September 7th, 2005
- I did end up wearing two of the shirts I said I wouldn’t wear on the airplane.
- My whole body hurts from my vacation.
- I bet my feet hurt for a week.
- Joss Wheddon was a no show at DragonCon, which annoyed me.
- Apparently author Robert Asprin lives in New Orleans. Has anyone heard from him or his wife Lynne Abbey?
- My childhood home is underwater in New Orleans.
- My mother has apparently trained hundreds of nurses at the Astrodome. My dad says she leaves at 7am and doesn’t get back until 10pm. She’s my hero.
- I know a lot of people are collecting necessity items for refugees. I’m thinking of starting up a collection of reading materials like books and magazines and maybe old computers to send to shelters. Not sure how to go about it. Obviously, I want to wait until people get settled a bit, but I figure people are going to need something to help them pass the time once they get the necessities and find their families.
- The cast of Serenity that I got to see/meet (Jewel, Marina, Adam and Ron) were very nice. They were collecting money for Hurricane Victims. Adam Baldwin seems like a big goofy 8 year old. I thanked Jewel for playing an engineer/mechanic on the show — I told her how important it is for little girls to have role models that can be pretty, smart, and dirty all at once.
- Meg and Peter are trying to find reasonably-priced housing in Baton Rouge as both their companies are rebuilding there. However, they say that everyone is renting/selling to the highest bidder.
- Did I mention my feet hurt?
- I completely redesigned Nothing Tastes As Good and cleared the DB since I’m restarting Weight Watcher’s today.
Tags: DragonCon, discombobulated, New Orleans, Serenity, blogs, Firefly
September 6th, 2005
Well, I guess I expected the drama to be of a greater level between El, El’s Mom (Mrs. M), and PW this weekend. Don’t get me wrong. There was definitely drama that was somehow related to the evacuation of New Orleans but also from a year or so of things just building up, I guess.
For those of you who’ve been reading since my beginnings on Strategically Bent you could probably skip the next few paragraphs, but for those of you who haven’t, perhaps some background information is in order.
El and PW have been friends for perhaps 16 years. Neither is what I’d call normal. I’ve learned over the years to take the bad with the good. No one is perfect and I’m too old to care about the drama bits.
PW is from a troubled upbringing with an abusive father and a mother who kidnapped her sister and abandoned her and her brother with her father. She has issues resulting from all of that. I’m not a psychologist and I only had a semester of it in college, but I’m pretty sure that she has abandonment issues as well as a certain amount of paranoia and she’s overly sensitive about many things. I also suspect her to be co-dependent though she won’t admit that. She has major mood swings and can be explosive at the most unexpected moments.
El is the last of three children and her sisters were pretty much grown by the time she was born. She apparently has some sort of sickly past and has been in at least one mental hospital. She has a heart condition and appears to have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome — though I have my theories on that. I think she’s anorexic and self-absorbed and is definitely co-dependent. She wants to be independent but also wants and needs to be cared for. She claims she wishes she was well-enough to work but I’m told she stays up all night playing video games and then sleeps until 3pm. She’s a drama queen type who has to be the center of attention and all men love her instantly, but she is afraid to drop her boyfriend who appears to be using her for her internet connection because she needs to have a boyfriend and as a shut-in, she’ll never meet anyone.
Mrs. M is definitely one of those Italian moms who has to be in charge. She is co-dependent but she’s the caretaker. She’s a martyr because no one can take care of themselves and she has to do it. She has all this weight on her shoulders and no time to push it off. I sometimes wonder if El is the way she is because she was catered to and babied by her mother all of her life. I know that she always takes her daughter’s side of the story as truth even if it isn’t and if you try to tell her that her daughter is wrong, you have committed the ultimate sin.
But they have their good qualities. You can trust that in a crisis, they’ll be there for you. They try their best to be good people, though I suppose everyone has their own definition of good people.
Now, after PW’s husband left her and she couldn’t afford to renew her apartment lease, Mrs. M invited PW to come live with them to save up some money and get back on her feet. She was supposed to stay six months but it turned into over a year. She then moved into a small studio apartment for six months before El and Mrs. M made an offer she couldn’t refuse.
PW and El have been living together for about a year in a three bedroom apartment that El inisted they have that PW couldn’t afford. The agreement as I’ve been told by PW was that she would pay 1/3rd of the rent and bills and do all the chores and El would pay the rest of the rent and bills (though I learned today that El’s parents were paying half of her part). PW says that when they got moved in, El demanded she pay half of everything and expected her to do the chores. So she moved in with El to save money and ended up paying more than she could afford. She used up all her savings and when El and her mom asked why PW was having financial trouble, she told them straight out. So they gave her a $50 “discount,” which is still way more than PW was paying in her old apartment plus she’s still expected to do all the chores.
