books. [laughter, because she has]. Then she told us that while she couldn't provide a list of everything she's written without going through assorted paper or computer records, if someone mentions any of her books she'll remember where she wrote it.
Next was the presentation of the Carl Brandon and Tiptree Awards. As soon as the Carl Brandon Society board came up to the podium, huge numbers of camera flashes started going off. I fled after a minute or so. I gather I missed two good ceremonies, including the chance to see Geoff Ryman in a tiara. I do hope that none of the people who were up on stage found the flashes painful.
The panel on "The Myth of Class Mobility" included some useful discussion of what class is, and where the boundaries are: in particular, the significant overlap between the working class and that part of the middle class, including the intelligentsia, who are living on wages/salary, possibly with lower income than someone with a decent unionized factory job. Panelists provided statistics as well as anecdotes: among the latter, as evidence that there is some class mobility, Chip Delany pointed out that his grandfather had been born in slavery, and he's a tenured professor at Temple University.
The one panel I was on, "Shaping the Culture of SF/F Fandom," was a bit chaotic, as such panels generally are. People talked about inclusivity; about the expense of travel making it more difficult to get to cons (
marykaykare pointed out that she's been hearing that particular complaint/doomsaying for thirty years), about whether some parts of fandom are too isolated from each other, and of course about the Internet. Someone in the audience asserted that the net was a substitute for "real" contact; I said "I beg your pardon! I met two of my partners online." [That's a slight fudge: I met two of my partners in person, but through a friend I met online, and I believe she'd met both of them online as well.] There were a lot of other panels I'd thought looked interesting, but that I didn't know the right things to volunteer to be a panelist.
The panel on "Both/And in an Either/Or World", looking for ways to encompass both sides of a variety of cultural dichotomies (including race and gender) and to claim the middle ground, included Ursula Le Guin introducing herself with "I'm the heterosexual grandmother on this panel." Aron Lichtov talked about doing presentations to college classes on transgender issues, asking the students to raise their hands if they had grandmothers or aunts who did the heavy physical work on the farm, and then saying "Grandma was a tranny" as a way of making trans people "us" to the students. I disagree with him on the specifics—I don't think women who do what is called "men's work" are necessarily or usually transgendered—but think he may be onto something useful in shaking perception. Pamela Taylor said some interesting things about being simultaneously a feminist, a Muslim, and an American. She gets pressure from people who share one of those identities to choose that one rather than the others, or at least to declare a primary loyalty, and pressure from some non-Muslim Americans who don't believe she can really be American if she's Muslim. She has a stronger sense of identity as American than I do, I think: her family has been here for 13 generations, so while we share loyalty to American ideals, she has much deeper roots on this continent than I do.
There was a disclaimer on the con web site, the pocket program, and every issue of the newsletter:
WisCon 30 is funded in part by a grant from the Wisconsin Humanities Council with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the State of Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Humanities Council supports public programs that engage the people of Wisconsin in the exploration of human cultures, ideas and values. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this project do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Also, water is wet.
I'm very glad we got to have lunch with
annafdd; that was at Kabul, the furthest I got from the hotel all weekend (my heel still not being happy). Kabul had the duck strudel on the special board, which pleased me (a fond memory from previous visits), and we all liked the cardamom iced tea. More to the point, we had plenty of time to talk, and Anna seemed more cheerful than she had at the previous Wiscon.
I missed a lot of good programming, I know. There's a note in my journal that says "All those readings, and I went to none of them." [Most if not all of the returning Guests of Honor gave readings.] I also completely spaced the Bake Sale until after it was sold out.
(This is almost certainly incomplete, but it's also already very long. I may post more later.)
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