Last night I dragged my friend out to Incubator (the Incubator?) at Someday Lounge.  We are both friends of The Doubleclicks who, along with The Broadsides from PDX Yar, were in the lineup for the night and, well, we are supportive friends.  My friend, though, is…….let’s just call him Pirate Averse and I? Well, my brain tends to Statler and Waldorf things that….deserve Statler and Waldorfing. I do it in my head but my face gives me away…which makes me dangerous at “My ARTZ, lemme show you them!” kind of events. Still, I promised to be on my best behavior and to act as a human shield to keep the pirates away from my friend and off we went.

And?

It was so much better than I could have hoped.  I knew Angela, Aubrey and their buds would kill it, they always do.  I did not expect to genuinely appreciate so many other performers. We sat back on the couch and listened to ambient music played by Tickle Fight. We watched some beginner Tap Dancers tap their groove thangs to a few bars from The Future’s So Bright.  We watched a few scenes from a play.

Obviously Angela and Aubrey were my favorite part of the show, but my second favorite was a guy named Tommy Twimble who did some Vaudeville comedy for us. Twice. And was ah-mazing. He was impossible to look away from. His timing, the jokes he chose to show (he didn’t talk much), the way he just threw himself into it–I do not remember the last time I have laughed so hard. This is the link to his promo video!

One of the things I’m loving the most about this whole “get outta the house more every day” experiment is the way it kind of forces me to find new things to do and new experiences to have.

Oh and I got to practice my “Human Shield” skills. As far as human shields go, I think I might have a natural aptitude for this kind of work!

One of my best friends on the planet writes Horror and Fantasy stories.

Another one of my best friends carries a big ol’ torch for classic literature.

I’m into Internet Geekery.

A new friend has been a working illustrator for years and is very passionate about comics.

This blog post is his fault.

Earlier tonight my friend Indy (he designed an 8-bit tarot deck, how cool is that?) (NOT an affiliate link bee tee dub) and I were talking online and the talk turned to how quickly some of the cons we both love sell out now (compared to when they started out). I had been talking about wanting to experience more cons than PAX but not really minding if I missed out on SDCC.  PAX, I told him, is where my people are (when they aren’t leaving me behind to go on super awesome cruises) (not that I’m at all bitter about the lack of funds and its impact on my ability to have that kind of fun).

That’s when I noticed the time and begged him for a blog post idea.

He said “Why are our fandoms so important to us?”

Good show, Indy. Give me a huge topic with minutes to spare in which to write it.  Awesome. But! I asked!  And, well…. Challenge Accepted.

If I had to sum it up in two sentences they would go something like this: Our fandoms are so important to us because they help us feel less alone.  We all have those things that we love and it’s only natural to seek out other people who love them too.

I was thinking about this on Friday when I was at a concert at the Mt. Tabor theater. The theater had graciously allowed some nerd-centric artists to perform before their “big” guys of the night went on. Timing was tight, sets were limited and we all laughed about how one of the best things about being a nerd is being able to go out, catch three bands and be home before ten. My favorite part of the night, though, was discovering the new (to me) people. Just when I start to think I’ve got my own peculiar little fandom figured out, I get hit with something that makes me realize that this world I live in is so much bigger than I will ever be able to understand. You might think that would make feel overwhelmed or maybe even discouraged. It doesn’t. It makes me feel excited.

On Friday night I watched my friends, The Doubleclicks, do their awesome Nerd-folk thing and then turn the stage over to Adam WarRock, a nerdcore artist. The only other exposure I’ve had to nerdcore (which is not a type of nerd porn, shut up you pervs) has been watching Mc Frontalot be awesome at PAX.  I wasn’t quite prepared for the physical reaction I had to the music. Hip Hop is cool and all, but being there in person–feeling that bass pump up through your feet and cause tingles on your skin–I got it.  It’s an experience that I want to have again, to be sure–but not just because of the electricity.

After Adam’s set, Kirby Krackle took over and rocked out for a while. This was old school, play your own instruments, sing without auto-tune, rock music. About superheroes.  And again: the bass thumping up, the static in my ears– I’m not afraid to admit it to you guys, I got a little fluttery. There may or may not have been some downloading going on when I got home, is all I’m saying.

The music was awesome but, like it is every time I go to one of these things, it wasn’t my favorite part.

My favorite part was just being out with my people, doing our thing and not giving a rip what anybody thought of us. There is joy there–pure unadulterated joy–the kind of joy that only comes from knowing that even if it’s just for a single moment, you aren’t just accepted for who you are, you are embraced because of it.

There are going to be skeptics out there who are going to point out all of the trolls and haters who seem to sit around waiting to give someone a hard time for loving what they love or for the way they express that love. And to them I say, very eloquently: “pffft.” Let them bitch. For every one of those jerks, there are fifty more who are looking for you just as hard as you are looking for them.