Mind you, Mrs. M is apparently in and out of the apartment at least once a day to feed and take care of El and when Mrs. M isn’t there, El expects PW to stop everything to cook her dinner or fetch her a soda.
And supposedly, according to PW, since the financial difficulty argument, Mrs. M and El have been treating PW like a slave. There was also an argument that El never wants to do anything with PW anymore and isn’t friendly at all and then there was the argument about the fact that El and El’s beaux stay up all night in the computer room which is next to PW’s and make a lot of noise playing computer games and arguing and such and PW has to get up by 5am for work.
Mind you, this is all hearsay. I don’t really know. I wasn’t there and I only got the one side of that story. I can see it though, knowing them, but I also know that PW can overreact.
Anyway, so all of that was brewing long before Katrina became a depression. Mrs. M, El, El’s beaux, PW, PW’s beaux English, Mrs. M’s mom, and El’s dad evacuated with four cats in two cars the Sunday before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Apparently this was a worse experience than one would imagine.
I’ll try to recall all the things that have been said to me over the last few days.
Mrs. M is angry with PW for packing and saving board games (collectible and rare ones at that). She’s angry that English and PW showed up with large suitcases the morning of the evacuation which wasn’t practical and she was annoyed that PW was unhappy about having to reduce everything to one suitcase. I think she also feels like PW wasn’t very grateful for Mrs. M getting her out of the city and then out of Hammond and PW seems angry that Mrs. M made her go to Memphis though staying in Hammond would have been much worse. Mrs. M is angry because apparently PW had a meltdown about having to leave her new used pickup truck though it was her decision to leave it in Metairie (near New Orleans) because she hadn’t had it long enough to know how it would react to the stop and start traffic of an evacuation. In fact, Mrs. M seems to be angry that PW keeps mentioning and bemoaning the things “she” lost in the hurricane and doesn’t seem to understand that she isn’t the only one who’s suffered loss.
Apparently, El’s dad, who’s known to be a bastard and has said some nasty things to PW in the past, claiming they were jokes, told PW on multiple occassions that she hadn’t been invited on this little adventure — only he was meaner about it. Anyway, this set off PW into another meltdown apparently in front of a priest which Mrs. M is angry about; plus, Mrs. M insists the comment was a joke and didn’t know until I told her that he’d made it more than once prior to being made in front of the priest.
This got PW to thinking about just going to England with English for about a month or until she could get back into New Orleans, where she and El lived, to get her stuff. Basically, she felt like she was a burdon and unwanted and she felt like it would make everyone happy if there was one less person to worry about.
Then there comes the nightmare about PW’s cat. Mrs. M got in a huff because PW hadn’t asked her if she would care for PW’s cat if she went to England. PW was infuriated that Mrs. M thought she had to ask permission to go to England with her boyfriend. See where this is going?
This led to a meltdown in the food court about what to do with PW’s cat. I volunteered to take the cat — even fly to Memphis to get him on a weekend — but for hours PW would not let go of the thought of what to do about the cat. This lead to how she was alone in the world because he hated father was probably dead in the hurricane and she didn’t know where her mother was and she had lost everything and now she’d probably have to put her cat to sleep because that was more humane than leaving him in a kennel. This led to how when she got back to the States, she’d have no where to live and how she wouldn’t even afford the FEMA and Red Cross housing, though I told her over and over that many displaced Katrina folks were getting free housing. And you have to love this logic: she insisted she wouldn’t qualify the low-cost housing because she had tried before and they’d turned her down and now she didn’t even have a job to help pay the rent for a full-cost rent.
El was upset because she felt like PW was insisting that she couldn’t be upset about losing all of her own stuff in the hurricane because at least she had a family to take care of her and love her and all of that. And it’s true that whenever El started to bemoan her own loss, PW would start playing the “I’m worse off than you game.”
Finally, Mrs. M is upset because she’s treated PW like a daughter for years and PW is treating her terribly and thought Mrs. M wouldn’t take care of her cat…nevermind that Mrs. M pretty much said something to the effect of “You’re just going off to England and expecting me to take care of your cat?”
Mostly, I think Mrs. M feels a lot of stress beyond the feeling of loss (though her house appears to be fine except for roof damage on the satellite pictures). I think she feels like she’s the only responsible person and that if she didn’t take care of everything nothing would get done. I think she needs to be the caretaker and in control and this whole thing is out of control. No one knows what’s going to happen next and that has to be discomforting.
I do think Mrs. M has been treating PW like a daughter. I’ve seen firsthand Mrs. M angry at her real daughters and I think she’s treating PW just like them.
Personally, I think they were all right to have whatever feelings they had, but I also wanted to point out how selfish they all seemed to be that they all expected each other to not whine about their own loss. No one wanted to hear “I lost my” and yet they were all saying it and it was perfectly fine for each of them to say it but no one else could. I think in a tragedy like they are facing, they’re all going through some tough feelings and emotions and of course they’re bound to aggrevate each other. I know that when you lose someone near and dear to you, you feel like the whole world should be as devestated about your personal loss as you are, and I think this is the same.
