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Youth Trad Song: The Annotated Ephemera edition!

( about 1700 words and a lot of images! But it is as complete a con-report as you'll get. )

It was a good weekend, and honestly, I think this sufficiently covers what all I did. Any time not covered by the above was probably spent cuddling and chatting with my friends, and singing all the nice songs they were leading.

~Sor
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1: It is me, if I were a half-centaur, half-minotaur.

2: She is my nemesis and was fool enough to tell me the etymology of her last name. Honestly, usually I refer to her in my head as "Laurie Sheepfucker" because that has a much better ring to it, but technically it is not fucking the sheep, it's getting them to fuck each other. Hence.

Original Tags: how can I keep from singing?, conreports

Content Warnings: Bugs, snakes, animals killing each other

So last summer Pinewoods dance camp had to hire a new camp director. They landed on Chris, who had experience in the nonprofit world from working as director of a nearby nature center. During each session I was at camp, she gave a different little naturewalk among the camp itself --the kind of thing where you walk about 200 yards in an hour but have learned more than you ever thought possible about the different kinds of sedges and ferns and wildflowers and bushes and trees and bugs and moss along the way!

She offered up in the auction the chance for a small group to have a ~private nature walk~...during a time of year that wasn't actually camp! Get to see nature in a different season, also eat snacks in the beautiful woods. I confirmed that jere7my and Kendra would also find it interesting, and we _jumped_ on it! And now, eight months after camp, we have gone!

I brought Austin, and the two of them brought Kendra's work colleagues, and Elliot had arrived at camp for the season as Grounds-crew Chief, so Chris plus the seven of us went traipsing around a bit and looking mostly for bugs. Chris's favourite place to find bugs is by sludging up the floor of the ponds with nets and dumping the finds into a bowl of clear water, plus there was some more general poking around.

It was a very exciting bug adventure, with two *exceptional* highlights (and I'll try to upload photos of both later).

The first was when Chris was talking dragonfly and damselfly life cycles, and mentioning how as the transitioned to adult, they left behind exuviae, often clinging to sticks near the water (hard to see) or the edges of the dock just above the water line (much easier to see). Now, exuviae is near and dear to mine and Chris's hearts, since it's one of the ways we bonded last year --after camp was over I sent her some of the cicada exuviae I had collected from the Brood X emergence in May, and she return-posted some dragonfly and damselfly ones from Pinewoods! So it would've been pretty cool to find more.

And then I spotted one! It looked a little weird, but I chalked that up to being intimately familiar with cicadas and not nearly as much with other bugs. Until I reached to detach it and it shuddered and twitched its legs and I realized the exuviae was another inch higher and the thing I had found was the dragonfly currently emerging from it

Oh did we make merry. I now have photos of a new species emerging! In the ~20 minutes we were at that pond, it went from still-tail-in the shell to all the way out and wings wrinkled against its back. I was able to return when it was snacktime, a few hours later, and it was still there, wings stretched out and drying...and held perpendicular to the surface, like a damselfly would, instead of parallel like a dragonfly! Apparently it's the one time in their lifecycle they do that, waiting for the wings to fully dry so it can depart.

Between those photo ops, we were up on the path wandering towards the venal pool. Chris was explaining something exciting, but I had let my eye wander a wee bit...to catch the movement of something thrashing a bit. "I think that's a snake!" I said, as excited as I can possibly be (because let's be real, insects are only my favourite because they're easier to find). I never successfully spot snakes, always someone else sees them first and then I can go look too (and half those times I'm not fast enough to catch more than a disappearing tail), so this was a THRILLING moment.

This snake wasn't going anywhere. Because this wee lovely garter snake, head diameter about 1 inch, was currently latched onto some kind of local frog, stomach diameter about three inches. Brutal? Oh sure, but that's nature and that's life and it was SO COOL! I now have a pile of photos of the snake working on the frog --Austin and I wound up staying and watching for longer than everyone else, and we theorized that the snake would sorta...tenderize the body as it thrashed it around, until it would all fit into those famous unhinged jaws. Chris later confirmed that to be the case, adding that probably there would be some digestive acid to help break it down.

It was _so cool_. Alas not there later (although I did feel like a proper forensic detective, spotting one lonely little leaf among the litter with a bright red splash of frog blood on it) but I am incredibly satisfied to have gotten to see not just a snake, but one doing something really interesting!

And then there were snacks, and the drive home (always so much longer than _to_ camp) and Austin and I collapsing into naptime and shower and tick check. Now I've been sleeping and will sleep again. Goodnight!

~Sor
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Content Warning: bugs, snakes, animals killing each other

I am writing my words ON A TRAIN!

More specifically, in roomette 1 of the 65 from Boston to BWI. We're past Providence, so the conductor has ceased announcements for the night (I have an alarm set to wake me up about half an hour before my station). There was a potential version of this plan where I did all this with a partner, but I have to say, I'm really enjoying flying solo.

Having my own tiny space to travel in is *exquisite*. I'm not going to be able to afford¹ this every time I travel (especially since I don't think there's a remotely convenient train route from Boston to Dallas) but I really need to keep both train in general and roomette in specific in mind for the future. The privacy while still being in a communal vehicle is really neat! I can just...take my pants off if I want and moon the wilds of Providence (hypothetically, probably).