This is why our fandoms are so important.  It isn’t about the thing we’re fanning.  The companionship is what matters. That’s why people sit online waiting to hit “buy” when they see that tickets to SDCC, PAX, World Horror, Orycon, or whatever have gone on sale. It’s why they spend years working on applications to study classical literature at Oxford. It’s why they spend hours in forums. It’s why they show up on rain-soaked, traffic-borked nights to listen to music that they could have easily heard in warm and dry homes.It’s why they sport team logos and buy tickets to watch various sports (yeah, I wanted the sports thing to be more eloquent too but I don’t know sports like I know other things).

We all have our things. And for every. single. thing. we love, there are hundreds of other people who love it too.

Fandoms prove this.

That’s why they’re important.

So there.

I’m so doing it again.

You still like me though, right?

John Green’s books are not those books. With a John Green book you go slowly. You read every word carefully because every word has weight. You limit yourself to a few pages, maybe a chapter at a time. You pace yourself. You pace yourself because you never want the book to end. You want to stay in those pages with those people and when the book ends, so do they. Even when the words make you burst into tears and fling the book across the room because you cannot bear what is happening within them…you go slowly. You savor. [Pick your favorite food] books.

It took me a while to get to The Fault in Our Stars. It didn’t get delivered on the day it was supposed to but a couple of days late. Then I was busy. Then I was distracted. Then I went to Nerdfighteria for an afternoon, listened to the excerpt (with the spoilers carefully removed) and went home and started reading the book.  I finished it a couple of weeks ago but haven’t written about it until now because I needed time to process.

I’m not going to go into details because I hate spoilers more than I hate…hmmm. Maybe Spoilers are at the top of the list.

But whatever. Read this book.

Having read John’s other books I was prepared for something insightful and chock full o’ meaning and heart string tuggy. I wasn’t prepared for heart string yanky. But it did. It yanked on my heartstrings so hard it felt like my heart was breaking…but in a beautiful way–the kind of way that makes you hope you can have it broken like that over and over again.

I’m still figuring out how I feel about the story as a whole.

John has said that this book took him a decade to write. I can understand why.  As a reader it has stuck with me. I can only imagine how heavy it must have been to carry it around as the person responsible for translating it to the page.

You can check it out at your local library or at any book retailer (but it feels better to buy from the Indie booksellers).

Read it! Read it NAOOOOW!

What’s fun is that my very favorite snack memory would not have every happened if it weren’t for Wendy.

When Wendy and I were in high school we’d have sleepovers what I remember being as nearly every weekend but were probably just once a month–maybe twice if we were lucky.  You would think that, what with being together all day in school and after school in clubs and then spending afternoons on the phone, we would eventually run out of stuff to talk about but, seriously, when do fifteen year old girls ever run out of things to talk about?

We’d stay up until all hours, share a carton of Dutch Chocolate Ice Cream and gab away until we started to fall asleep. Sometimes we’d keep gabbing even after we’d fallen asleep.

One night the conversation turned, as it always does at least once during every woman’s life, to what we had eaten during the day.

Don’t mistake us for calorie counters. We were never those girls. But one night, as we were sitting at my coffee table, digging lustily into the ice cream I realized “hey, you know what? I think this is one of the first things I’ve eaten today.”

“Really?” Wendy asked.

“Yeah… I think…. Did I? Well I’m sure I had some food, but… I can’t remember.”

“How do you do that? I remember everything I eat.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. Like today I had some oatmeal for breakfast and then some leftovers at lunch and I had a cookie for a snack and then at dinner I ate some cardboard pizza-”

“Some what?”

“Cardboard pizza.”

I should mention that at this point it was probably two in the morning. We were both hyped up on school dance vibes and half a box of ice cream and, well, we were fifteen.  Of course I started to giggle.

“Cardboard? Pizza?”

“Yeah you know.. the kind where the crust is like cardboard and the cheese just kind of glops on top and then all pulls off when you eat it but you can’t eat the crust because it’s all….cardboardy?”

“How do you know what cardboard tastes like?”

“I ate the pizza.”

I started to giggle harder. Which made Wendy start to giggle. Which made me start laughing. Which made Wendy laugh. Which made me laugh more.

We were in a laughter spiral and it kept going.  Every once in a while, one of us would manage to suck in enough oxygen to sputter the words “cardboard pizza” back out.  Or make that kind of sqeaky hooty sound that you make when you’re laughing too hard to actually do anything but rock back and forth with your face contorted in an expression that would normally be quite alarming… if you weren’t laughing so hard.

Eventually we both collapsed onto the floor. We’d laughed ourselves into  giggle-comas.

You may not think the phrase “cardboard pizza” is worthy of such merriment and guffawing. In fact, you are probably reading this right now and thinking, “O……….kay?” I get it. I really do. But that night, it was the funniest phrase either of us had ever heard or said.

