Listening to the news. I have just heard NBC say that the odds of something happening are 50-50. I would say the odds are 1 in 2 or the chances are 50-50.

Reading: Iris Murdoch, Under the Net and Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

Moving: Yes! Lots and lots! Biked ten miles and swam one--no, more: 1.75k. Hear me roar. Ogle at my pre-Euro-trip fitness, oh yes.

23 July 2001: Zucchini for dinner

In the fall of 1990, I went to my first Renaissance Faire. Givens: it's faux Renaissance with lots of medieval worked in, and you call it Ren Faire with an unnecessary e. The compression of periods is a fine thing: Boccaccio wrote the Decameron before 1375 when he died, and it marks the beginning of the Renaissance in Italian literature. This work influenced Chaucer's writing of Canterbury Tales before his death in 1399, and the Canterbury Tales are staunchly medieval in style, mindset, theme, language, religion. So.

Between then and now, western civilization has gone through a rebirth of knowledge and an age of enlightenment, but we still think we have dominion over the whole planet.

There were animals here, and now the King Richard's Fair site lists a zoo that I am sure it did not have ten years ago. The zoo, the menagerie, was this time the final straw that convinced me such things are not, or are no longer, for pageantry and immersion and fun but for shopping and mindless nonsense. I don't recall at previous fairs seeing elephants and cats enslaved and paraded as they are at casinos and circuses without even the dubious edification that occurs in zoos.

I do waver about zoological gardens in principle. I don't have a problem with prey animals in them, because I figure those are a) stupid and b) happy if they're not being pursued at every turn. I have a problem with intelligent animals like elephants and big cats and primates without stimulation and society and scenery displayed for humans' amusement and purported enlightenment with no broader (human-calculated) benefit to their species or environment.

Enlightenment, ha.

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My experience with rôle playing, gaming, live adventure:

One midsummer morning a friend of SSP's hatched the idea for a live adventure. It would be rôle-playing, but in person instead of with dice or however D&D had then evolved. You couldn't tool around on your flame-breathing unicorn unless you had, you know, an actual flame-breathing unicorn. In my more charitable moments I think of it as similar to reënacting the Civil War, except those folks can probably distinguish McClellan from Sherman--which is, now that I think about it, maybe more than a regular Union soldier could have done. The friend, TEWS, was from upstate New York, and among the web of friends of friends, enough folks (or their parents) had land that the game could be held in a variety of different places. I attended three times, one long weekend a year in 1990, '91, and '92. Astute readers may piece together that the latter two times were post-SSP-breakup and infer stress and misery. I remember little from the worst, 1991 trip without cringing and shame, and nothing that I want to expose here.

I can tell some things that don't involve messy emotions. You can track my relationships by the tents I used: in 1990, SSP and I camped in one borrowed from someone he worked with. In 1991 I had to borrow one from someone I worked with. I spent most of that weekend in that tent, but not enough. In 1992, I borrowed one from RDC, whom I did not yet have any intention of dating. In 1992 I picked up the tick that gave me Lyme Disease and apparently permanently tainted my blood. Also I picked up a pendant that became a talisman, because that weekend I realized SSP was better off with AFK than he had been with me, and I was happy for him: that's called recovery. Also I picked up an Obsessed Todd, not that I knew that at the time. Also, I later learned, I picked up a reputation for not spending as much time as I ought to have in my tent, or not alone in it.

A really sweet fellow named Tom had obviously crushed on me from the first. The 1990 Adventure was the seventh year this had been going on, and most people knew everyone else from college or wherever, and Tom had attended from the very first year, I think. By 1992, the crush was well-known enough that whoever organized that year's Adventure worked it into the plot: when I woke up the first morning, I found out, by a note pinned to my tent door, that I had dreamed of a tall man with red hair, romantically, even. His sister was the fortune teller (and everyone was supposed to have their fortune told to get characters interacting and the plot unfolding), and a tall red-haired man featured prominently in my fortune. Poor man.

Here is exactly why I did not belong in any Live Adventure: I can't act. I cannot be other than who I am. Possibly I could, if I trained to it and had a script to follow. But it's nothing that comes naturally to me. If my character had to do anything for the proper denouement of the puzzle or mystery, pity the plot. Even less was I going to go along with any plot device that embarrassed Tom or myself.

