Festival
Fortuitously the three glasses of port I drank last night didn't result in a hangover, so at around nine thirty in the morning I make myself comfortable on a pale couch in Aumann and open up my laptop to do some work.
The port was from a good friend who is also here. I messaged him earlier in the week asking for a time to hang out and catch up, and that time was resolved to late in the evening the previous day. He had made a brief comment on the strangeness of the time, but it was nostalgic for me — it brought me back to last November, the writing done and most everyone asleep, playing video games together in the quiet dark. Being back here is so genuinely lovely.
He has a new room, and we hugged tightly for a long time at the threshold before he let me in. Inside was this typical Lighthaven mixture of spartan and indulgent, new engineered wood and crooked ceilings, and we sat next to each other and proceeded to talk for the rest of the night. We talked about work and ambitions and writing, and the beautiful prose you can find in certain books, and he refused to tell me the location of a secret attic on campus.
My body doesn't shake off the east coast time, so despite the late night I still rise early, and on that pale couch I edit a few paragraphs I'm writing about footage my dad shot at the 2004 pride parade. I think about how he must have felt there, sneaking out of the house on some random excuse to be surrounded by people who are like him, not making a sound but at one single point reaching out to brush against the fringes of an elaborate outfit worn by one of the marchers, so I catch a glimpse of his arm. Think, too, of the rest of the crowd decked up in their own festival gear with the shadow of AIDS still cleaving to them, the deaths by then beginning to slow but still claiming lives by the dozen each year in Toronto alone. You wouldn't know it by the footage, though. The footage is all raucous joy.
After I complete my edits, I wander outside into the unusually scorching day, and join a new friend near one of the fire pits. He shares some of his morning brew with me, a ripe pu'er that somehow reminds me of apple pie spice, and shows off his very respectable travel collection - a full bing of a newish raw, some smaller assorted bags of oolongs and pu’ers, and the most precious stuff, little nuggets of it, in plain ziploc snack bags with years and descriptions scrawled on in sharpie. I never see the most expensive stuff in full bings, only ever in these little snack bags. I suppose if I were inclined to share tea from my most expensive bing, I too would bring along little nuggets of it rather than risking travelling with the entire thing and damaging or losing it.
He wasn't able to make the morning session due to a scheduling conflict, so I schedule a second session for the evening for us to try brewing something in his collection.
I've been hosting a bunch of tea sessions, at least one a day but often more. I cap them at five attendees, which has caused much anguish amongst the folks who have failed to RSVP. I do this because I noticed last year that I get antisocially antsy in standard conference conversations because of (as the ingroup puts it) high perceived opportunity cost. Then I feel sad and alienated at the end of each day because I had a bunch of ten minute surface level conversations with people but failed to make any friends, because I was too distracted by trying to hop into better conversations.
So this year I brought with me a pretty set of teaware, and accidentally(?) bully the organizing team into buying me a nice gooseneck kettle, and I sit down and make people tea in an elaborate and time consuming way so that we can be pleasantly trapped for forty-five minutes together. Happily, from this I do succeed in making a new friend a handful of times — someone I previously did not know, but would be glad to speak to when I run into them at future festivals. That morning session is good - the people who show up are smart and thoughtful, and the conversation rambles on pleasantly. The tea is hot, but the little enclosure we are in is enshadowed and pleasantly cool, and it is early enough that the campus is still relatively quiet. It is a nice morning, and a nice way of starting the day. I idly wonder how I can make the tea sessions be even more the shape that I desire. Would it help to have discussion questions prepared? What if I designate each session with a certain theme (e.g. anger, writing, gender) and have participants self-select into sessions that have other people who enjoy thinking about the same thing? After the tea session I message S— on discord. Despite seeing them around campus a bunch, we haven't really had a chance to really hang out, and I shamelessly demand some of their time for a proper catch-up.
Meeting secured, I proceed to filch a copy of this novel by a writer I like and start rereading from the beginning. The author and I had arranged to have lunch together at a local Indian place, and I wanted to talk to her about it, because it’s one of the most bracing things I’ve ever read. But the conversation flows in a different direction and we instead talk shop – courting controversy and internet comments and readership without audience capture, the merits and demerits of Substack. I say to her, I want to keep writing posts that are reasonably controversial but I think if I get more flurries of bad comments I might become mad enough to stop publishing for good because I lack strength of character. She says yeah so you just stick the controversial posts past a paywall and then only people you like will read those posts. I say fuck that actually sounds pretty reasonable. But man, I really like my current blogging platform!