Plus, I think they’re all a bit similar and that kind of classes. Three drama queens in the same circumstance? Oy.
Anyway, I know it sounds like I had a miserable time. I didn’t. I’m proud of myself for not getting in the middle of it and not trying to fix it. If they can’t fix it themselves, then it’s their fault. I was just a neutral adult party who leant and ear and a shoulder.
I told them over and over that no matter what’s happened in the past or what’s been said in the past, the one thing about this group of friends is that when there’s a crisis, we’re the best support system ever — most of us will drop anything for each other and those of us in better positions to help in this case will help. Heck, JB has offered his home and money to his family and to our group. I’ve offered my futon in the living room. I was willing to fly to Memphis to get PW’s cat and take it home. (Mrs. M is taking care of all four cats while they wait for the opportunity to go home.)
Hopefully, when PW returns from England, things will have cooled off and everyone will have had time to heal and things will be back to -erm- normal.
Oh, and P.S. I liked English. I think he’ll be good for PW. He’s mature for the most part. Well, he’s not immature like her ex-husband. He’s very patient and he doesn’t roll his eyes like the ex-husband did when she had a meltdown. He tried to come up with solutions for her worries though like me he was frustrated that there was something wrong with every one of our suggestions. Anyway, I like him and I hope they make each other happy ever after.
Tags: Hurricane Katrina, dysfunctional drama, DragonCon
September 4th, 2005
Next year I may completely skip all of the panels and just walk around taking photos. I missed so many good ones — like Darth Brooks, completely with guitar, Captain Jack Sparrow, and a midget Darth Vader.
Anyway, here’s today’s picture-taking results. You’ll note there are more spandexed superheroes and also a bunch of Klingons enjoying a meal in the Food Court with the latest winner of the Miss Klingon Empire Contest. Oh, and I caught up with Strawberry Shortcake while I actually had a camera in hand this time…nearly tripped over myself to get the picture too. I’m a dork.
September 4, 2005
One last photo…guess who
By the way, one of the above pictures is El.
Tags: DragonCon, photo, costumes
September 4th, 2005
Well, relieved to have my camera back, I was able to download the pictures I took in the afternoon.
I saw some cute costumes while I was camera-less that included Strawberry Shortcake, G.I. Joe, a fairy, a family dressed as Princess Leia with Han Solo and Yoda (who was the toddler). Really there have been some fabu costumes this year. I’m determined to get skinny and do a Firefly costume for next year as well as wear my skimpy cat-girl costume. 
September 3, 2005
Costumes About the Con
Hyatt Regency Lobby at Night
I also took some in the Hyatt Lobby to try to show how crowded this year’s convention is but they came out dark; so the grainy-looking pictures are the ones I tried to lighten using Picasa (not sure I really like that software yet).
(By the way, those are old and new Willy Wonkas posing there a floor below me…again, it was dimly lit.)
Tags: DragonCon, photo
August 9th, 2005
I spent more time worrying about how to get there than I did figuring out why I was going.
True, I need a vacation.
True, I’d like to see my friends — even if I will be some weird 5th wheel and stuck in a room with El and possibly her mother and boyfriend…PW has already assured me that English is not like ManBoy and doesn’t really do that PDA stuff. Thank Goddess! That was pure torture. Couldn’t go anywhere with them.
So, I looked up the DragonCon website and looked under “guests” but then I remembered that I don’t know names, just faces and it’s a pretty long list. A search for “Firefly” on that page revealed that about half the cast will be there and so will Joss Whedon. I really would like to know why he did that awful muppet episode of Angel. Another search revealed that the twins from Harry Potter will be there. Too bad Oliver Wood won’t be…the three of them are certainly nice to look at.
Richard Hatch and Herb Jefferson, Jr. from the original Battlestar Galactica will be there but none of the new cast…and they’re always there anyway.
Kevin Sorbo and Steve Bacic from Andromeda will be present for oogling as well. I hope Kevin has kept his hair short. His long “do” in Hercules didn’t suit him.
I didn’t really look too hard at the guest list really. I was disappointed that the beginner’s writing workshop was “sold out”. Maybe I’ll get into the rail game tournament. I don’t know…that seems time intensive and requires some sort of commitment.
I know I won’t be going near those Wyrr Fest people. They scared the crap out of me the first year I went. They took it all so seriously and treated Anne McCaffery as if she was the one and only God. Kind of sad because I think some of their panels were interesting — like medieval medicine (I wish I’d taken notes).
Ah, well, the one thing I remember from my previous visits is that not everything was as fun as I had hoped and my travelling companions weren’t always interested in companioning. I’ll have to bring my laptop and a good book and entertain myself. At least I’ll get to see Ruth Thompson, my favorite artist of all time.
Tags: DragonCon
