Mini Blog

This has been a really great weekend!  I was really worried because my ex was taking my kid to Disneyland, but it turned out she had a good time.  I found myself looking forward to something that would normally fill me with dread, AND it was fun, so my anxiety can just fuck right off.  It wasn't a huge deal.  It was a tabletop game day among friends and friends of friends.  I'm really inexperienced at games because I grew up as an only child in a rural area and never really played tabletop games, much less role playing games.  Usually I feel like a fraud geek when I play games, if that makes sense.  In any case I got really into it this time and had a bunch of fun.    Then everything just continued to be fun all day Sunday too.  I returned my bad boots to REI with no issue and we replaced them with two pair of Merrells, and a Leatherman for my purse.  Then we met up with friends at Boneshaker in Rocklin, which is an amazing Pub.  If you like beer and you live in the Sacramento area it's totally worth the drive.  The food's really good too.


Funny note on edit:  The spell checker suggested I change leatherman to leather-man.

Fat chick Burning Man Attire and Beauty.

If you've been reading you'll remember that I was SUPER worried about what sort of clothes and shoes I'd wear out on the playa.  I ended up buying some nylon tube top dress things and was worried about not wearing a bra or whatnot.  The two long dresses I bought were a fail.  They were almost to the ground and kind of hot and I had to tie them up shorter in knots to ride my bike or do any meaningful work.  The shorter dress was a win.  I think the two long ones may get new lives as knee-length ones soon.  I was short on clothes but serendipitously found that I really liked wearing a pretty bra and ruffle-butt bloomers.  No once seemed to be throwing up or anything, but I have no idea what it looked like.  Mirrors are rare out there.  When I was out exploring I got more attention when I wore less, so that was fun too.

My $140 boots I got, I think I might take them back.  I wore them one day with two sets of squishy heel stuff in them and my heels still hurt if I stood more than a half hour or so.  Is it ethical to take them back because my particular feet hurt in them?  It's not like the shoes are defective in any way.  I ended up wearing athletic shoes.

My nails held up like a charm!  I had them done as short as aesthetically possible and told the technician I was going camping.  He put some extra hard gel stuff on them and had no problems.

My hair, oy.  I had no idea it would do this, but it dried up and frizzed into this unrecognizable curl-tangle I could barely get a brush through.  The playa took much of the purple and all I could do was scrape it into a pony tail.  Camp mate Stacy had braids done before she came, and that looked like it worked out much better.

I've been back for 2 weeks and my skin is still messed up and weirdly thickened on the back of my calves.  It took a week of prescription cream steroid to get rid of the rash on my arms.  I'm sure I got a big vitamin D boost and I have a respectable tan.  When I put my regular powder on my face now it looks like playa dust against my skin.  I guess I'll pay for that with a few more wrinkles.

I took a whole sack of makeup to wear out there, but all I ever used was lip balm, sunscreen (sometimes), and moisturizer.

Burning Man, setting the stage.

So if all about Burning Man is what you've seen on TV, you probably don't know much about what it's about or what it's like living in it.  Basically it's a week-long "art of all kinds" festival centered around ten principles which you can read about here.  The principles create a unique social environment in which to experience, create, and perhaps even be art.

The whole thing takes place on a particularly inhospitable bit of desert in Nevada.  It is so barren that the only animals that are inconvenienced by the presence of seventy thousand people tromping all over for a week are the fairy shrimp eggs in the dust. The dust is everywhere, and it sucks the moisture out of everything and eventually does nasty stuff to skin.  The weather is unpredictable.  It can be anything from freezing to city-paralyzing rain but specializes in effing hot with winds full of dust in the afternoons.  The infrastructure is minimal.  Porta-Potties are provided in generous numbers, but still possibly more than a quarter mile from where you might be at any given time.  There are trained medical personnel and ambulances and helicopters on call to whisk people away on expensive trips to far off medical centers.  There are security forces including federal, county, and an incredible volunteer safety force of the city called the Rangers.  There are helpful services for people who need psychological help.  Ice is available for purchase from the city for health reasons, and coffee is available to purchase, I'm not sure why, likely tradition.  It is prudent bring everything you need to survive in that environment physically for the whole week.  Some people don't though, and get by on the kindness and gifts of strangers.

Meh.  I don't like that description at all though.  One of the most important parts I think is the LACK of a society that will say "don't".  You can choose to express yourself in any way that isn't ridiculously harmful to yourself or others.  Even "ridiculously harmful" is subjective.  If you want to put people in a suit and shoot fire at them, it's okay as long as everyone's in consent and you're pretty sure it's safe.  When too many people fell off the giant coyote they put up a sign suggesting they refrain from climbing it, but it is NOT a place where they do overly much to protect you from doing stuff that could get you injured or even possibly killed.  You're responsible for yourownself.

I don't like that description either.  I'm trying to capture the spirit of the thing.  OK.  Cory Doctorow has a book called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (free download from the author).  In it is an alternate reality Disneyland in a world with no money.  People work on whatever Disney attraction they are most passionate about because money's not a factor.  Burning Man is a lot like that.  The desert makes it concurrently like a giant game of the reality show Survivor, IF it were a collaborative game instead of a competitive one.

Going out of order: Decompression

  I'd heard that coming back to the "default world" could be tough, but I didn't really believe it.  As if I would go camping for a week and have a hard time adjusting to the life I've had for years.  Actually, I really am having a hard time and I'm starting to be depressed.  It was kind of like someone handed me an amazing Utopian society to live in, and then made me give it back at the end of the week.

We got home at 2am Tuesday, and had to meet my parents at 2pm to get Evy.  I'm Really grateful that they watched her for us AND met us halfway so we didn't have to drive all the way down to Valley Home to get her.  It was still a long few more hours on the road though.  Wednesday I worked from home.  I took two naps and only managed 6 hours of work, all of it whittling down my 1369 unread emails (I still have 120 of those left to look at).  Thursday I jumped in with both feet taking on issues and found out that no one had had time to do very much of my work for the last 6 days, so things were becoming emergencies.  Then at 5pm someone forwards me an EMERGENCY that was dated last Friday. It's too late to do anything now, it will have to wait until morning, so a whole week has gone by with this "holy crap that's a great bloody fuck up" EMERGENCY just sitting there, so I'm kind of freaked out about it.  Then I ran to Target because Evy needed some Raiders clothes for school because it's sports team Friday and we have no team clothes.  I got some bread and cheese intending to duplicate the breakfasts Rebecca Rose Bleu made us on the playa.  Licensed sportswear is expensive.  Also my prescriptions happened to be ready, so more expensiveness than I expected. Then I got home and it was 7pm and Evy needs dinner before her 8 o'clock bedtime.  Also, someone almost backed into Sheldon, the lunch lady is mad at Evy because she can't remember her student ID, and the school called me saying Evy was absent for a period.  Then. I. Burned. The. Fucking. Dinner.  And that's how I ended up crying and shoving a plate of food at Sheldon telling him to "Go eat your nasty-assed burned fucking dinner!"  Evy decided I should have two hugs for the amount of upset that I was and everything was fine soon after.

I can show you where I camped though!  Here is the photo:

So if you go 1/3 the way along the top of the photo from the left, there is a yellow school bus colored container.  It is a dumpster.  There are two little humps against the dumpster.  The forward hump is our tent.

Camp was at 3:00 and Airstrip, which was a great location.  Whenever I was too tired to go anymore I could just sit in the camp living room and watch people and art cars go by.  At night we could watch people playing with the camp's 2 story interactive light wall.