what I meant to say was...

I had a big post done about CEII but it turned into something else I didn't want to get into right now.

So...here we go again.
CEII was amazing. It was, in fact, probably one of the best experiences of my life. I rode a 5 day high of delight and excitement that I swear I have not experienced since I was a whole lot younger than my current jaded old self. Trying to figure out why this was exactly I go off on all sorts of tangents and really it's like trying to explain the meaning of life to a rock...or something.

I think the combination of meeting extraordinary people who all share the common love of Star Wars and geeky stuff along with the fact that it was a HUGE event plus some rather extraordinarily unexpected wonders that happened which made it special. I'm going to leave it at that.

packed and ready to go!

Day 1 Thursday:

Having spent the day before packing and sewing I wanted to get on the go early. This did not happen as we had last minute shopping stuff to do and Himself needed a hair cut. We left the house around 1 ish and off we went to Essen. I grumbled a bit because I wanted to be there a bit earlier but no matter. The trip down was easy. We missed all the staus and the bad weather. It was fun getting Facebook pms as updates from our friend Claus and before we knew it we were at our hotel. The Ruhr Hotel Essen.

almost there...not quite...

 
This is a smallish ( around 40 rooms) family run hotel around 15 minutes walk from the convention centre. Checking in was funny because the first thing that was commented on was that we were the people who couldn't decide how long we wanted to stay for. Ha ha. 1st we'd only booked  Friday Saturday, the weekend, then we added Sunday night then realized on Wednesday that we'd forgotten about staying on Thursday, luckily for us they had room still open for Thursday night. They made sure we got the same room all the way through in spite of the 3 x we booked. Super friendly doesn't begin to cover it. The room we had was spacious and in the back of the hotel. #23. All the while this is going on people we know are also showing up. It was a huge reunion in the hotel lobby much to the amusement of the staff.

After all the back and forth, the walking to find the convention centre we headed out, wearing the appropriate t-shirts ( a must) to the brauerei pub where the meet and greet was to take place. This pub, as a nice as it was, needed serious lessons from a Munich beer garden. The service was pretty abysmal, they were totally under staffed and they, even though they had been warned,  had no idea how to cope with the mass of people that showed up. Dudes, the 501st and the Rebel Legion + friends are huge. But this was the case, it turned out, for pretty well the whole area around the Messe. No one expected the 501st, the RL the droid builders etc... we are legion and far too many for all the local eateries.

The meet and greet was great. So many familiar faces and a lot of new ones. I stepped way out of my shy zone and bounced about like Tigger on uppers. I was so hyper and excited. It was fun and silly and I got to talk to new people, meet new people and probably scared new people who were wondering who was the crazy red head and why is she talking to me....But really it was cool to actually get up the nerve to openly say Hi I'm Fiona who are you... and start from there. I saw people who really didn't know many people and they looked a bit lost. I know and remember what that feels like. For me, at least, this was a great way to meet new friends. You can usually tell after a few seconds if people don't want to engage and then you say nice to meet you and move along.

the meet and greet!

The pub just couldn't handle people standing around and not sitting at the table. They stopped giving bar service because ..well I don't know why actually.... and would only serve you if you were attached to a table.  We managed to get 1 beer order in and then given the state of the service added a second one which much to Marcus' chagrin came fairly quickly so he was left holding two beers as I still had not finished my first one. This was okay tho because it meant when our friend Jasmine arrived and was sad-panda-face because she wanted a cold drink and it was impossible I could gladly give her the beer meant for me. We rescued her with beer...this is a good German tradition I think. Anything for a squad mate! After a few hours of non-existent service and only1 beer we skipped across the street to a very nice Italian place and ate with our Swiss Garrison Friends. This was one of the only places ( also the sushi place) that did not run out of food and still managed to serve it in a decent time frame.) After food we went back to the pub and just mingled.

All 4 of my Tusken husbands were there so we took a silly picture.