We were fifteen. It was late at night. There was ice cream involved.

To this day, whenever I get uncontrollable giggles over something that would typically only earn a chuckle (or for no real reason at all, which happens more often than you might think), I call it a “Cardboard Pizza.”

And that, my dear Internet, is my favorite snack memory.

Now everybody go pay some attention to Wendy because this post was her idea!

Ignite Portland 10 was last night. I’ve heard of Ignite Portland before–a friend clued me into it a couple of years ago but I couldn’t go (don’t remember exactly why), which means this was my first time attending. It was neat! And fun! And I learned stuff!  The basic idea is that it’s a couple hours worth of five minute talks. Each presenter has to come up with twenty slides that are shown on a giant screen for not so very long each (don’t make me to do the math). Once the slides get set up, the talk just goes. There’s no pausing or doing over. Five minutes. That’s it.  It’s kind of like what I imagine the Toastmaster Olympics would be like. My friend Curtis gave one of the talks and got pretty much the best reaction from the crowd all night. So I declared him the event winner.  The second half of the show, though, had a talk called “The Sociology of Cute” which came in a close second for me.  The show is free and they take donations for the Oregon Food Bank so if you live close enough to Portland to attend one of the events you should definitely go.

The Portland Art Museum is having a Rothko exhibit this month! I keep meaning to buy a membership to the museum so that I can go whenever I want and not have to pay admission and this may be just the thing I need to incentivize me to stop procrastinating and just do it. Yes, it’s true. I like modern abstract art. I’m one of those people.  I never really used to like it but then when I was in college I took a modern art class and learned a lot about abstract art and why it’s important in the overall scheme of art history and what it’s really about and now I dig it, so I’m really jazzed to go see the show.

My love for David Tennant has caused me to purchase Hamlet from the Amazon Streaming Store (or whatever it’s called). I watched it on DVD last year with Will and people this is not Mel Gibson’s Hamlet (meaning: this is actually good). It’s HAAAAAAAMLEEEEEEEEEEEET. I doubt that it will be something I sit down to watch for fun ever again but I like the idea of owning it and keeping it on a cloud.  You know what this means? I have David Tennant on a cloud. Tell me that’s not a dream come true.

Okay. Yarn time! Because after a long exhausting week of awesome, I need some down with the yarn time like whoa.

I am officially phoning in this blog post because it is late and I want to get it published on time.  BUT! As I do with my vlog, when I miss a day or phone something in, I get punished. SO. I think I’ll try the same rule here.

So for my punishment I think what I’ll do is let YOU GUYS pick the topic of my blog post for… let’s say a week from Friday, to give you guys time to toss in suggestions and to give me time to write it.  I’ll take suggestions via the contact form through Sunday night, list everything in Monday’s post and then you can vote on which one you want most and then whichever one is winning by Wednesday I’ll write about for Friday.

I thought about just having everybody comment publicly but this seems like a little bit more fun and is more work for me and what are punishments, if not work?

So have at it.

So many awesome things happened that I can’t yet talk about. Which means that now I know what it’s like to be on THIS side of that kind of blog post. I wish I could say that it feels worse than it does but….no. It feels pretty good.

There were talks with friends and yummy beverages and fun cafes and FANTASTIC IDEAS and lots and lots and LOTS of laughing.

Oh and I got nothing of real consequence done in terms of profitability but in this moment I do not so much care.

This was not the blog post I thought I’d be writing today but you know… I’m not sad about that either. The deep stuff fares best in the middle of the week anyway.

It was awesome.

There you go.

Oh, you want more. I see. Okay. Here’s the thing: by now, probably the entire show has made it’s way on to YouTube in a variety of five and ten minute increments. A simple search of Nerdfighting PDX will turn up anything you want to know. So I’m not going to give you a play by play. Instead I think I’ll just talk about the overall experience of what it’s like to spend the afternoon in Nerdfighteria.

It’s hard for me to put into words why I make it a priority to go to as many nerd-centric shows like this as my bank account will (and sometimes won’t but I go anyway) allow.  It’s more than just getting to hang out with my friends (most of whom make it a point to see these things as well). I can hang out with them pretty much whenever I want. It’s more than getting to see a great band or hear a great author read, though that’s pretty…well, great. It’s more than watching while hundreds of people sing (with gusto!) songs about particle physics, angler fish and Harry Potter. It’s even more than watching dozens of people who would, in most other situations feel too shy or scared do more than sit in a corner watching “normal” people have fun, dance with wild abandon (though, admittedly, that was one of my favorite parts of the show).

It’s about…a t-shirt.

There is a t-shirt–and a lot of people at this show were wearing them–that says “I went to Nerdfighteria and all I got was this AWESOME COMMUNITY.”

