The last four days with a brief glimpse into the future
Thursday: I don't really remember what I did during the day, but I sure know what I did at night -- met katesti and xxsincerityxx! We met up at a delicious cafe a few blocks from my house (to which I biked; this is a theme) and had cake. They are cool and not scary axe murderers! Yay! We talked about hockey and music and y'all. Pretty much awesome.
Friday: Again, I don't totally remember the daytime, but at night I went to a swing dance over in Minneapolis. I got there just fine on the bus (in fact, having an interesting conversation with the driver about our books at the beginning of the line) and then danced and hung out with my dance friends. There were like twelve people there from Winnepeg, which was kind of strange but also cool. I got a ride to the light rail station around 12:30 and took the light rail to my bus stop around 12:50, only to discover that the bus had stopped running at 12:20. Fuck. Further investigation revealed that my only friend with a car was drunk. Double fuck. That's why I keep a cab company's number in my phone. I got a taxi home and it ended up not being that big of a deal or all that expensive.
Saturday: We had been planning to go to the Pride Parade, but then it turned out that it was on Sunday. We (me, Jason, Hannah (not inkstain, a different Hannah), and a girl who works at the library with me, Shivaun) still went to Pride. We biked, which according to Google Maps is a 7.2 mile car ride, but we took the Greenway, so that distance is approximate. Also? The Greenway is AWESOME. It is so flat! It felt like biking on a bowling lane, except not so slippery. Once we got to Minneapolis, it was harder and hillier (the gears on my bike don't work in any way I can understand and possibly not at all) but still shockingly bike friendly with bike lanes on all the major streets. Once we got to the park, we marched in the Trans March. You know what? I like marches. They are fun. You get to yell stuff. I decided that "There ain't no power like the power of the people cause the power of the people don't stop" is my new favorite chant. ("We're here, we're queer, we're fabulous: don't mess with us!" is pretty great too, although I find it somewhat problematic in terms of my own identity since I don't particularly consider myself queer, although that is lost in the larger point of yelling stuff is fun.) Also, while several people yelled supportive stuff back at us, not one person (who I heard, anyway) yelled anything nasty.
After the march, Shivaun decided to head back and Hannah was signed up to table for the Rainbow Rumpus, so Jason and I wandered around the booths for a while trying to find Emily, who was supposed to meet us there but whose phone had died. We did eventually run into her, which is really pretty impressive when you think about it. There were many, many people. Probably my favorite thing at the festival was the free canoe ride around the little lake in the middle of the park. Around three, we decided to head back. Biking back was harder, but we persevered! We biked for somewhere between an hour and a half and two hours, which is crazy hardcore for me. I had been planning to go back and swing dance that night, but since the studio was back in Minneapolis and biking was kind of out of the question and the idea of walking to the bus stop exhausted me, it was not a good time to go try and dance for three hours. I'm kind of bummed because I hear the band that was playing is like AMAZING, but meh. This way I didn't fall asleep on the dance floor or get stranded in Minneapolis again. I ended up just chilling on the internet all night.
Sunday: Waffle morning! We made my housemate Cara's delicious buttermilk waffle recipe (I put strawberries in mine) and I scoured the internet for more icons (MORE! MORE! I have so many icon spaces!) and found some pretty good ones, although people should still point me to their favorite icon makers. Around 1:30, I met up with some other people from my program to distribute some fliers for one of our projects (Cooperative Energy Futures. It was pretty fun. I hope some people get back to us so we can really get moving on this. We put out 250 fliers, so if even ten percent of those people are interested, we'll have more than enough houses.
At 4, we had a messaging meeting to decide how we want to portray what we're doing to the media and our families and random people on the street. We ended up having a much more fundamental conversation about who we are (difficult, but we came up with answers on a few different scales), what we're doing (same, but more with synonyms rather than scales), and what our goal is -- the "object" of our sentence -- which was really hard. We ended up running over dinner by half an hour and scheduling another meeting to figure it out. It was a good time, even though I was totally frickin starving by the end. We had our potluck in the courtyard of one of the dorms instead of someone's house. It was a good idea; the courtyard is a really nice space and we were able to flag down people who we knew but who aren't in the program to eat with us. It turned into a stretching/acrobatics/dance/clapping games party after a while. There was also a massage chain which turned (somewhat awkwardly, we didn't really have enough people) into a massage circle. It's possible that was my favorite potluck we've had of all time.
Today: I need to scan some stuff and return Hannah's (yet another Hannah, not either of the two mentioned above) pants which she lent me because I was in a skirt. Ha, funny story, Hannah 1 (the one who went to Pride with me) was also in a skirt but wanted to do cartwheels, so Jason lent her his pants and wore my skirt. Then he tried to teach us some breakdancing moves. Anyway, I have a meeting I should prepare for and my exco class tonight.
