Reading: Don Quijote

Watching: "The Sting" and "The Last Seduction"

Moving: quick stroll to the library

House: nah.

Garden: I love my salvia, I do.

9 October 2002: Speed Dating

Is there a way to express the concept that someone is terrific in person, but their journal just doesn't work for you? Or the reverse? It's interesting to me that Kymm described a journal as a window and said that, as such, your journal is you, if just a facet (or two) of you, where Karen (on the same panel, in the next breath) said no, we are not our journals. A window at a further remove, or something, being more detached from the result. Because Beth said I was different in person than in my journal. Maybe I've internalized my self-editing-for-publickation [sic] too much. I like to think I'm the same in person as in my journal, just more. Or more facets.

All the mooshy journaler love might come off as fake or excessive or cooing, but if I wasn't thrilled to pieces at the prospect of meeting X or Y, possibly to the point of wanting to avoid Z, I am feeling all the love because of the whole experience. Michael W made the analogy I hadn't articulated yet, which is that JournalCon is more like college than anything I've encountered since I left. A large group of diverse people, all with at least one common interest (or two: Buffy), and more, all (that I could tell) wanting to meet everyone else with the intent to be friends. Or at least friendly.

Sitting around the eight-person table at dinner Friday night, watching tea and water and platters of food spin on the lazy susan, I came up with the next JournalCon concept: speed dating. My modus operandi at a party is to talk to everyone at least once and then to talk to fewer people longer. Speed dating is the model we need to ensure that everyone talks to everyone at least for seven minutes. However, the heterosexual speed dating model is meant to introduce one half a group to the other half. If there are homosexual speed-dating setups, to get everyone to meet everyone minus one, they must be arranged in a more complex geometry than my puny brain could work out in the few minutes before I realized what a fucking disaster speed-journaling would be.

Remember how in "West Side Story," Mr. Glad Hand arranged all the boys and all the girls in two concentric circles, and then the Musical Chairs tune played until every boy-girl pair was Anglo-Puerto Rican, and then each boy took the hand of his own girl to avoid that nasty miscegenation? Yeah. That would totally happen at JournalCon. It would be fun for onlookers in the know because the entire thing would be a trainwreck in action. Or in potential.

If it had happened, maybe I wouldn't've introduced myself twice to Hez, maybe I would've managed to introduce myself even once to Bev, maybe my head would have exploded as I took our seats across from my Über Enemy. The groovy thing though? Didn't have an Über Enemy.

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The branch by the new office is what the librarian called a "destination" branch. She admitted it wasn't a good research branch, and, as I expected, it was jam-packed with videos and light on the books. Its purpose is that all 200 people who want Shelters of Stone can have it right then. But I can have any title in the city delivered there, and how often do I pick off an unknown title off the shelf anyway? It doesn't have a windowseat but does have a gas fireplace, interesting architecture, and proximity on its side. I got some Diana Wynne Jones and Behind the Scenes at the Museum.