hey! she never uses this journal!
There is officially no more rhyme or reason to my division of labor between this journal and the bettyp journal, other than I suppose the obvious, which is that in the event that I post fic as Betty Plotnick (all popslash and updates on the 16 Instinctive Behaviors TS series) it'll be there, and if I should post fic as Hth (look for some Buffy gen and some Atlantis porn in the forseeable future, and then whatever the hell else I feel like writing) it'll be here. Other than that -- all meta about fandom, squee about what I'm watching, and complaining about school -- Betty. Unless it's here. And here I might have some pagan stuff and some stuff about my original fiction. Unless I don't! Got that? Me neither!
And on that note,
So I've never been a festival pagan, particularly, partially because I am only sporadically a social being at all, but mainly because going to festivals require money, and money is what you have less of when you take four days off work. However, as of last week I am gainfully unemployed, having quit my job to focus on school and rack up *enormous* debts to the federal government, and so I did this thing.
This thing was the brainchild of a vv cool friend of mine named Aislinn, who is a Celtic Reconstructionist and one of those networky kinds of people who knows everybody in the world, so she could get away with making it invitation-only and still having like fifty people turn out for it. What she did was create a whole four-day immersion experience, modeled after the Tailltean games, which were basically the Irish Olympics, held around Lughnasadh every year. They were basically giant state fairs, with multiple tribes/clans/kingdoms showing up to compete athletically and show off their food and their bards and all that; the mythic background is that they commemorated the funeral of the god Lugh's foster-mother, who died of exhaustion after clearing a great plain of land for her people to farm.
I can't even begin to describe to you how much work Aislinn and her husband Cat put into our own personal Tailltean games. We were divvied up into three tribes, and the whole experience, from Thursday night to the middle of the day Sunday, was structured through these tribal bonds: we camped together, ate all our meals together, competed as a team in many of the contests, even raided cattle together (more on this later). All the winners of the individual competitions, as well as receiving very beautiful prizes individually, also earned honor marks and points for our tribes, culminating in a Tribe of the Year award -- and no, the Hogwartsiness of it all was not lost on anyone, incuding Aislinn *g* However, we're Celtic sorts, so there were three instead of four, and nobody was evil. So it was kind of like Hogwarts if they sacked all the Slytherins.
The thing about creating these insta-tribes, watching it happen and being a part of it, was that you get to see all these things going on that you normally only read about in your sociology textbooks. It's amazing to me, even though intellectually I knew it was bound to happen, to *see* people conform so quickly to expectations, to create this sense of loyalty and identity. You hang a banner by your campsite (ours was fucking huge! it was like 15X15, with this enormous black boar in a Pictish style with evil red eyes, and it was awesome), you help each other pitch some tents and cook a meal, you develop odd little customs (dude, we even had a gang sign to mimic tusks), and suddenly it seems entirely reasonable to conceptualize yourself as *this* and not *that,* as somehow recognizably a Boar rather than a Stag or a Horse. Why? No idea. It's just what people do. I've always found that interesting, and to feel it happening to yourself even when you can more or less see the strings in terms of the psychology of it all, is fascinating. I've been home for almost a full day now, and I still in some way *feel* like I should be identifiable to other people as a member of Boar Tribe. I mean, isn't it *obvious*?
