Frolicon post mortem
25 March 2008 16:10![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amulI just woke up after driving back from Frolicon last night.
The drive back was particularly cool - every couple of hours, I'd stop off at a Waffle House and grab something to nibble on. I always ended up talking to someone else at the counter, usually politics or religion. It felt really bohemian, ultra cool. You're a trucker? I'm an artist, heading home from an art show. Yeah, that's me.
The convention itself was awesome, I met this model from New Orleans that I'm a little bit in love with. She'll be at ShibariCon, so I'll see her again in a few months. I also managed to get a post-convention coffee date with a girl I met at Dragon Con last year (said coffee date ended the next afternoon ;) The coffee-date was particularly nice, and I kept reminding myself that a large part of my emotional attachment was obviously a product of the geographic distance between us. It's easier to trust someone I know I can't see every day.
I have two distinct crews in the ATL region now, and a part of me lingers over why it's been easier for me to make friends and feel like myself at these conventions. Even compared to the local conventions, I just seem to be able to relax more into myself the farther away things are. On the other hand, I did make some very fast connections at the BDSM con earlier this month, which was Chicago-based.
Friday night, I experienced a massive dose of ego-stroking, as several people hunted me down to tell me how much they liked my work, their turns of phrase highlighting aspects of my work that have always been very important to me. Without having to tell these newly-discovered fans what I was going for, they saw it, saw the difference between what I do and what others do, and praised it.
In the midst of that high, other people complimented my outfits, one even saying that I looked very "steampunk," a style I've been interested in but hadn't specifically approached. Crashing in upon me after that, a dozen people remembered me from last year and hailed me as a long-lost drinking buddy.
As I was driving back, there was an unfamiliar pull at the corners of my mouth, and I realized that I was smiling. Not the lascivious smile of someone remembering a weekend of hard drinking and harder sex, not a smile based in any sort of nostaligia over the weekend, but the simple smile of a man who feels rewarded for living his life by his own rules.
The phrase that keeps coming to me is the springtime of my soul. Something inside me has been turned back on....no, that's not quite the right metaphor. It's more like all the dust has been cleaned off of my cooling fan, and fresh air is circulating across my systems again. My processor isn't running as hot and hard as it was before, and a guttering whine inside me has settled back to the satisfied hum it made when I first bought this machine.
How do I keep this sense of satisfaction with myself? How do I learn to keep it lightly caged inside my grip without crushing it with the need to hold on?
The drive back was particularly cool - every couple of hours, I'd stop off at a Waffle House and grab something to nibble on. I always ended up talking to someone else at the counter, usually politics or religion. It felt really bohemian, ultra cool. You're a trucker? I'm an artist, heading home from an art show. Yeah, that's me.
The convention itself was awesome, I met this model from New Orleans that I'm a little bit in love with. She'll be at ShibariCon, so I'll see her again in a few months. I also managed to get a post-convention coffee date with a girl I met at Dragon Con last year (said coffee date ended the next afternoon ;) The coffee-date was particularly nice, and I kept reminding myself that a large part of my emotional attachment was obviously a product of the geographic distance between us. It's easier to trust someone I know I can't see every day.
I have two distinct crews in the ATL region now, and a part of me lingers over why it's been easier for me to make friends and feel like myself at these conventions. Even compared to the local conventions, I just seem to be able to relax more into myself the farther away things are. On the other hand, I did make some very fast connections at the BDSM con earlier this month, which was Chicago-based.
Friday night, I experienced a massive dose of ego-stroking, as several people hunted me down to tell me how much they liked my work, their turns of phrase highlighting aspects of my work that have always been very important to me. Without having to tell these newly-discovered fans what I was going for, they saw it, saw the difference between what I do and what others do, and praised it.
In the midst of that high, other people complimented my outfits, one even saying that I looked very "steampunk," a style I've been interested in but hadn't specifically approached. Crashing in upon me after that, a dozen people remembered me from last year and hailed me as a long-lost drinking buddy.
As I was driving back, there was an unfamiliar pull at the corners of my mouth, and I realized that I was smiling. Not the lascivious smile of someone remembering a weekend of hard drinking and harder sex, not a smile based in any sort of nostaligia over the weekend, but the simple smile of a man who feels rewarded for living his life by his own rules.
The phrase that keeps coming to me is the springtime of my soul. Something inside me has been turned back on....no, that's not quite the right metaphor. It's more like all the dust has been cleaned off of my cooling fan, and fresh air is circulating across my systems again. My processor isn't running as hot and hard as it was before, and a guttering whine inside me has settled back to the satisfied hum it made when I first bought this machine.
How do I keep this sense of satisfaction with myself? How do I learn to keep it lightly caged inside my grip without crushing it with the need to hold on?