Tusken husbands #1,#2,#3,and #4

Cards were traded, patches were swapped, stories were told and the excitement ramped up a notch for the big day tomorrow.  I think we wandered off at around midnight-ish, because it was very warm and we were kind of tired and tomorrow was going to be pretty busy.

Back at the hotel we settled in to sleep but not before I set up the fan we'd brought with us...a trick we had stolen from the people sleeping in the room across from us at DW20 and boy were we glad I had done this. Essen was in full on heat wave and the lovely hotel did not have A/C.

Aaahhhhhhhhhhh!

Day 2: TBC....

Friday...

One of the things I hate being told is that "This is the way X is so you will just need to accept it."

It's a bullshit statement and if everyone just accepted the way things were we'd still all be living in caves banging rocks together. Change happens because people want to move beyond the constraints of the now into something better. Women got the right to vote because a small group demanded change and started a movement that we are still fighting for to this day. Slavery was abolished, religious freedoms are more widely accepted and so on but all these changes came about because someone somewhere said hey hang on a minute this isn't right and fought against the status quo.

Telling me to accept things the way they are, telling me that my fight is useless because things are the way they are and they won't change no matter what I do is a red fucking flag.

You know what it's a bullshit statement from a scared majority who don't want things to change because they are perfectly happy with the way things are, they way things run in their favour and change scares the shit out of them.

When I played Star wars Galaxies I railed vehemently against the "NO TRADE" aspect of the game and time and again got told I should just give it up it's never going to change. Well I and the group of people fighting this with me didn't give up and eventually we won. The no trade items were reverted back to tradable. It may have only been a game but what it showed me was that no matter what other people say if you, as a human, want change to come, you have to fight for it and you have to be stubborn and persevere.

And this is how I feel about sexism and the objectification of women. Yes sex sells, though not as much as it used to. Women,  well people actually, are slowly growing tired of this. And men, smart men see through it. I get that some males of the species are led by the lower brain but I and many others don't buy into this BS that this is THE ONLY way to sell stuff, to entice guys to read books or get them interested in a particular subject / object / etc.... I think most men are actually smarter than that.

In the world of Sci-fi and Fantasy the myth that it's a totally male dominated arena is slowly being busted. Girls and women are a huge force to be reckoned with and while it may be that the jocks with cocks think they rule the roost I think they'd be surprised. Women spend a lot of money on books, clothes and toys and if there were more items available I think they'd see how much more they could make if they start marketing and catering to the female market as well. Until then I will fight for it. I will push against the norm. I won't accept that I have to take what's given even if it puts women down or marginalizes them simply because (some) men prefer tits and ass to well written, well thought out, strong female characters. I get this is an uphill battle, I get I may not see significant change in my lifetime but that doesn't mean I won't rail against it anyway.

So telling me that this is the way things are and it's never going to change is only going to strengthen my resolve to initiate and fight for change.  I know change is scary but it's worth it in the end.

ps. I also tend to get testy when people say I can't do something because I'm a girl and I've fought this one long and hard as well but this would be another post for another day. 

The quiet one I'm not.

In an interesting little twitter conversation this morning with Bonnie Burton and another person on Twitter that I don't know about this book You-Can-Draw-Star-Wars I rediscovered that side of me no one seems to know about. The shy me.
I'm shy but no one ever believes me because once they get to know me I don't seem shy at all. Well like most things there are two sides to the person that is me. ( actually there are more but let's keep it simple for now).

Yes, I can be vivacious and out going, chatty and vibrant but if I'm in a situation where I admire, like, look up to or otherwise would like to talk with someone I don't know at all all of that arrogance and bravado flees rapidly. I don't do well at parties where I only know one or two people. I'm mistrustful of social situations because I'm different than the average crowd my age.