The other interesting thing about group psychology, or fate, or something, is how when you put groups of people together, they seem to fall quickly into identities, niches. The tribes weren't entirely random -- Aislinn tried to split up the stronger, more experienced people into different tribes, and in some cases tried to separate people who already knew each other well so they could get to know other people, and in other cases tried to keep folks together who really wanted to be camping together, etc. -- but it still amazed me how much they all developed their own strengths and personalitites. Stag Tribe were very sort of elegant and uber-civilized, with this kind of architecture to their campsite and all these beautiful things everywhere, very competitive, but also very strategy-minded. Horse Tribe was more or less our ass-kicking tribe (they took all the racing competitions with tragic ease -- FAST like FREAKS, as Capt. Mal would say), and they were also competitive, but with a more fiery, temperamental sort of bent to them and keen on the daring grand gesture. Boar Tribe -- okay, we were totally the slacker tribe *g* We brought a keg. We lost *every* athletic competition (due to a sad dearth of giant ass-beaters -- we had several very athletic guys and one girl who was not at all to be overlooked, but we were just outweighed, which mattered in a lot of the competitions, and our one stone badass was the director of the Athletic Track and held off from competing in a lot of the categories just for honor's sake, and also took a loss in one event that we all thought he probably won, even under extra handicapping, just out of sportsmanship), but we cleaned everyone's clocks in the bardic events (with two individual winners -- including me! yay, me! -- and two group entries, one as an ensemble choral piece and one as a ritual theater thing that was utterly fucking awe-inspiring, weaving together three separate chants, two drummers, two dancers, and a fire spinner), as well as taking a fair number of the arts & crafts wins. We were definitely the lovers and not the fighters of the Tailltean games *g*
The cattle raiding was definitely a trip. We had this whole elaborate LARP-y kind of deal, with corrals for our milk bottle cows and foam boffers and a designated druid to revive the dead, and it was all really much too complicated to go into. Unfortunately, in spite of a noble attempt to rig the rules to prevent chaos, it became apparent quickly that the only real strategy, if a tribe was half-decent at guarding their cattle, was to just overwhelm them with force. Escalation ensued. And as anyone who has participated in twenty-person melees can tell you, it quickly becomes a mix of confusion, frustration, and endless delays while the refs try to make sense of everything and people stew resentfully. The Boars, I am sorry to say, did our part to make the whole thing difficult by negotiating neutrality agreements on Saturday morning and then getting bored with them by Saturday afternoon and allying with Horse against the Stags. I didn't think it was honorable then, and I really don't now, but the whole situation was kind of confusing and weird, and I really don't think there was ill intent, so hey. More sociology in action, at the very least. Injuries were sustained. There was bitterness, here and there. By mutual consent, the cattle raiding came to an end on Saturday afternoon, so as to leave the last night free for partying. The moral of the story, from my point of view: beer is always better. (As a matter of fact, when the raids were called off, we went down to the permanent altar on the land and emptied some of our cows of their water in a symbolic sacrifice and a practical deterrent to anyone trying to count heads of cow to determine a winner, and many of those ex-cows were put to use that night at the intertribal Great Feast as beer cows.) Also, I think next year they should cap raiding parties at, say, four, so that there could actually be some entertaining feats of combat, and not just rather dull tromping in and knocking shit over.
Basically, it was a really unique event, and honestly pretty meaningful. The whole idea of having honor at all is kind of tragically scarce in the modern world, so having a whole festival where the idea was to expend your best efforts in all these various skills in order to bring honor to yourself and your kinfolk in this ritualized space where the honor would also go to your gods and the land -- that's a great thing to be able to feel like you've done. It was particularly cool for me because I got to meet all these amazing, interesting people that it would have taken me about ten million years to meet if left to my own devices, and in a context where I was doing something useful and interesting, rather than in a stupid cocktail-party kind of way where you meet people but can't tell anything about them and aren't sure you particularly care. All the folks in my tribe already knew each other except me, so it's the kind of situation I would normally avoid like the plague, but you know, by the end I'd done all this stuff, from carrying a bucket of dishes up and down the hill to wash when it was my turn to do the dishes to laughing at their spectacularly obscene sense of humor (seriously, you only *think* slashers are fucking bent) to winning an honor ring for the tribe in the storytelling competition, and I had these people coming up to me and saying how cool I was and how far I'd exceeded all expectations about the ability of a total stranger to slot comfortably into this group of eccentrics. And that was great; the event was just very well structured for people like me, who aren't normally at the forefront of stuff, to have lots of chances to find their niche and be of material use and show off their strengths. By the time I was doing my last workshop of the weekend on Sunday (on folklore; my major advisor would be so proud! *g*), I had the highest attendance of any workshop of the weekend, mostly Boars who I think had just decided that I was the sort of person who probably had something interesting to say. Aislinn intends to run it again next year as a larger, open event, so it was also neat to think that you were in at the beginning of something that's in the process of developing its own traditions and history.