I return from lunch in time for the final session of the four-day 1492 conclave LARP, in which I was King James IV of Scotland. I marry off my beloved cousin Maud to Portugal (sending her along with some fine wool and cod so she doesn't get too homesick) and successfully procure a printing press for my nation, but fail to do anything that would help remediate the horrible political instability that is about to overtake Europe. I have mixed feelings about the LARP. I absolutely don't regret participating in it, and even had fun at times, but through the sessions I often felt clueless and rudderless for a few reasons that are mostly my own fault. Um, namely that I... forgot.... that the supplemental information packets existed until midway through the sessions, and I didn't review them like I was supposed to in the week before the LARP.
Which is to say that I start the second tea session feeling unagentic and stupid. Now, the thing about gongfu tea sessions is that they take gōngfū (工夫; skilled work) to do well. Part of that skill is calibrating the brewing process to each specific tea — the precise water temperature, steeping time, and tea-to-water ratio required to make the end result high quality. The teas that I brought from home to share are ones that I've brewed enough times that I can do it in my sleep, but dialing in a new tea is a challenge. Unfortunately, I begin the session in such a wretched state of mind that I end up messing up the ratio fairly significantly, and waste my friend’s nice pu’er by serving everyone watery tea. I flee in disgrace afterwards and huddle alone with my dinner to emotionally recover.
Then it is nine, and I go find S—, who I like so much. She is ensconced in a little area with a new beau. I flop next to them and say hello and begin discussing my romantic woes, which I will spare you the sordid details of, and S— provides very sound advice which I will fail to take.
The conversation continues from there. One way rationalist gossip is fun is that it can be quite meta; at one point we were discussing why we attend conferences like these when it can be moment to moment not that pleasant, and the beau extemporizes a handful of distinct reasons for why it still might make sense to. It is fun to consider each reason in turn (because the highs more than outweigh the lows? because of some sort of social or status obligation? because it’s type 2 fun? because it’s sort of like gambling?) and see how much it matches with my own internal experience.
A few hours later we end up checking out a session for intimate conversation scheduled for late at night. I have a good impression of the organizer from seeing them around, but I think they are kind of out of their depth in facilitating this particular event (they’re fine, I just have high standards). There are eleven people sprawled out in a loose circle around the perimeter of the large room, resulting in crosstalk and general social uncomfyness, and I decide in the moment that I would hijack it and subject it to my tyrannical whims instead. I turn on the charm and get the organizer to instead arrange the attendees in two small circles far from each other. The energy changes afterwards; people begin murmuring together in low tones, heads bent together, and laughing.
Then, I badger the organizer about the fact that there is an NSFW warning on their event. Was that because they were simply open to the conversation turning sexual, or because they wanted to create a space for conversations about human sexuality? Ascertaining that it is the latter, I turn to the rest of my small group. I am completely in the zone, locked in, in my element. "I hosted a meetup on this a while ago," I say serenely, by way of introduction. "Let's go around the circle, and maybe we can share our preferred mediums for pornography, and how you feel it's shaped your current day sexuality".
Saying things in this matter of fact way is how you turn everything in the world into part of your game, by the way. People are generally pretty happy to be led around by someone who seems competent and reasonably benevolent. I learn some fascinating things about male sexuality, get into one genuinely stimulating disagreement with a total shitbag of a guy who I will play a small part in kicking out of campus the next day for unrelated antisocial behaviour, and successfully convince at least one person to try switching from literotica to ao3 for their written pornography needs. At some point I look around and notice that I am the only woman in the room, and I decide to gracefully make my exit then so that the men can continue to happily discuss their sexual functions with each other without an interloper present.
I walk into the cold night, the pale buildings all done up with fairy lights and fire pits, music and laughter and conversation. I spare a glance in the direction of my friend's room, and reluctantly decide that it would be a little gauche to go pester them for more port so soon. Instead I find some other friends, others who have travelled from far away, and we catch each other up on our days. Many of them believe that the world is going to end soon, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at their faces.