I'm 46. I'm married. We don't have kids and we never wanted to. We live in a house big enough for a family but it's just the two of us, my art studio, our computer room, our books and stuff and costumes and dvds and so on. We are both geeks in the truest sense of the word. We like science fiction and fantasy. We met through a Star Wars online chat club, our vacations are spent either doing 501st stuff or sci-fi conventions or medieval events ( SCA). When we talk to the normal people at parties we get looked at as though we come from another planet. I've learned over the many years to just keep my mouth shut because the average person doesn't get it and we are freaks of nature to them.

It's even harder for me because I like to talk to people, I like to share ideas and get into discussions and I especially LOVE meeting people who are into geeky stuff, are artistic and so on but man it is hard for me to go up and say hi. Sweaty palm, racing heart hard. So I tend to admire from afar.

At jedicon a couple of years back Denise Vasquez and Randy Martinez were guests. These two people are  great artists and really nice folks and I must have walked by the table they were sitting at, drawing and talking to people about 100 times but never once stopped to say hi or ask the questions I wanted to ask...why? Because I'm hard wired not to bother people. Because it's painfully difficult for me to break that barrier.

Occasionally I do it, and meeting to and speaking with Japanese artist Tsuneo Sanda was one such moment and it was glorious. Even better was keeping the contact up on Facebook because he is just brilliant. But actually making face to face contact is very difficult. Being in a room full of strangers is hard. I'd rather be the girl in the corner watching than take that 1st step which is daft and I do know this but some times, more often than not, getting over that hump is just too hard. I'd rather watch than be rejected or told to fuck off or what ever horrid situation you can think of.

We were at a BBQ a few years back with some dear friends of ours. they get us, they accept that we do stuff differently but the people we met at the BBQ well their faces when we talked about our plans for that year's holiday ... we might as well have been from Mars.  You could see it plainly as we talked they shrank back from us, their eyes got that glazed look and their body language said... ohmygodgetmeawayfromthesepeople. That sense of you are one not of us has been a driving theme my whole life. At that point I close ranks and shut off from the world, I place a nice smile on my face and chatter about mindless stuff I forget 5 minutes later.  At this party we kind of walked away and shortly after that we went home because it's just not fun being with people who think you are freaks and get all judgy because you do stuff that isn't what they think of as "normal".

But really I'm that one people point as really odd, does crazy things and has strange hobbies. How many times in my life I have heard the sentence "You're so weird."I lost count a long time ago.  So I spend a lot of time on my own and I'm perfectly happy with that. I don't mind being on my own. I can be social when I want but honestly I like the quiet time too.

I don't know where this comes from except maybe being bullied and teased a lot as a kid probably didn't help. I developed the arrogance / weirdness armour. I'm British and Canadian and I moved a lot to places were I was an outsider and that was made abundantly clear ( ask me about the time the Patey boy broke my pinkie finger because he hated the way  spoke). I've been a fish out of water my whole life. So I tend to react to situations in one of 2 ways.  I'm either unspeakably shy or I am just a shiny bright bouncy light bulb babbling away about all sorts of shit. I sound like an annoying know it all or so I've been told.

When I do get introduced to people I never know what to say after hi. What questions to ask. Where to go next. I don't do small talk well and I don't ask personal questions of people I don't know well not because I'm not interested but because I feel that if people want to tell me about themselves they will, if they don't then maybe asking is being intrusive and rude.  I want to launch into great and deep conversations right out of the gate. I want people to talk to me not at me and vice versa. I don't care about the weather or what car they drive. I don't want to scratch the surface I want to dig up the floor boards. But since mostly this is socially inappropriate I stay quiet.

So we go to conventions but I mostly watch from afar and I don't ask the questions I really want to ask, or ask for autographs, or say hi, or any of those things because in order to do these things I have to get my fear of rejection under control and while occasionally I manage that, most of the time I take a deep breath and walk the other way which is sad. When I tell you I'm shy it's the truth but probably by that point we've become friends so you won't believe it anyway.