That's what I did on my summer vacation.
And on that note,
So I've never been a festival pagan, particularly, partially because I am only sporadically a social being at all, but mainly because going to festivals require money, and money is what you have less of when you take four days off work. However, as of last week I am gainfully unemployed, having quit my job to focus on school and rack up *enormous* debts to the federal government, and so I did this thing.
This thing was the brainchild of a vv cool friend of mine named Aislinn, who is a Celtic Reconstructionist and one of those networky kinds of people who knows everybody in the world, so she could get away with making it invitation-only and still having like fifty people turn out for it. What she did was create a whole four-day immersion experience, modeled after the Tailltean games, which were basically the Irish Olympics, held around Lughnasadh every year. They were basically giant state fairs, with multiple tribes/clans/kingdoms showing up to compete athletically and show off their food and their bards and all that; the mythic background is that they commemorated the funeral of the god Lugh's foster-mother, who died of exhaustion after clearing a great plain of land for her people to farm.
I can't even begin to describe to you how much work Aislinn and her husband Cat put into our own personal Tailltean games. We were divvied up into three tribes, and the whole experience, from Thursday night to the middle of the day Sunday, was structured through these tribal bonds: we camped together, ate all our meals together, competed as a team in many of the contests, even raided cattle together (more on this later). All the winners of the individual competitions, as well as receiving very beautiful prizes individually, also earned honor marks and points for our tribes, culminating in a Tribe of the Year award -- and no, the Hogwartsiness of it all was not lost on anyone, incuding Aislinn *g* However, we're Celtic sorts, so there were three instead of four, and nobody was evil. So it was kind of like Hogwarts if they sacked all the Slytherins.
The thing about creating these insta-tribes, watching it happen and being a part of it, was that you get to see all these things going on that you normally only read about in your sociology textbooks. It's amazing to me, even though intellectually I knew it was bound to happen, to *see* people conform so quickly to expectations, to create this sense of loyalty and identity. You hang a banner by your campsite (ours was fucking huge! it was like 15X15, with this enormous black boar in a Pictish style with evil red eyes, and it was awesome), you help each other pitch some tents and cook a meal, you develop odd little customs (dude, we even had a gang sign to mimic tusks), and suddenly it seems entirely reasonable to conceptualize yourself as *this* and not *that,* as somehow recognizably a Boar rather than a Stag or a Horse. Why? No idea. It's just what people do. I've always found that interesting, and to feel it happening to yourself even when you can more or less see the strings in terms of the psychology of it all, is fascinating. I've been home for almost a full day now, and I still in some way *feel* like I should be identifiable to other people as a member of Boar Tribe. I mean, isn't it *obvious*?