In 1993, I knew TEWS was organizing the game again this time, but I hadn't received my invitation and materials though another UConn character had. So I knew something was amiss. TEWS had been distant since SSP and I had broken up, and he didn't like me, but would he exclude me for such a subjective reason as that? Or would his wife, whom I loved and admired (in all save her choice of husband)? Well, come to find out, he would. I telephoned to learn that because I was interested only in the social [spoken with a sarcastic emphasis implying sexual] aspects of the weekend, and not the game itself, why no, I wasn't invited.

Oh. Okay. It's true that I enjoyed meeting all these crazy cool people a lot more than acting in the game. I loved one couple especially. Their names were Nick and Sue, a combination of names that amused me hugely, but more than that, they were great, kind and clever and earthy and parents to adorable huge children with interesting names. Almost everyone was interesting, if occasionally in extremely freakish ways. The Bardic Circle on Saturday nights after the games I particularly enjoyed. The Obsessed Todd himself had a superlative baritone voice and I loved listening to him sing. Another woman knew wonderful Wiccan songs. If I remember correctly, Tom played guitar. In 1992 there was a new participant who was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, so I accosted him. He recommended The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, which I still haven't read. He had a collection of e.e. cummings's poetry, and we found a poem with a suitably medieval theme and read alternating stanzas together. Also I could not sing and I recited "The Stolen Child" and Sue acted it out as I recited, even though she hated Yeats (hmm--well, perhaps it was for the best that would be the last I would see of her).

Even aside from not playing the game, TEWS was not without reason to dislike me. The whole SSP thing was probably enough. You know. Maybe.

While I was loopy, the first school year after the break-up, I was more narcissistic even than usual, giving people good reason to dislike me but rendering me more oblivious even than usual to such unpleasant facts. Also, TEWS was courteous, which masks much; and to mask his dislike served him well (because he was a gossip); besides, we didn't see much of each other. The penny finally dropped for me after the Obsessed Todd made his swave move the following school year. The only person I knew who knew Todd was TEWS, so I approached him to ask what was Todd's damage. TEWS assumed I had acquiesced to Todd's proposition and was only asking for logistical information. Ah. Given that he thought I was a tent-hopping whore in the summer and fall of 1992, I don't know why it mattered to me not to be invited to his Live Adventure the following spring.

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Ren Faires and LARP don't necessarily have anything to do with one another, it's just that the sort of people who like one often like the other. I tried rôle-playing with dice and a GD in grad school one time. I'd met Scott through SEB; they'd gone to high school together. When we debated who would be which Tolkien character, this Scott was an orc because he lived in a cave (a corner, damp, smelly basement room) and had a beard and was generally hairy. Jonas and Kerry were other mutual friends. Scott and Kerry and maybe Jonas belonged to this rôle-playing gang. I was ready to try anything to get out of my own head that year and so went to a session with Scott. Kerry wasn't there, making me the only woman, and fresh meat at that, among Scott and the other three players, the latter of whom would defy greater descriptive abilities than mine. I sucked, perhaps because I was bored, and perhaps I was bored because I wasn't making an effort, and perhaps I wasn't making an effort because being fresh meat isn't a challenging part. I bowed out of that evening as quickly as I could.

Last summer I asked SEB if she knew what had become of Scott. No, but wasn't he interesting? I reminded her of the Tolkien-assigning discussion, and how this person and that were hobbits because they had hairy feet, and this person was Sam Gamgee (not a compliment, no sirree bob), and that person an elf because he was tall and blond, and we even had a Galadriel. I still wonder what became of Jonas and Kerry. That whole lack of correspondence thing.

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After a week of dry heat and no rain, last night I watered the front yard and this morning the fruit trees. I wore a flimsy rayon sundress. By doing this, I created rain. Last weekend I hung a load of wash on the line and minutes later rain began to fall. I am a rain goddess.

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Tonight for supper I sautéed zucchini in garlic and as little oil as I could manage. Also I broiled a small eggplant. The former came from my very garden; the latter did not. But today I did spot the first hint of a blossom on one of the eggplants, and last weekend I ate a handful of string beans raw, pausing only to rinse them under the hose. That first bite of food I raised myself was a holy experience. My garden is doing splendidly.