Two nights ago my husband arrived home from work and was greeted by a 9x7 foot tent set up in our living room.
He is still laughing.
See, I am not what one would call… ‘outdoorsy’. I don’t do bugs. I prefer to sleep on something made by Stearns and Foster, not Mother Nature. I require things like electrical outlets and sweet smelling shampoo and processed, conditioned, climate controlled air.
So the fact that I am going to hang out in a tent and a sleeping bag on a sidewalk in Los Angeles for 5 days comes as a bit of a surprise to those who have known me the last… oh, 30-some odd years.
I am not certain what to expect out of this experience. But there are hundreds of people who went last time and not only lived to tell about it, but seem to have had enough fun to want to relive it all over again. I’m hoping it’s not like child birth – where it’s just been 18 long months and they’ve forgotten how painful it was.
(Are the bugs in LA really big???)
(I digress.)
There are a couple reasons I wanted to go on this trip. And, despite what all the RL people on my Facebook have been sarcastically poking at me about all day (“You’re going off to ogle RPatz? Are you serious??”), getting up close and personal with The Pretty is actually pretty far down on the list. (EEK! I hope all the other tent city ladies don’t read this and come try to confiscate my wristband…I’ll sqeee when he comes by I promise.)
The real reason I’m doing this is just to prove I can.
I live a very blissful, sheltered life with a husband who was my high school sweetheart and parents who still reside 20 houses away. I went to college with people I’d known since elementary school and got married shortly after graduation. So you see, I’ve never been wild and crazy and taken a leap into wildly unchartered, unknown territory. That’s what this is right? I mean… there will be bugs? And packs of “literally on the verge of being clinically insane’ women. And I mean… it’s CALIFORNIA. Those of you who are lifelong east coasters will understand that just going to the wild west is like leaving the country…
I guess some women like me decide to go off and have a mid-life awakening (I refuse to call this a crisis) by going on safari in Africa or doing mission work in South America. Me? I’m gonna sit on a sidewalk in one of the largest cities in the country.
I’m a trail blazer I tell you.
I am not going to lie and say I am not nervous about this. From the chatter on the blogs and twitter for the past month there seem to be a million rules governing this shin-dig. From what I can tell very few of the rules are from Summit – lots seem to be created by what I am going to call the fangirlmafia. It seems in years past there was some stampeding. And line jumping? And perhaps a few people who touched The Pretty’s hair.
My biggest goal is to stay outta the Twifan Mafioso’s line of fire, I am far more afraid of them then I am of Summit. (Wait. Maybe they are undercover agents that Summit has sent out into the fandom to secretly control us all… You know Summit and their ‘vast-right-wing-PR-Loving-Plots’ (sarcastic grin at the delusional nonnies among us) – they might be smart enough to dream that kind of undercover shit up….
Yeah. Right., I don’t believe it either. But let’s see if the nonnies start running with that conspiracy theory. They all think Summit is staffed by geniuses.
Right after he stopped laughing at my tent, Mr Pea (who is a saint among men for taking off a week from work to watch my 7 year old twins – an adventure all it’s own) kept repeatedly saying, ‘You’re going to do all this… JUST to see someone for 5 minutes?’
And that very question being repeated over and over made me think of what I really WANT out of this. SO here it is.
I want to see the faces of some of the lovely ladies I have spent most of my nights with (and ok,… plenty of unproductive days too) for the last year. I want to hug them and squeeze them and see if I can get thoroughly confused trying to play the ultimate game of Memory as I try to match up real names with twitter ID’s.
I want to prove I’m not a wuss. I can fly 3000 miles across the county all by myself. Manage to navigate LAX with exactly 3 suitcases (I shit you not), 1 laptop bag and 1 purse that is crammed so full it won’t go on my shoulder.
I want to take the famous AiT finger puppets for a grand adventure and see how many compromising pictures I can take of knitward trying to get with yarnella. (I’m taking requests…)
I want to see the bubble first hand. I would forgo an autograph or a picture if it meant I could stand in person and watch those two eye fuck each other for 5 minutes. The pictures of the eyefucking at the Eclipse premiere is what drew me out of being just a regular fan into this crazy vortex of madness.
And oddly, while I want to see The Pretty up close to judge whether the fuckhawtness is real… more than anything I am looking forward to seeing Kristen in person. I can’t help it. I have a strange fascination with her as all my besties know. She is one of the first people I have ever actually admired. And I don’t mean in that Krisbian sorta way that my husband secretly likes to imagine… I mean in that ‘she’s taught me to be a stronger woman’ way.
So here I go world. Off to practice being that stronger woman. Off to conquer this thing. And, hopefully, live to tell about it.
I really hope the bugs aren’t big.
Won’t the mafia ladies have big guns that can overpower them?
No comments:
Post a Comment