I took a friend with me to see the Tour de Nerdfighting. It was his first major geek show and he was equal parts apprehensive and “aw, look how excited she is for this thing, that’s pretty cute. I think I’ll humor her,” about it. He laughingly obliged when I told him that we should get to the Bagdad at least an hour before the show was scheduled to start and then had his mind kind of blown when we got there an hour early and the line already went around the building…and then kept queueing up after us. “Nerds show up.” I told him.  As we stood there he watched, kind of shocked as we broke out into cheers as carts of books were wheeled by, as people ran by with video cameras, and whenever we saw a staffer doing anything, really. “We’re also kind of enthusiastic.” I told him.  “Don’t worry, we’re friendly too.”

And sure enough, two minutes after we sat down inside the theater a younger guy came over and asked to sit next to us. Within twenty seconds the three of us were all chatting away as if we had been planning to meet there all along. Not long before the show was supposed to start our new buddy, Josh, decided to brave the merch table, leaving us on our own for a few minutes.

“That guy is really friendly.” said my friend.  I nodded.

“Look around,” I told him. “Do you see all of these people?” My friend nodded. “All of these people are your friends now. All of these people care about you and love you…just because you’re here. They don’t need to know your story. They don’t even need to know your name. You don’t need to prove yourself to them. Every single one of them will move mountains to make sure that your life has as much awesome in it as possible. Just because you’re you and we’re us.”

I think that is my favorite part of the Tour de Nerdfighting. Most of the time Nerdfighteria is an ethereal place. But for a couple of hours on a rainy Sunday afternoon, it was tangible and I got to show someone new how awesome it can be to spend time there.

What? I like to share.

The Annual NaBloPoMo experiment.

The Christmas Advent experiment.

The Vlog Every Day experiment.

I didn’t have a cha–er–experiment in January. I was mostly just focused on paying bills, keeping the lights on and recovering from a maddening end to 2011. This month, though, I’m back in the saddle. I’m calling it the Great Get Yer Ass Outta The House Challenge (experiment).

You guys know that I work from home, that I spend most of my time at home and that I spend most of that time primarily, well, with my cat. Sure I hang out on Twitter. I check Facebook all day long. I read blogs. I have conversations with people through all of these mediums.  But, at the same time and even though I have a roommate, it is really easy for me to go days without having a face-to-face conversation with or even seeing another human being. And while this was kind of a good thing while I was working through the immediate aftermath of my divorce and all the grossness there, now that I’m starting to really heal and feel better…it is not a good thing. It is really starting to hit me that I don’t have to live like a recluse anymore.

When I was married I lived pretty reclusively because the person I was married to simply does not like other people. He preferred to stay home, sit on his game and interact with people that way. I try not to judge much because hi, Twitteraholic right here.  Still–whenever I did want to go out it was like  trying to pull teeth with a gummy/slimy slap handy thing and more often than not lead to an argument or someone pouting and acting like a douche or just general overall unhappiness for us both so… I very rarely asked to go do things and made myself content to sit on the couch with the cat, watching shows on Netflix over and over again.

I’m not forced to live like that anymore and I’m starting to realize something. As more time passes, it is becoming more and more clear that…

I have no desire to be the next JD Salinger.

Sure, Dude was a brilliant writer but I want to be out! Amongst the people! Certainly not all the time but some of the time (it was really hard not to quote The Little Mermaid just now).

This is where it gets tricky. It’s hard to justify going out and potentially spending money when staying home is free (ish). It’s hard to put away the work and have fun when work and fun occupy the same space. It’s really difficult to switch from “Get It Done” brain to “Relax” brain. So I need to make a change.  I’m just not sure exactly which kind of change to make.

So! I’m challenging myself! Because that’s always fun.  (I can’t say I’m experimenting on myself. It just sounds wrong…and vaguely dirty.)

For the month of February I’m going to try to get out of the house in some fashion every. single. day. For Monday through Friday I’m going to try my hand at working outside of the house and on Saturday and Sunday I’m going to… I don’t know exactly what just yet. Try to do fun things. Go for walks. Hang with friends. Whatever. Just get out for at least a few minutes each day–even if it’s just a walk by myself.

Of course it’s one thing to say that I am going to do these things. It’s another to find a way to force myself to do them. So…um… I put a monthly transit pass on my credit card. Now I have unlimited TriMet access for the month of February so there’s no reason to sit at home. In fact, sitting at home would pretty much just be the same thing as throwing the money I spent on the transit pass away, right?

Monetary incentives are sometimes the best incentives–even when it’s “do not let that expense to go waste!” kind of incentives.

We’ll see how it goes…but I figured I’d better announce it somewhere or I’d never make myself do it, monetary incentives be damned.

PS. I know I had said I would talk more about Nerdfighteria and PDX’s Tour de Nerdfighting stop today but I’m still trying to figure out exactly what I want to talk about. I’ll post it on Friday for sure!