Friday: Again, I don't totally remember the daytime, but at night I went to a swing dance over in Minneapolis. I got there just fine on the bus (in fact, having an interesting conversation with the driver about our books at the beginning of the line) and then danced and hung out with my dance friends. There were like twelve people there from Winnepeg, which was kind of strange but also cool. I got a ride to the light rail station around 12:30 and took the light rail to my bus stop around 12:50, only to discover that the bus had stopped running at 12:20. Fuck. Further investigation revealed that my only friend with a car was drunk. Double fuck. That's why I keep a cab company's number in my phone. I got a taxi home and it ended up not being that big of a deal or all that expensive.
Saturday: We had been planning to go to the Pride Parade, but then it turned out that it was on Sunday. We (me, Jason, Hannah (not inkstain, a different Hannah), and a girl who works at the library with me, Shivaun) still went to Pride. We biked, which according to Google Maps is a 7.2 mile car ride, but we took the Greenway, so that distance is approximate. Also? The Greenway is AWESOME. It is so flat! It felt like biking on a bowling lane, except not so slippery. Once we got to Minneapolis, it was harder and hillier (the gears on my bike don't work in any way I can understand and possibly not at all) but still shockingly bike friendly with bike lanes on all the major streets. Once we got to the park, we marched in the Trans March. You know what? I like marches. They are fun. You get to yell stuff. I decided that "There ain't no power like the power of the people cause the power of the people don't stop" is my new favorite chant. ("We're here, we're queer, we're fabulous: don't mess with us!" is pretty great too, although I find it somewhat problematic in terms of my own identity since I don't particularly consider myself queer, although that is lost in the larger point of yelling stuff is fun.) Also, while several people yelled supportive stuff back at us, not one person (who I heard, anyway) yelled anything nasty.
After the march, Shivaun decided to head back and Hannah was signed up to table for the Rainbow Rumpus, so Jason and I wandered around the booths for a while trying to find Emily, who was supposed to meet us there but whose phone had died. We did eventually run into her, which is really pretty impressive when you think about it. There were many, many people. Probably my favorite thing at the festival was the free canoe ride around the little lake in the middle of the park. Around three, we decided to head back. Biking back was harder, but we persevered! We biked for somewhere between an hour and a half and two hours, which is crazy hardcore for me. I had been planning to go back and swing dance that night, but since the studio was back in Minneapolis and biking was kind of out of the question and the idea of walking to the bus stop exhausted me, it was not a good time to go try and dance for three hours. I'm kind of bummed because I hear the band that was playing is like AMAZING, but meh. This way I didn't fall asleep on the dance floor or get stranded in Minneapolis again. I ended up just chilling on the internet all night.
Sunday: Waffle morning! We made my housemate Cara's delicious buttermilk waffle recipe (I put strawberries in mine) and I scoured the internet for more icons (MORE! MORE! I have so many icon spaces!) and found some pretty good ones, although people should still point me to their favorite icon makers. Around 1:30, I met up with some other people from my program to distribute some fliers for one of our projects (Cooperative Energy Futures. It was pretty fun. I hope some people get back to us so we can really get moving on this. We put out 250 fliers, so if even ten percent of those people are interested, we'll have more than enough houses.
At 4, we had a messaging meeting to decide how we want to portray what we're doing to the media and our families and random people on the street. We ended up having a much more fundamental conversation about who we are (difficult, but we came up with answers on a few different scales), what we're doing (same, but more with synonyms rather than scales), and what our goal is -- the "object" of our sentence -- which was really hard. We ended up running over dinner by half an hour and scheduling another meeting to figure it out. It was a good time, even though I was totally frickin starving by the end. We had our potluck in the courtyard of one of the dorms instead of someone's house. It was a good idea; the courtyard is a really nice space and we were able to flag down people who we knew but who aren't in the program to eat with us. It turned into a stretching/acrobatics/dance/clapping games party after a while. There was also a massage chain which turned (somewhat awkwardly, we didn't really have enough people) into a massage circle. It's possible that was my favorite potluck we've had of all time.
Today: I need to scan some stuff and return Hannah's (yet another Hannah, not either of the two mentioned above) pants which she lent me because I was in a skirt. Ha, funny story, Hannah 1 (the one who went to Pride with me) was also in a skirt but wanted to do cartwheels, so Jason lent her his pants and wore my skirt. Then he tried to teach us some breakdancing moves. Anyway, I have a meeting I should prepare for and my exco class tonight.