The other interesting thing about group psychology, or fate, or something, is how when you put groups of people together, they seem to fall quickly into identities, niches. The tribes weren't entirely random -- Aislinn tried to split up the stronger, more experienced people into different tribes, and in some cases tried to separate people who already knew each other well so they could get to know other people, and in other cases tried to keep folks together who really wanted to be camping together, etc. -- but it still amazed me how much they all developed their own strengths and personalitites. Stag Tribe were very sort of elegant and uber-civilized, with this kind of architecture to their campsite and all these beautiful things everywhere, very competitive, but also very strategy-minded. Horse Tribe was more or less our ass-kicking tribe (they took all the racing competitions with tragic ease -- FAST like FREAKS, as Capt. Mal would say), and they were also competitive, but with a more fiery, temperamental sort of bent to them and keen on the daring grand gesture. Boar Tribe -- okay, we were totally the slacker tribe *g* We brought a keg. We lost *every* athletic competition (due to a sad dearth of giant ass-beaters -- we had several very athletic guys and one girl who was not at all to be overlooked, but we were just outweighed, which mattered in a lot of the competitions, and our one stone badass was the director of the Athletic Track and held off from competing in a lot of the categories just for honor's sake, and also took a loss in one event that we all thought he probably won, even under extra handicapping, just out of sportsmanship), but we cleaned everyone's clocks in the bardic events (with two individual winners -- including me! yay, me! -- and two group entries, one as an ensemble choral piece and one as a ritual theater thing that was utterly fucking awe-inspiring, weaving together three separate chants, two drummers, two dancers, and a fire spinner), as well as taking a fair number of the arts & crafts wins. We were definitely the lovers and not the fighters of the Tailltean games *g*
The cattle raiding was definitely a trip. We had this whole elaborate LARP-y kind of deal, with corrals for our milk bottle cows and foam boffers and a designated druid to revive the dead, and it was all really much too complicated to go into. Unfortunately, in spite of a noble attempt to rig the rules to prevent chaos, it became apparent quickly that the only real strategy, if a tribe was half-decent at guarding their cattle, was to just overwhelm them with force. Escalation ensued. And as anyone who has participated in twenty-person melees can tell you, it quickly becomes a mix of confusion, frustration, and endless delays while the refs try to make sense of everything and people stew resentfully. The Boars, I am sorry to say, did our part to make the whole thing difficult by negotiating neutrality agreements on Saturday morning and then getting bored with them by Saturday afternoon and allying with Horse against the Stags. I didn't think it was honorable then, and I really don't now, but the whole situation was kind of confusing and weird, and I really don't think there was ill intent, so hey. More sociology in action, at the very least. Injuries were sustained. There was bitterness, here and there. By mutual consent, the cattle raiding came to an end on Saturday afternoon, so as to leave the last night free for partying. The moral of the story, from my point of view: beer is always better. (As a matter of fact, when the raids were called off, we went down to the permanent altar on the land and emptied some of our cows of their water in a symbolic sacrifice and a practical deterrent to anyone trying to count heads of cow to determine a winner, and many of those ex-cows were put to use that night at the intertribal Great Feast as beer cows.) Also, I think next year they should cap raiding parties at, say, four, so that there could actually be some entertaining feats of combat, and not just rather dull tromping in and knocking shit over.
Basically, it was a really unique event, and honestly pretty meaningful. The whole idea of having honor at all is kind of tragically scarce in the modern world, so having a whole festival where the idea was to expend your best efforts in all these various skills in order to bring honor to yourself and your kinfolk in this ritualized space where the honor would also go to your gods and the land -- that's a great thing to be able to feel like you've done. It was particularly cool for me because I got to meet all these amazing, interesting people that it would have taken me about ten million years to meet if left to my own devices, and in a context where I was doing something useful and interesting, rather than in a stupid cocktail-party kind of way where you meet people but can't tell anything about them and aren't sure you particularly care. All the folks in my tribe already knew each other except me, so it's the kind of situation I would normally avoid like the plague, but you know, by the end I'd done all this stuff, from carrying a bucket of dishes up and down the hill to wash when it was my turn to do the dishes to laughing at their spectacularly obscene sense of humor (seriously, you only *think* slashers are fucking bent) to winning an honor ring for the tribe in the storytelling competition, and I had these people coming up to me and saying how cool I was and how far I'd exceeded all expectations about the ability of a total stranger to slot comfortably into this group of eccentrics. And that was great; the event was just very well structured for people like me, who aren't normally at the forefront of stuff, to have lots of chances to find their niche and be of material use and show off their strengths. By the time I was doing my last workshop of the weekend on Sunday (on folklore; my major advisor would be so proud! *g*), I had the highest attendance of any workshop of the weekend, mostly Boars who I think had just decided that I was the sort of person who probably had something interesting to say. Aislinn intends to run it again next year as a larger, open event, so it was also neat to think that you were in at the beginning of something that's in the process of developing its own traditions and history.
That's what I did on my summer vacation.