I spent about the first hour just being really excited and poking around at everything the room had to offer, with lots of photos and a couple videos to go with it. The room is gorgeously well designed, as you'd expect! Things fold or move or slide, and there's storage space hidden unexpectedly --I found a private overhead bin, essentially, and there's plenty of space beneath the seats.

Obviously, I am charmed as absolute fuck by the funny little basin you 're supposed to wash your face in, but I was even moreso impressed by the clever little locking mechanism for the door, and the net designed for the upper bunk to keep you from falling out. Oo! And literally as I was writing this, I discovered the sliding knob to close the vents by the window, so now it's not going to be quite as chill...but it doesn't really matter, because there's a lovely blanket which as an unnamed friend explained "It's property of Amtrak but it's cozy property of Amtrak".

(I have plenty of cozy blankets of my own and am not going to steal this one. Probably.)

It's dark and rainy, so the scenery hasn't really been much, and while I think I'll be able to sleep just fine, I don't yet have any way of proving it. Overall though, I am very charmed and at peace and cozy. I hope you are also finding joy wherever you are tonight!

~Sor
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1: I mean the time, mostly. The train is a _little_ more expensive than a flight to BWI from Logan, and the roomette basically doubled the cost of this leg (I'm not getting one on the way back and _slightly_ regretting it). But even with security lines and all that, flying's about half as long.

And of course the PostScript: "wait, why are you on the train in the first place?!" I am going to Maryland to see the CICADAS, my friends! I recognize the rain will make this slightly difficult, but I refuse to be daunted in my hunting of bugs by being physically miserable. The answer to the question "wait I live in Maryland, can we hang?" is no unless you are my capital-F Family --I hope to do a longer trip sometime in the summer when I can do a proper social, but for this trip, it's Veronica, Grandpa Perks, and BUGS!!!

Today's New York adventure was also very High Quality New York!

Today was shopping day, which means we hauled butt to Union Sq and hit up the Strand, Forbidden Planet, and Books of Wonder. I did not buy the uncorrected galley proof of Howl's Moving Castle (I didn't even ask how much it was). I also did not buy the $500 25th anniversary edition Where The Wild Things Are signed and doodled by Maurice Sendak. I *definitely* did not buy the $22,500 (yes, five digits) first edition signed and doodled one.

I did buy a copy of the Audubon field guide to Insects and Spiders, mostly because there were several copies on the shelves of the Strand for $25 bucks, and then one suspiciously identical copy that was marked at $11.50. I have not yet figured out why it was ten bucks cheaper, but I assume it's for a parallel dimension's worth of bugs, and they will all be subtlly...off.

Since we were in the area, we went to the Museum of Sex as well! That was pretty cool, although a little smaller than I was hoping. They did have a very cool punk rock exhibit going on! And there was a section on early stag films, which I was hoping would dovetail nicely with my recent obsession with The Rialto Report (site not remotely safe for work, details in footnotes¹). It actually largely predated the stuff I've been focused on, which meant I got to watch snippets of a whole bunch of super early loops --black and white silent films and every bit as filthy as we like to see today!

The effect was ruined some by some of the other patrons, who were giggling wildly and uncomfortably any time anything happened, like...a penis. You are at the Sex Museum. There is sex. Kindly _get the fuck over yourself_ or at least go be utterly immature about it over there somewhere.

Also mom and I got to bounce around in a bounce house made of boobs. It was amazing. There are photos, but you can't see them because obviously².

Post museum, we walked back to Times Square and picked up some tickets for The Play That Goes Wrong. Oh my poor sides. There's less _analysis_ to be done with this one than there is Hadestown. Suffice to say, the title is utterly accurate. I kinda want to see a "proper" staging of the Murder At Whatever Manor now, ideally done as overwroughtly as the actors would hope.

We waited outside the stage door, and probably made the casts day, as there was no one else except a couple of friends of a couple of the stars. Friendly chatting and signed playbills all around!

Now we are home again, and I am procrastinating completing my grades which are due in about ten hours. I'm sure I'll find the time to do them somehow!

~Sor
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1: The Rialto Report is a highly academic podcast and website that collects interviews and primary source documents for the golden age of pornography, with a special focus on late 70s/early 80s NYC. It is so cool!! There is something beautiful and powerful and tragic and painful about all these stories of people living and fucking in that sweet moment after the pill but before AIDS. About half the interviews end with pictures of smiling 70 year olds, laughing somewhere far away. About half the interviews end with a drug overdose thirty years ago. It is such a _fascinating_ archive.

And yeah, it is _deeply_ not safe for work. Nothing about it is safe for work. There are full scans of smutty magazines from the eighties with big ol' tiddy spreads, and headshots of porn stars, and film stills, and backstage shots from strip clubs. It's academically awesome, it also can be some genuinely titillating stuff.

2: "Were you not just being enlightened and holier-than-thou about how well you can handle the existence of sex?" Yeah, but there's the whole point, and some people who are immature and can't handle it are my bosses and the parents of my students.